I'm happy to announce that The Beer Cellar v2.0 will launch next week on Tuesday, March 29th!

Thanks to those who volunteered to help beta test, the new site has come along quickly, and I'm excited to get it into the hands of users. It's a big revamp and, while it's been rebuilt almost entirely from the ground up, the core functionality has been retained and improved. In no particular order, here are some things you can expect in the update:

• Speed: all primary cellar management actions are now performed asynchronously, meaning no more full-page reloads after each add, edit, or delete operation. Existing entries can be edited inline, and new entries can be added dynamically.
• Accuracy: thanks to a new Elasticsearch backend, searches for Beers and Breweries now handle "fuzzy" matches without issue, ensuring you can find the information you're looking for. As a result of these changes, the CSV import process should also achieve more accurate initial matches, and is much quicker when it comes to fixing unmatched entries.
• Features: a bevy of new features will accompany the update, including but not limited to: sortable Drink By dates for entries; user toggles for default sort order and tasting note visibility; the ability to hide the "In Fridge" column; and user messaging.
• Usability: in addition to the improved cellar management flow, the entire site has received a visual refresh utilizing darker tones for increased readability and, I hope, a more visually pleasing experience.
• Security: when the new version goes live, the entire Beer Cellar site will switch to the HTTPS protocol, meaning all traffic will be encrypted.

I'll provide more details on launch day. You can expect the site to be down during the upgrade period on the evening of Monday, March 28th as I move things live and ensure everything is working as expected. In the meantime, I'd suggest holding off on any major cellar updates or imports, as everything should be much easier come next week!

Lastly, I'd like to thank my core of beta test users one more time for volunteering their free time to help ensure the upcoming version is up to snuff. Without your help, I'd be much more nervous about releasing the new version into the wild. Cheers, and if you're ever in town, I'll buy you a beer.

Beta invites for the the revamped Beer Cellar—might as well call it version 2.0—are going out this evening! I'm really excited to get this new work out there as it's a vast improvement over the current state of the application, but I'd like the help of any users who are willing in testing things before they go live. Ideally, we'll be able to work out any remaining kinks before deploying the new site to the entire userbase.

Some details follow, including info on how to receive an invite at the bottom.

• The beta site is being hosted indepent of the live site so as not to interfere with normal site usage during the testing period. It will utilize a duplicate of the live database, but no live data will be affected—the beta environment is sandboxed.
• While the entire beta site is up for grabs testing-wise, in particular I'm hoping for testers to focus most on a few specific areas:
  • Cellar Interface: the main cellar interface was rewritten from scratch and can now be managed entirely ascynchronously, meaning no more full-page reloads when adding new entries or working with existing ones. I've done a lot of testing here, but I wouldn't be surprised if users uncovered a bug or three.
  • Data Integrity: related to the main cellar interface, I'd like for testers to make sure those changes they make are being accurately reflected and maintained across uses. Things like beer/brewery/unique totals, in fridge and in cellar counts, etc.
  • Messages: this is a brand new feature allowing users to have threaded conversations with others on the site. It's a relatively self-contained feature, but some testing would nonetheless be useful.
  • CSV Import: while the underlying matching logic hasn't changed much, the Import interface was also rewritten using the new Add Entry flow. And thanks to improved beer/brewery searching with Elasticsearch, the final Fix Import stage can move a lot more quickly.
• Some other new features to look out for and test:
  • A Drink By date can now be set for any beer entry, with a corresponding days remaining status displayed in each row
  • The Add Entry flow has been revamped so that you can still browse your cellar in the background when making an addition
  • Default Sort can now be set to Brewery instead of Beer, in the My Account area
  • There are additional My Account settings as well, including: an In Fridge toggle, a Drink By and Tasting Note public visibility toggle, and a toggle to enable or disable Messaging

With those testing caveats in mind, if you're interested in helping test version 2.0 of The Beer Cellar, I'd greatly appreciate it! You can either email me at josh@beercellar.me (please hit me up from your Beer Cellar address), or reply with your email address at @BeerCellarMe. You'll receive a response from me with further details.

Thanks in advance to all willing to help out, and for everyone else, I'm hoping to launch version 2.0 within the next couple weeks. Stay tuned.

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!

I wanted to post a quick status update about the upcoming refactor, which continues (albeit more slowly than I'd planned—thanks in no small part to San Francisco Beer Week).  It's coming along nicely, and I'm excited about the new aesthetic for the site as well as the cleaner, quicker interface for doing common tasks with your cellar.

While that's brewing, however, I've pushed a quick fix up that should significantly decrease cellar loading times.  I've discovered a number of less than performant aspects in the existing code, but this particular fix was easy to move over to the live site, so I've done so.

Enjoy the better performance, and look for a site-wide refresh in the next month.  Cheers!

Despite the long hiatus in blog posts, work on the Cellar has continued!  While a major refactor of the current cellaring interface is underway, plenty of other smaller changes have been implemented.

• The cellar import bugs that some users were experiencing have been squashed
• If desired, you may now delete all existing cellar entries when completing an import
• On both the desktop and mobile versions, Consumed Beers are now paginated
• When drinking a beer, the consumption date can now be changed (desktop and mobile)
• On mobile, tasting notes can now be viewed inline with consumed beer entries
• Mobile filtering options have been updated to achieve greater parity with the full version, e.g., you can now filter by In Fridge, In Cellar, trading status, etc.
• The desktop version now features a Filter by Style drop-down under the filters menu
• Numerous performance enhancements, including a new back-end setup for better responsiveness under heavy load

Stay tuned for further updates in the coming months.  As always, feel free to get in touch via email or Twitter with any suggestions or questions you might have.  I've already received some great feedback from users, and have added a number of user suggested features to my to-do list.  Cheers!