After much talk about the ideas for improving the CPAN Testers Reports, I'm finally please to announce the completion of the work so far. There have been 3 significant changes to the site behind the scenes, all of which will hopefully improve the way everyone interacts with the site.
Phase Two was to finish off a number changes to enable a dynamic site. As it's turned out a full dynamic site hasn't been possible, as some of the pages still take several minutes to retrieve all the records from the database and render the pages. The 'ADAMK test' took over 30 minutes! As such a redesign of the caching was implemented that now means the pages are updated in the background. It means that the most frequently visited pages are more likely to be up to date now.
Phase Three was to implement a flat HTML site, that was similar to the old site, before the Javascript was included, but also benefits from all the fixes that have been implemented into the current site. As a result of the caching changes in Phase Two, this was actually extremely easy to implement, as it only meant adding templates.
With all that done, I was virtually ready to implement the sites on the live server. However, following a post by Adam Kennedy about the state of some of the Perl websites, I decided to hold back and concentrate on Phase Four. This last phase wasn't just planned for the reports sites, but aimed at covering all the CPAN Testers websites I'm responsible for. When I first created the Statistics website, I was more interested in making the the data and information available, and always figured I'd get around to designing a proper layout at some point. With me taking a month out during April, the time was ripe to completely redesign all the sites. So taking an inital design from the OSWD site, I amended it appropriately for my uses, and I have now converted all the CPAN Testers sites I look after across to the new design.
Hopefully the new design will meet with everyone's approval (Leon, fear not there is still an orange colour scheme in there :)), and the changes to the functionality improve the way people are able to use and access the site. For the time being the old path mappings should remain working, but I would advise moving to the new path structure when the sites go live.
So when are you going to get to see all these changes? Well very very soon. I'm currently setting up the new designs on the server and once everything is in place I'll be doing a symlink switch. Please be patient .. just a little while longer ;)
