roy

I've been working hard at my job and in my spare time as well, trying to bring Tabulas up to where I want it; I'd have to say the first 5 days of 2006 have been awfully productive :)

This week I've mostly spent setting up the automated billing system at Tabulas and integrating it with PayPal. Prior to this week, all PayPal subscriptions were manually handled by me - when PayPal notified me that someone had created an account, I would change this in the database manually. If someone's subscription renewed, I was usually too lazy to update the database.

This, of course, is problematic. It also meant that almost no accounts were ever downgraded. NO NO NO! Bad ROY!

So now everything is handled automatically - renewals, cancellations, new subscriptions ... AND Tabulas will automatically upgrade/downgrade/send notifications for future renewals by itself... so this is a HUGE step for me. Any spare minutes I can scrounge up seem to go a long way lately (especially since my hours at my job have been increasing due to some deadlines coming up ).

And you know what's cool? THREE people signed up for Tabulas patron accounts today (I think it's the most in one day in a LONG time)... and all three were smoothly handled by the new system! Talk about karma :)

There was some time spent after work today getting all the old paid PayPal subscriptions into the system... boy was that a wreck. Luckily PayPal created a single .xls file for all subscriptions ... and I actually finally got to see how much Tabulas has made total. And guess what? Since it's inception, Tabulas has been nearly break-even (a smidgen of a profit!) given the high server costs I pay! And here I thought I was losing a BUNCH of money!

In any case, I'm hoping to launch all the work I did over winter break and so far in the new year onto Tabulas either this weekend or sometime next week.

Not only have I updated the automated billing system, but I've also created a very simple support ticket center (very very basic). Having all the help requests in one place (plus anybody can respond to any ticket!) will hopefully allow me to quickly answer questions and help resolve issues.

This will launch shortly, as well as the minorly revamped documentation section. No big changes there really (mostly aesthetic). I'm also trying to move items away from their own subdomains (help.tabulas.com) because it's a maintenance nightmare.

The new launch will also include the new home page, a new user directory (which will be a stripped down version of the existing one), the revival of the statistics page, and hopefully an extended "what's happening on Tabulas" page (this may actually wait though until I get the new control panel in place).

Basically in my mind, the next launch of Tabulas is partitioned into three components: display engine (shows your site), control panel, and "everything else." "Everything else" is a rather broad and vague category which encompasses both miscellaneous components (like the help center) as well as critical "network-friendly" features (like the API and Tabulets). This first pass will get all the really important "everything else" sites up - help, home, accounts, and support. Then I'll begin work (once again) on the display engine/control panel.

So I guess this post is my official announcement that I'm spending all my free time on the next version of Tabulas. I'll mostly likely do a review of all the existing work I've done on 2.1 and then take what i can from it.

So those of you with patron accounts, please stick with Tabulas for just a LITTLE while longer. I have some REALLY exciting plans and features that will make the existing version of Tabulas seem like crap (remember how big of a change Tabulas 1.0 was from 2.0? Well, I hope to have an even BIGGER change than that!)