The past year has seen a dramatic increase in staff at dpreview, but less new 'features' than many expected. Why? What have we been doing? I thought I'd inaugurate the dpreview dev blog by shedding a little light on the dev situation here at dpreview over the past year and in the immediate future.

Oct '07 to Jan '08 - Lens Reviews

Aside from the addition of Andy, Lars & Richard to the editorial team, October 1st 2007 saw the addition of myself (Jaysen) as dpreview's first ever full-time developer (Phil retains his role as hacker-in-chief). By November 2007 we'd handled the transition and knuckled down to begin the lens review project in earnest. Reviewing lenses is a complicated business and we're pretty proud of the proprietary charts, analysis pipeline and interactive UI we've developed for the job. Andy, Phil, Simon and I put some long hours of R&D into that project, which came to fruition when the first lens reviews debuted on 28th Jan 2008. The majority of the subsequent lens review feedback can be described as polite congratulation, with the remainder divided between demands for more reviews (praise of a kind) and confused folk looking for the pre-2008 lens reviews (there are none!).

Feb to Jun '08 - Infrastructure & Search

When we sat down to plan our followup to lens reviews, it became clear that the majority of our future plans required some serious renovation of the site's foundations. So, with a tear in our eye, we shelved our beloved feature ideas and marched into the salt-mines of infrastructure development. The following 5 months saw dpreview transition to a new hosting provider with more bandwidth, hardware and redundancy. The associated hardware/software upgrades also necessitated an overhaul of our search system with some expanded features to boot (any problems with search? let me know) but went largely unnoticed (aside from the occasional yawn).

Jul to Oct '08 - 'Camera Database' overhaul

With the hardware and hosting infrastructure sorted, we turned our attention to a collection of components loosely referred to as 'the camera database'. In an ironic twist for a public-facing web development team (now a bona fide 'team' with the addition of Jan in September) we've spent the past few months developing a new suite of internal tools for data entry, analysis and reporting. Besides dramatically improving the 'quality' of the specs data, the overhaul saw the addition of the 'live view' and 'USB' query parameters to the feature search.

To the lab!

This week we've begun development work for a new, exciting and very public feature of dpreview. I can't say what the new project is yet, but it will be of interest to all dpreview visitors, especially our forum community. What I can say is that we're planning to change the way in which we launch new features onto the site. While past updates have been rolled out silently (or with a quick forum post), future feature releases will be available (initially) in a new 'labs' area of the site (on an 'opt-in' basis). Corresponding announcements and discussion of labs roll-outs and site tweaks will be coordinated through the dpreview dev blog.

We hope to throw this mysterious new project into labs early Q1 '09 for feedback (but as ever, we're operating on a 'when it's ready' basis). In the meantime, in the spirit of the new blog, I'd like to encourage feedback through the feedback channel and the appropriate dev blog comment threads. (discussing bugs/features in the forums is fine, but may not find the right ear). If you're interested in the progress of the site I'd also encourage you to subscribe to the dev blog feed.