Hi developers,
I have great news. The master branch of ThinkUp's repository (
https://github.com/ThinkUpLLC/ThinkUp/commits/master) is now up-to-date with the code running on
ThinkUp.com. This means the company and the open source community will no longer split our efforts across different branches; we'll all be working from the same starting point. Hooray!
What veteran ThinkUp developers should know: That starting point has undergone some serious changes. Over the course of 2014, as ThinkUp-the-company worked on building ThinkUp-the-service, we made several strategic choices. Our goal was to simplify the user experience and make as compelling a consumer product as possible. With a small team and limited time, we had to focus on the best parts of the app and make those great, instead of trying to upgrade everything. In other words, not everything made the cut.
Here are some of the biggest changes we made:
Focused the entire experience on the insights stream. In lieu of the dashboard, ThinkUp's stream of insights is the central, sole interface to the app. We designed these insights to work as "cards" in ThinkUp's web interface, as tweets, as browser notifications, and as mobile/wearable push notifications (someday). They also work very well bundled up into daily or weekly email digests.
Completely redesigned the insights stream. From new typography to a fantastic color palette to support for big, beautiful hero images, the insight stream is gorgeous and just as responsive and good-looking on every size screen.
Added dozens of new insights and reworked existing insights. ThinkUp's new insights sound like a friendly conversation you'd have chatting with a pal about your social networks, instead of a robot reciting statistics.
Focused on the core networks ThinkUp is smartest about. ThinkUp's core competencies are Twitter and Facebook, so we rewrote all of the insights specifically and only for those networks (so far). That means several networks that used to work with the old dashboard don't work with the new insights stream yet. For now, we've deprecated those network plugins from the core codebase and stowed them in separate repositories until they're ready to come back in (
Foursquare,
Google+,
YouTube). We also deprecated the
GeoEncoder plugin (due to changes in the Google Maps API) and
Twitter Realtime plugin (due to lack of activity).
If you pull and test the master branch (and I hope you do), keep in mind:
- ThinkUp no longer runs on PHP 5.3. The PHP Group "end-of-life"d version 5.3 in August of 2014. Therefore, ThinkUp is no longer compatible with PHP 5.3.
- Insights from a past beta will break. If you were running a past 2.0 beta, your existing insights will break the stream. After you upgrade to the new code and run your database migrations but before you run the crawler, TRUNCATE your tu_insights table to delete your old insights and start fresh.
- Instagram is coming. The relatively new Instagram plugin is in active development. Even though it is rough around the edges, it is included in the master branch. (Interested in helping get it production-ready? Get in touch.)
- There will be bugs. All these code changes have been tested in our hosted environment, but not as much for install-yourself setups. Let's work together to resolve these bugs. Report them as you find them either here on the mailing list or in the issue tracker on GitHub.
It's been almost a year since the last install-yourself user release, the longest time in ThinkUp's history. But this one will be worth the wait. I hope to package up the master branch into a user release soon - as soon as some of you have had time to test and catch the more important bugs. (Especially around areas that can brick the app, like password reset.)
As always, thanks for your contributions to, patience with, and interest in ThinkUp's codebase. If you've got questions, comments, or bug reports, don't hesitate - please post 'em here.
Onward,
Gina
P.S. We've got a couple new developer tools that make working with ThinkUp's codebase and building insights easier. More on those in a separate post, soon.
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