Despite rumors to the contrary, I am still alive, as is The Beer Cellar!
Obviously the previously promised update has not yet materialized—though it is still in the works (promise!)—so I wanted to post an update to let folks know what's up. The scope of the work has expanded over time, and I have not worked on things consistently, but below is an outline of the planned features and improvements, including a rundown of current progress and a few screenshots (click to enlarge).
Updated Aesthetic
One of the first things you'll notice in the included screenshots is a change in aesthetics. While the overall user experience should remain largely the same when it comes to managing your cellar (though faster and easier; see below), the site's palette has changed. While not one hundred percent locked down, I'm pretty happy with the shift after extensive use and find that the darker take makes things a bit more readable (and a lot less like an out-of-the-box Bootstrap UI).
User Messaging
One of the biggest truly "new" features is a system to message users, finally giving you an internal means of contacting other users for potential trades or other discussions. When launched, all users will be opted in and will be able to send/receive messages, but any user will be able to disable the messaging feature in their account settings. Initially the system will be limited to one recipient per message, with threaded histories for each conversation. This feature is technically complete, though some further tweaks may be introduced after user testing.
Asynchronous Cellar Management
Arguably the driving factor (for me) behind this refactor, the entire cellar management area has been redeveloped with speed and asynchronisity in mind. This means that when adding, editing, or deleting entries, the entire cellar page will no longer be reloaded—instead, changes will be processed via AJAX and reflected in place. Management tasks should take significantly less time to complete, and bulk adjustments (e.g., deleting a large number of entries) should cause far less headache. In addition, I am experimenting with a new bottom-docked entry overlay (in contrast to the current modal overlay) in order to keep most of your cellar visible and scrollable while adding new beers and breweries. This set of features is nearing completion, though some final JavaScript and UX work is still pending.
Community Moderation of Beer and Brewery Info
As more and more beers and breweries are added to the database, so too is more "bad" data acculumated, be it duplicate entries, misspelled beer names, or incorrect information. While I initially attempted to moderate these errors myself, the data set has long been too large for me to handle alone. So, in some form, I'll be introducing community moderation for beers and breweries, enabling users to correct these kinds of issues. This feature is not very fleshed out at the moment, and may be pushed to the release immediately after this one in order to get the new features out the door more quickly.
Other Additions
While not pictured in the screenshots, a few often requested additions will be included as well. These will include: a "Drink By" indicator of some kind (with user definable value); the ability to default sort your cellar by Brewery rather than Beer; the ability to change the email address associated with your account; an export for Tasting Notes; and an option to toggle visibilty of the "In Fridge" column for those that don't make use of it. Some other user requests, such as amount paid, entry copying, and more granular public visibility toggles will likely wait for the next update.
And lastly, speed! So far, using similar data as compared to the live environment, I've seen reductions in page size up to 30% and loading times up to 70%. These reductions may not be quite so large once I'm actually done, but I'm hopeful they'll remain significant.
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Next steps for me are to wrap up the cellar management work, shore up those areas of the site that have not yet been updated with the new UI, and implement any missing or newly broken features (the biggest of which is currently the CSV Import) to bring the refactored site up to parity in those areas. After that, I'll be soliciting some help from users to help beta test in a non-live environment with the updated application in order to root out any issues, especially any issues that might affect the integrity of your cellar data or other information in the database. After that, we'll launch (though, having learned my lesson, I won't promise a hard and fast delivery date).
If you're interested in helping beta test when we get to that point, feel free to let me know that you're interested via email at josh@beercellar.me. Otherwise, keep on enjoying beer, and keep an eye on this blog or @BeerCellarMe for further updates!