v0.5 Release & More

Well well well.

It's a new year and we're back at it. Let's hit the bullet points.

• We have a release date for v0.5! After plenty of scope creep, fighting for our lives with search & comment enhancements, and squashing several ugly bugs, we're ready to move on. Version 0.5 will be released on February 24, 2024. This new version will include improved search, CSV exports for your chives, updated collections functionality, video hosting, and more.
• Did we follow our roadmap? No we did not. The roadmap will be updated to reflect new release dates and modified scope. This release cycle was a learning process for us as far as prioritzation goes. We're getting a better sense of what normal development times look like for us and what's a good balance for features/bugfixes/modifications to existing features.
• As part of the update, our demo site, ourchive.io, will be moving to a new address. This is a closed beta site, but for the curious, redirects will be set up.
• Absolutely huge UI/UX news: welcome aboard to brightperigrine, who has already produced a ton of wireframes and very valuable feedback for the works & search views. We're hoping to include these UI improvements in v0.6. As always, if you're interested in helping out, feel free to reach out.
• brightperigrine also sent out a wonderful survey, a card sort activity to help us understand how people think about information associated with a work. You can expect to see a new browsing experience in v0.6 as a result of this research.
• Huge thank you as well to jadedofmara for volunteering to do some data sorting with tags imported from AO3. Ourchive's tagging solution is very flexible and admin-configured; one of our big beta period lessons was that this is a double-edged sword, and we need to ship with a more comprehensive set of initial tagging configurations.

We'll see you on the 24th. 🫡 Release notes will be published both here and on our GitHub.