Two Years Old

The ASP.NET version of what was then the Borland Developer Network went live two years ago today (actually, it first went online about a week earlier, but some DNS issues forced us to roll back). The original version, called "BDN 2" at the time, replicated almost all of the original community site’s content and functionality (conference proceedings were migrated a little later). It also included a new content management system, GetPublished, named after a section of the old site that allowed community members to submit content (and get paid), and a new membership system.

The most significant improvements of the new system were:

• Support for Unicode, multi-lingual content, and localized user interface.
• Ability to upload Word and HTML files and have the server automatically generate thumbnails, tables of contents, and printer-friendly output.
• Completely web-based content management system.
• Integration with other Developer Network services, such as membership and comments.
• Electronic signatures for legal agreements.
• Role-based security and workflow for content submission and publishing.

Internally, the biggest change was probably having full control over the site’s appearance and behavior - after all, we now had the source code to everything. The new system was also load-balanced on several servers, improving performance and reliability.

It’s really interesting to work on a live site. Unlike "normal" application, you don’t have the luxury of building everything in the background, freezing code for testing, and deploying new versions every now and then. A live site needs constant updating, and we regularly add new features and capabilities. We haven’t really kept a detailed change log (hey, that’s not a bad idea), but here are some of the major features we’ve added and changes we made over the last couple of years. Many of these are internal, and some are only visible to administrators or other users with sufficient privileges, but all affect the way the site looks and behaves:

• Online reviewing of unpublished content.
• Online negotiations for paid articles.
• Support for multiple sites managed completely within GetPublished. The CodeGear, Support, Turbo Explorer, Conferences, and TeamB sites all run on this platform, in addition to CDN.
• Support for multiple URLs for each site.
• Content-specific site areas, such as CDN TV.
• Automatically generated site maps.
• Article list sorting and paging.
• Keyword search.
• Automatic syntax highlighting and source code language filtering.
• RSS and Atom feeds.
• Exception trapping and email notifications for server errors.
• Dynamically loaded modules that can be placed (almost) anywhere on the page.
• Support for posting external links, not just articles.
• Virtually unlimited depth for the path hierarchy, replacing the old community/neighborhood/street model.
• Support for user locations, including location-specific content.
• Upgrade to ASP.NET 2.0 on 64-bit servers.
• AJAX controls and dialogs in GetPublished.
• Email notifications for publishing workflow events.
• Ability to consume RSS and Atom feeds (for example, the "CodeCentral Items" box on http://dn.codegear.com/).
• Support for static "micro" sites, similar to regular static sites, but managed online using GetPublished.
• The ability to stage entire sites, including content, appearance, and modules. This was used to stage the new www.codegear.com site.
• Management of product lists and links, used to generate location-specific shop links on product pages.
• Support for feature lists on product and article pages.

Some of features were live long before they were actually used (for example, modules could be placed on the page banner since June last year, but this hasn’t been used until the latest site update earlier this month). In fact, there are still some features you won’t know about until they’re used. These features have been written, tested, and deployed, but unless you have sufficient permissions to access them in GetPublished, you’ll have to wait for new content to make use of them. I realize that sounds like teasing, but my point is we’re constantly adding features, and sometimes it takes a while for these things to become useful.

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Posted by Yorai Aminov on May 24th, 2008 under CDN, GetPublished |

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