Jazzhouston.com 2009

What's New?
This is a major rewrite of the site, the first since 2000. The 2009 version took about four months to complete -- and that's working at it nearly full-time! Of course it's a pro bono project dedicated to helping the local jazz community, which means it was my own time and dime but I love working on it, so here it is!

Features
Here's a list of new features, etc.

• Local CD player to check out mp3s from Houston jazz artists
• Events: New events home page
• Events: listing of all one-nighters coming up for the week
• Events: New Jam Session listing on main page
  
• Forum: Ignore user lists
• Forum: Post ratings with auto-block
  
• Forum: avatars based on the user profile
• Forum: bump protection (users can no longer bump their own posts, sorry)
• Forum: You can finally paste in YouTube embed tags
• Members: Upload your Profile Picture!
  
• Members: "Remember Me" feature so that you can stayed logged in between visits
• Members: New registration system with confirmation email support and spam image-challenge protection
• Members: New member profile pages with easy to remember URLs
• Members: profiles display musician's upcoming shows (as leader)
• Members: profiles display article's written by user (if an editor)
• Members: Lost password finally works
• Members: listing of newest members on /members
  
• Display: Layout now stretches to fit browser size
• Display: Major visual redesign
• Misc: Tons of cleanup on broken features
• Misc: Feedback forms that actually work

Technical
This was the bulk of the work since it was a ground-up rewrite.

• The whole site was re-written using Ruby on Rails
• Massive URL changes which will help enormously with Search indexing (Google, etc.)
  
• Upgraded to MySQL v5.0 from unsupported v3.x
• UTF-8 support
  
• Better AJAX support thanks to  extjs
• Beautiful form controls thanks to extjs
• Massive CSS overhaul
• Password security greatly increased

There are other details, but this captures the essence of the work. I want Houston to have the best regional jazz community site in the country and I think this brings us closer to that goal.

Andrew Lienhard
January 11th, 2009