LabelEd 4 - What’s it all about?

LabelEd 4 will represent the single biggest upgrade to the platform since the original product launch in 2008. Ordinarily we do favour smaller incremental releases, but we feel that we’ve learned so much in the past few years, and there were so many things that we wanted to change, that it would have been practically impossible to release these changes separately.

The main changes and motivating factors behind them include:

A brand shiny new admin

Yes, we’re sick of the blue and yellow too!

The crux of the matter is that the LabelEd 3 administration system was designed around 2007 conventions. Technology and everything else on the web moves so fast. Browsers and monitor sizes (among other things) factor massively into how we design interfaces, and using the current system does now feel a little claustrophobic.

So, the new UI features:

• A completely reworked colour scheme.
• New “liquid” layout that grows and shrinks depending on the size of your screen. If you’re lucky enough to run a nice large resolution monitor then we’ll basically just make use of it. If not, we shrink everything down and start hiding some of the non-critical pieces of information so that you’re not at a disadvantage. Hey, they tell me size isn’t everything.
• Improved work flows. We’ve worked really hard to improve the way that you achieve the most common admin tasks. Everything from searching and sorting lists of products and orders to managing your own site settings and alerts.
• Functionality improvements to areas such as variation management and orders.

There's actually loads of things we'd like to highlight in terms of interface and functionality additions and improvements. We'll more than likely post more about these in the run up to launch.

New infrastructure

We’re moving away from 1&1 (hurray!) to Rackspace (whoop whoop!). This’ll give us the ability to offer improved SLAs on the back of a much better hosting infrastructure. We’re in the process of provisioning and setting up our new servers, but we’re talking about full load balancing with redundant capacity. :-)

Improved web services

We’re working to expose more data via web services, opening new possibilities for external integration. We’ve also added support for JSON in addition to the default XML format.

Performance

Major improvements to our back end caching strategies, in addition to some clever use of RAM tables, not to mention the new infrastructure. LabelEd 4 should certainly feel faster.

Growth

We’re aiming high. I obviously can’t claim that this is “just the beginning”, but we’re definitely not at the end. We’ve got lots of plans, which i can’t get into at this stage, but we’re really excited and can’t wait to share more.

We’re still currently a little way off launch, but we’ll be contacting people in the next few weeks with regards to an optional beta test. So if you’re an existing client, please do let us know if you’re interested in trying out the new platform before we officially migrate your site.

If you'd like to find out more about LabelEd, please see our products section. And if you enjoyed this post, please feel free to respond or follow us on Twitter @labelmedia. Bye for now!