FLProg.ru - the face of the FLProg program on the Internet

In previous articles, I talked about the prerequisites for creating the FLProg project and the current state of the project .
Now I want to talk about the site dedicated to the project, which is a gathering place for users of the program.
The main objective of the site is to enable users to download the latest version of the program, learn about innovations and changes.


You can download the program without registering on the site, but for registered users, the site’s functionality expands markedly. Registration is very simple and only requires an email confirmation. No other data is required.
On the program download page, the program download page always has two versions: an installer and a portable version that does not require installation. If possible, I also upload the update file of a much smaller size, allowing it to be updated from previous versions. Also on the download page you can see a list of innovations and bug fixes for this version and go to the archive of previous versions .


The second task of the site is feedback from users to the developer. For this site created a bug - tracker . Unregistered users can view the list of detected errors, their status. And registered to add to the list of their detected errors. I try to get the next version of the bug - tracker to be clean, and almost always succeeds.
Also, the purpose of feedback from the user to the author is the new functional page. The organization of this page is slightly different. Unregistered users can also view requests for new features of the program, and registered users can add their own wishes and vote for existing ones. Thus, a list of the most requested functions requiring implementation, which I try to adhere, is formed.
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The most interesting from my point of view place on the site is a forum . Here, users of the program can ask questions about working with software, ask for advice and discuss problems. The forum lives very intensively and requires less time from me. Already appeared their gurus and old-timers who help beginners. I am very grateful to them, because it reduces the load on me. Here, as well as on other pages of the site, unregistered users can view messages, and registered users have full capabilities. No ratings and levels are maintained. I do not see the point. In general, very serious and responsive people gathered at the forum. So far, for the year of work, no attempts of hooliganism have been noted, advertisements of all sorts of things than other forums usually get sick. I, of course, reserved the possibility of a moderation and a ban, but so far I have never had to take advantage of this. For the convenience of site users, file hosting has been created to store images and files inserted into messages. Since the space on my disk is not infinite, I regularly spend deleting unused files on the site with a shelf life of more than a month.


For training novice users of the program there is a documentation page.
On it you can see the program description, site description , video tutorials and examples of working with the program , as well as a list of equipment used in the program . Video tutorials describe most of the functionality of the program. The first introductory lessons turned out, of course, too long - more than an hour each, but I could not cut them into parts without losing logical completeness.


In the form of an experiment on the site created a section of publications . The ideology of Habr is taken as a basis. Registered users can write their articles and comment written by other users of the publication. In this section, unfortunately, so far I noted one. Now there are articles about the development of users of the program, a description of most of the equipment used in the project. Hopefully, over time, site users will try this opportunity to realize their writing talents.


Well, now a little about the site engine.
Since I am not a web programmer, and I didn’t want to waste time learning ready-made CMS like WordPress or Joomla, I decided to write my own engine in the language I know. The site is written from scratch in SmallTalk using the Seaside package. Now the second version of the engine is working. The first was written in haste over the course of a week and is intended mainly for informing about a new project. But already in it were present the user's personal account, the bug-tracker and the section of the new functionality. Well, the first prototype of the forum. But he also had problems. First, to speed up the engine writing, I used the dynamic link mechanism built into Seaside. It is very convenient to work with it if you do not plan the indexation of the site by search engines. Search engines see such a site as one main page, and all other pages do not index. This is understandable, since all links live for a maximum of two hours. This was the second problem with dynamic links. When a user has a page open, if he doesn’t do anything with it within two hours, the next time any action on the page is transferred to the main page. Well and the most unpleasant is that it does not make sense to keep links to any internal pages, they will also lead to the main page in two hours.
As a result, after six months of torment, it was decided to rewrite the engine again. Writing a new engine has required two months of work. Well, it is excusable, after all, this is just my second website. Since I am not very friendly with the design, a professional designer was hired to create the main page. The rest of the pages if possible, pulled up under the main. For some functions, we had to learn JavaScript, the ready-made BB-Code editor was taken for messages, but its parser had to be written independently. Honestly, it still doesn’t work perfectly, and from time to time I’m looking for mistakes when someone writes some original message.
The site runs on a home server, with the Intel Atom as a CPU, and four gigabytes of memory. Easily sustained peaks of up to 8,000 visits per day. This is certainly not a super performance, but with an average load of 1500-2000 visitors per day, this is enough. In general, I liked the SmallTalk-Seaside-Glorp-PostgreSQL bundle for creating a small site with great functionality. I am very sorry that this language is so little common in Russia, and is some kind of exotic.
In the next article I will talk about the immediate and distant plans for the development of the FLProg project.