Beta Update: New Features, Wider Beta Coming Soon

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So, it’s been about two months since we started the Private Beta and we think today is a pretty good day to share an update on what’s new. If you have a short attention span, the post title ↑ pretty much covers it, if not read on to hear about new features, our new blog, and our plans to widen the beta.

More Beta Testers Please!

Up to this point we’ve opened the beta to a small group of existing Kodingen users who expressed interest in testing. In the next few days, we’ll be inviting everyone on that list. Shortly after that we’ll be opening things up to more people. If you’re interested, head over to our preview page and let us know.

New Features, Launching Soon

Two months, thousands of commits, hundreds of bugs squashed and 96 awesome beta testers have gotten us pretty far down the road to launch. When we launched the beta, the system had only about 30% of the features we expect to have when we’re done, so we wanted to make some progress there, but our big focus at the beginning was on system stability & performance bugs that were slowing things down. After getting past the biggest of those bugs, we’ve moved on to getting more of our planned features into the system. For the last month or so the team has been working on our next big feature push.

Enhanced Code Shares

Code shares now allow for easy editing & saving so if you want to use or just tinker with some code someone shares, you just press a button to open it up in your own code editor.

Topics Tags

Topic tags are system-wide tags for you to follow the content that interests you & label your own shared content so it can be discovered by users with similar interests.

Inbox

Inbox is your central place for realtime private conversations & activity notifications.

MongoDB & MySQL Databases

We’ve exposed the ability to add Mongo and MySQL databases to beta users.

This is what beta testers can expect to see really soon. Up next we’ll be working on a new App Catalog, additional content sharing types like Q&A and discussions and some interface enhancements to make things easier, more on that later.

What Else Is New?

New Blog, built on Koding!

Well, if you’re reading this, you’ve found our new, responsively coded blog. New blogs designs may not be that exciting, but we thought this one was worth mentioning because it was installed and customized from start to finish on the Koding Private Beta before we pushed it to production.

New Preview is Live

Yesterday we pushed out a new preview of the app. If you are interested in getting in on the beta or just seeing what the new Koding will look like, head on over to the preview page.

That’s all for now. Going forward you can expect to hear from us a bit more frequently.