Skalfa eCommerce Press

SkaDate 7 – Major Release!

December 26, 2008 – 12:06 am, by Emil @ Skalfa

Posted in News, Products, SkaDate | Tags: release

It’s the day after the Christmas night but everybody is in the office. I am so incredibly excited to make this announcement that I can hardly type. I will try though.

We are rolling out the seventh major release of our flagship product – SkaDate. This is the product of 6 months of hard work by big development team and one crazy month of heavy testing. And what is even more valuable, this is also the product of company’s 4 years of experience.

SkaDate 7 intentionally has no codename unlike previous versions, SuccessPoint and Unity. Number 7 has been lucky for the company on several occasions so it deserved to be not only the version number but also the official name.

SkaDate traditionally had a full pack of features thus with this release we concentrated on the overall usability, stability, and performance. SkaDate 7 introduces the new platform engine with reworked forms, AJAX, JavaScript, templates, languages, document and component models. Those changes (both explicit and implicit) are just too much to list them here but I will cover some of the important ones.

Features

We have reworked some of the features according to the feedback from our customers and now are glad to introduce new level of usability for events, video, blogs, forum, mailbox, and others.

As one example, video now supports not only plain uploading of files but also embedding video codes from any of the video sharing sites out there. It means that your members can now generate content for you without actually uploading files to your servers – only embedding their favorite clips from their favorite video sharing services. On your site they will be wrapped up in comments, tags, rates, and selections – so your site can become a big meta video storage in no time with zero costs.

Security

Security has always been one of the strongest points of our software. SkaDate 7 continues this tradition by using the same methods of protecting site content. We just had some optimizations and fixes during the development since SkaDate 6 security still remains unbeaten.

Performance

This is an interesting topic about SkaDate 7 and I want to cover it in details.

What are the usual ways to optimize performance on high-traffic websites? There are several tools to set up for a site like Nginx (a tiny proxy-server that optimizes HTTP requests for Apache) and Memcache (in-memory data storage) and others. Finally, there is clusterization – the last measure because it adds up considerable running costs and helps when nothing else can. You set up separate server(s) for database and for http requests. There is a load balancer that sends queries to the least loaded server out of the cluster. Database and storage servers need to be synchronized which is also a complicated task. This method provides scalability solution for any usage volume, the only downside is high cost and big additional complexity.

These methods are transparent for programming code – you can apply them to any existing site. We believe the optimization starts from ground zero – at planning and writing software.

SkaDate introduces built-in performance optimization by smart cache handle. Imagine that there’s a selection of latest site members on the homepage and every time anyone opens it, this selection is queried against the database (that has say a million members). SkaDate caches this selection to a compiled HTML code and doesn’t make any queries. Once a new member signs up this cache gets removed and SkaDate makes one new query which gets cached until the next selection change. If 1,000 visitors open your homepage and only 3 of them sign up, SkaDate makes 3 selections instead of 1,000 and gives you 333 times performance boost for this unit.

This is one small example of how SkaDate handles data and caches pages and their parts for making as little SELECT database queries as possible. Given that SELECTs absolutely outnumber INSERTs and UPDATEs on an average community site this gives unlimited possibilities for performance. Eliminating actual database queries can’t be substituted with other methods. A really busy site on SkaDate can even do without high-cost clusterization with only internal cache handle, nginx, and memcache.

Almost one year ago I said that there’s no way to handle million userbase sites on PHP/MySQL. I’m going to gladly eat my words once we perform a number of tests on SkaDate 7. There is no packaged software that does this kind of optimization, SkaDate comes first to enable businesses play big games.

Template management and integration

Another big advantage is the new way to handle templates. Given that we removed regular HTML markup from templates we now offer easier and much faster template integration and better support for new features. From now on we do not need to add markup to all templates when we add a minor feature or rebuild an old one, and new templates are integrated way easier. For you it means bigger selection of 100% up-to-date templates and 5 times as cheaper custom template integration.

In templates you can actually override the default HTML markup with your own, but except for the homepage in 99% of cases you don’t need to. We ported 5 templates from the previous version and created 2 new ones within a couple of weeks. Earlier that process would take us about a couple of months. From now on we can extend our free collection of high-end dating site templates on the constant basis.

Index page now supports arbitrary HTML code insertion and inclusion of the standard components, like latest profiles, video, photos, etc. You can even add/remove main menu, standard header, sidebar, etc.. to quickly create a unique homepage for your dating/social networking site.

Forms

Forms are 80% of the software functionality that is why we paid special attention to eliminate the existing shortcomings of the previous versions. On top of complex and dependent profile fields (that you’ve seen in SkaDate 5.x, 6.x forms) we introduce advanced Ajax validation, unified error handling, and easier programming form assemble.

Sorry for being a little bit too techy in this announcement. This new masterpiece from my team makes me feel as if I’m a little boy with a new toy again. I hope to share that feeling with you.

SkaDate once again puts its straightforward for small businesses. You don’t need multi-million budget for starting a community business. We have put so much insight, experience, and effort into one package. For you.

If you don’t feel like downloading and installing software we have hosted solution available.

Ok. Enough words at this point, I invite you to check SkaDate 7 on your own.

SkaDate 7 information: www.SkaDate.com
SkaDate 7 Online Demo: www.SkaDate.com/demo.php

Thank you.

Emil Sarnogoev
CEO
Skalfa eCommerce