Audiofanzine v4

A leader in multilingual online media in the audio and musical instruments domains, P.Bordas publishing group launched the new version of their site
en.audiofanzine.com last night.

Following intense study of Audiofanzine, both as a website service and as a company, and in considering current membership and future objectives, the technical development of version 4.0 followed a complete overhaul of the website’s backend functionality.   This development was undertaken in order to support the rapid increase in traffic, solve numerous scalability issues, and facilitate the content management aspects of the site.

Furthermore, in version 4.0 there are several enhancements both on the functional front end and in the user navigation experience.  Highlights include:

• A new fixed search bar independent of a user’s scroll movements on the page.

• Unified member registration across all AudioFanzine’s sites.

• A Rich Text Editor with all the benefits of a word processing software implemented in the forums and other community spaces (reviews, tips, news, tutorials etc.)

• A revamping of the Classifieds Section Geolocalized for:

o    Sell/Buy/Exchange used products and instruments.
o    Offer or find employment in the audio/recording/playing professions.
o    Give or take music lessons (with the possibility to exactly specify which music style/genre)
o    Recruit a musician or join a group (with the possibility to exactly specify which music style/genre)

• Thematic start pages for all the main ‘musical universes’ developed on AudioFanzine: Home Studio, Music with Computers, Guitar & Bass, Drums & Percussions, Electronic Instruments, DJing, Sound & Lighting.  When a page theme is chosen all content type is automatically filtered to display only content related to such theme.

• A media Space allowing users to share their photos, videos, sounds, and other files (presets, documents etc.) concerning a product, an instrument, a brand or a category in the data base.

Discover all the latest developments on en.audiofanzine.com .  Check us out!

Short update from our God of Technology:

360,000 lines of code, 5 developers, 1 year of work… here v4 is reduced to some figures.

Sometimes we are guided by the head and want so much to see V4 online that we forget that Audiofanzine it is also more than 70,000 unique visitors and 700,000 pages seen each day! You see, to migrate a site with 5 simultaneous visitors or 2500, is really not the same thing and I can say to you that the hardware behind the site in question does not respond in the same way to both cases!

The hardware, has its own sense of importance… because even if Moore’s Law is from now on obsolete, a server with 2 processors last generation with 4 hearts each one does not respond like a processor that we had 4 years ago… The new Audiofanzine uses latest web technologies, but that also comes at a price.  While today the code is cleaner, more flexible, more readily available to change and manipulation, it is also heavier.  Binary code lovers will say to you like me that object programming requires more resources than the procedures.   And I speak not about the use of a framework such as Zend which is extremely powerful but also very heavy…

In short, so what happend during the  last weeks?  Well, alot alot of  optimization and bug fixing in all directions.  I assure you that we have made supreme efforts in this regard, as many bugs were left unattended to for many years……  Our enthusiasm has resulted in the new Audiofanzine being able to handle 10 times as many simultaneous requests, and of course we will not stop there because we always want it shorter, faster, more stable- in short, better than the preceding version.

Anyway, we don’t want to keep you in suspense for much longer, but it is good for the cause at hand,  and at the end of one year of work, we are just a few days away…

While part of the team left to cover Musikmesse in Frankfurt, other stubborn developpers were left to conitnue the work on two fronts:  site optimization on the one hand and bug fixing on the other.  So when will V4 be finally released?  When it is ready.  I would like to say, in other words, soon….

After several hours of hard labor, our technology team has managed to make available a beta version of V4 which can be found at this address:   http://fr.af-v4.com/  (French only for now).

Certain functionalities are not yet available, but nevertheless you can take V4 for a test drive.  Please note that any content publsihed on the V4 Beta will not be kept or stored and will be tossed away when the beta testing state is over and we complete the final migration.

To continue to benefit from the services and content offered by Audiofanzine please visit the ‘old’ site at www.audiofanzine.com  .

For those of you who didn’t notice, the site has been down since last night and for a better part of the day today for the obligatory maintenance process- the time required to move from old version 3.5 to the new version 4.0.

No products, forums, advertisements, or any other content was available during this time while we tested things out.   However, as we discovered that migrating to V4 took longer than expected, we reverted back to V3.5 for now while we are putting the finishing touches on V4.  Stayed tuned for the unveiling of V4 very soon!

Why is this taking  so long?  It takes time to import all data from the preceding site to the new database, that is to say hundreds of vidéos, thousands of news items, tens of thousands of classifieds, hundreds of thousands of members and over a million messages in the forums.

Patience, therefore is required…

R for Rich, T for Text, E for Editor. Hence,  RTE, a developer’s acronym which signifies that going forward on AudioFanzine, all content creation areas (News, Reviews, Forums, etc) will benefit from an ergonomic way to edit and process text.

Having said that that, this should make the user experience on V4 more intuitive and allow us to do things that good old BBcode prevented us from doing (such as the creation of a table in a forum thread).

Is it really necessary to explain what are dedicated themes?  What is each thing….is it clear enough for all?  (note:  for now we only have screenshots for the French version, but you get the picture)

The Classifieds:  new look (French version)

While worrying about code optimization (the artist was seen as kind of a product, a little bit like some artists are viewed by big record labels ), the ergonomics of the Artists Classifieds section of Audiofanzine was invaluable for daily users.  Without revealing too much, the Classifieds of V4 should be definitely clearer and more practical in this regard. You will note that one will benefit from the integration of musical genre as a selection, which has been sorely lacking.   From now on one can look for a Reggae bass player, or a Flamenco voice teacher…