Project Status update – At last

As promised, here we go! Unfortunately as you might have imagined by now the development of the project suffered a major step back two months ago and the progress was almost halted. We continued to progress everyday but the pace was very slow, it became impossible to predict when we would be able to go beta.

I have to confess that when I first started I had no idea of the sheer dimension of what I was getting into. I have worked on hundreds of projects through the years, some of them were technically complex but nothing quite like this.

Fortunately all of these mishaps are a thing of the past, during the last month we have reached a stage of the project where every major functionality has been developed and is in place, and we are very close to entering our beta testing phase.

I don’t think I have ever written about this, but the project was intended to be released on the 5th of November 2010, and coincidently one year later it’s the exact release date.
This date has a lot of personal meaning to me, and it is the definite “do or break

Major update

I am aware of how long it has been since the last update, but a major update is going to be released today, fixing the main issue that has been affecting our project at the moment, site speed!

Will keep you posted and will circulate an update soon!

Production Diary #16 – Week 17

It has been a long time since I have updated our project’s log, the closer we get to launch day the more hectic things are getting.

At this moment all of core functionalities of the frontoffice and backoffice are in place, we are now focusing on delivering details, and unfortunately these are taking a long time to complete.
As you might have guessed by now we will not be able to comply with the release date that we committed too, it’s the second time we have let you all down.

The project’s immensity has really taken a toll on the development team, and we were faced with technical challenged that were impossible to predict.

Tonight I will be issuing a formal statement with the project’s new release date.
You have all been fantastic and your emails of encouragement are truly what keeps us going strong despite all of the mishaps.

Help us keep our twitter account active

We have 3 vacancies for Tweeter users that love movies to help us keep our tweeter updated and to engage with our following base.

Requirements:
1. Fluent written native English
2. Twitter account
3. Must be passionate about movies
4. Sociable and friendly
5. Must have good experience with twitter (searching topics, etc…)

We will pay on a monthly basis, do get in touch with us for more details at info@ourplot.com

Production Diary #15 – Week 12

It’s been awhile since I have provided you guys with an update. So this week we have taken our first break since the project has began, Krish has been working non-stop and desperately needed a break. We have really made good progress on week 11, so next week things should pick up at a very good pace.

For those you who missed the post, we announced that we had to delay our launch date a couple of weeks back , but as things stand we are ahead of schedule.

Will keep you guys posted, and this weekend I have a small susprise/present to all of our blog members.

Release Date moved up to July

Unfortunately due to unforeseen circumstances the site’s release date has been moved to the 20th of July, coincidently the same day Armstrong walked on the moon. We did our best to comply with our first commitment, but as the release date approaches it became more evident that while it was possible to release the site on the day, it was not going to be released the way it should, fully tested and bug free.

Production Diary #14 – Week 10

We have finally finished the community forums, and they are looking pretty good, it was quite a challenge, developing a forum from scratch turned out to be quite the endeavor, but Krish did a wonderful job, it’s exactly how I imagined it to be technically and the user experience is very slick as well.

We are now moving into the user community group’s area, that is also an important part of our community features. It will allow users to join communities that share similar movie interests. For example, you might be into independent films, and would like have discussions read reviews around this category of movies. The Ourplot Groups will allow you to do just that, it’s a community within a community.

After we are done with the entire community aspect of the site, we will focus on the user profile area that is by far, next to the movies rating system, the most important area of the site.
Unfortunately, as you might have guessed by now we are behind schedule, as a matter of fact we are dramatically behind schedule, so shortly I will be announcing the new site’s release date.

It’s so frustrating to see all the planning be thrown out of the window, I really wanted us to nail the project’s release date, and felt so comfortable with it that I made a public announcement and made a lot of deals with suppliers , partners and advertisers based on that date. I guess it’s better to release a stable site than releasing unstable code that wrecks everyone’s experience, but it really bothers me that we failed such an important milestone of the project.

Rest assured that the next release date that we will publicly release will be considerably more conservative, to prevent more delays and mishaps.

I would like to thank everyone that has contributed to our Blog and is still participating in our small community, do keep the faith on us, in the end we will not disappoint you.

50 / 50 Trailer

The Whistleblower Trailer

Production Diary #13 – Week 9

It’s been too long since I made a production diary entry but we have been very busy.

The development has definitely picked up the pace, and we are now working in parallel between the back and the frontend. More than ever I now know it will be extremely hard to launch our site due to a lot of unforeseen obstacles we were comforted with during the last week of programming.

Rest assured we still have the necessary backing to carry this to the end and I am quite satisfied at how things are turning out. I should be making an official announcement regarding the release date of the project sometime during next week.