V3

We released the third version of our site in it's history over the weekend and we're hoping that you like what we've done.

The site as you know it hasn't changed substantially, but under the covers it's a whole engine that's powering this community. This was a big change under the covers, giving us a consistent codebase that should provide more flexibility over the next slice of this site's lifetime.

We're working hard, on call, and responding to all bugs being reported as quickly as possible. If you see something wrong, plesae feel free to send a note to us: webmaster at sqlservercentral.com.

The Big Changes

We've got an article coming out that explains some of the things that have moved around and you can read that for more details. However the biggest changes are:

• RSS - Almost everything is RSS'd now, so add the feeds you want to your favorite reader. If we're missing something, let us know.
• Discussions and Comments - We've enhanced the forums and now scripts, as well as all other content, can be commented on.
• Scheduling - Has been greatly enhanced and Steve can go on vacation without worrying about editorials and newsletters being delivered 🙂
• Tagging - Old fashioned categories just don't work with the growth of the SQL Server platform, so we've moved to a tagging system. If you find issues, let us know.

We have dropped a few sections for now, but we'll work on getting the content back as soon as we can. Products/freeware, and books are the current ones. We've got a poll set up in a thread to take votes on what's the most important to the community.

Overall, we haven't changed a lot of how the site works. The look has changed, but this was mainly about building a base architectuer that will allow easy changes in the future. With this upgrade, the entire site now has a single codebase that's based on ASP.NET, AJAX, and other new technologies, including SQL Server 2005, to bring the platform up to speed. We are looking to add some new sections, video, and who knows what else in the near future.

On Call

We've got developers and editors on call and monitoring the webmaster email, logs, and various other places where we can quickly respond to problems and bugs. This site has received a lot of testing from our side and a large beta group that provided some valuable feedback. And while we're working on a few enhancements right away, we're also prepping for a few point releases over the next month or two that will correct anything we've missed. Or to add something that you think is a good idea.

So let us know if you find something broken, lacking, or that you just want to see.

A Bit of History

Some of you will remember this site from over 6 years ago. One the front pages, very little has changed, and our initial ASP pages integrated with Snitz forums helped us grow from 6 members (the founders) to over 100,000 in a little over a year. That was an exciting time and we lived with the site through 2001 and the slow growth of .NET technologies.

We realized around that time that the Internet was getting to be a dangerous place, so we knew that our exposure of email addresses in the forums and for the authors was a bad idea. There was a lot of debate about moving to .NET or sticking with ASP and in the end we compromised.

We rebuilt the forums based on the Instant Forums code from Instant ASP, which was built on VB.NET and ASP.NET technology. This was done on vacation taken from work and crammed into a 3 week period. As a result we ended up rebuilding the authentication and forum structures and leaving everything else alone. It would have taken more time to upgrade the other sections and we ended up with a split ASP / ASP.NET architecture that had a few bugs.

We also have upgraded a few different email systems over the years to handle our growing volumes. The final one, I think version 4, is still in place and pumping out the emails as you read this.

Wrapping Up

We really hope that you like the new site and find it easier to use and get at the information that you need. Please send us suggestions, problems and anything else that will help make this a better community.

Steve Jones

Editor-in-Chief