Dev Manager Update

Hi, my name is John Viner and I am the new Development Manager of the Envato Marketplace dev team. My last 2 roles have been at companies where the community is at the heart of the product (as the dev manager at social sports network PlayUp and as dev manager at Lonely Planet). So I appreciate the importance of the Envato community and keeping you updated.

Since I started 10 weeks ago there have been some exciting things happening in the team.

Firstly, we are growing. We have had a couple of new developers come on board (Martin Jagusch and Shanon McQuay) and are looking to keep expanding the team.

Secondly, we have completed several “back end” engineering projects that we needed to do to ensure our site can continue to handle the growth in traffic we’ve been experiencing.

These projects included restructuring the way we handled photo processing in the background (to enable it to be more stable and scalable) and upgrading our search engine to handle traffic increases and put us in a better position to roll out new search features.

Having completed these engineering projects, we have started to focus more on delivering improvements to the experience that you, the community, will notice. We are proud of these changes and hope you like them!

• We’ve done a significant rework on the way we handle signing up and signing in to ensure that we reduce the pain of having to enter CAPTCHA and at the same time can protect the site from nasty distributed-dictionary attacks. The results have been better than expected, with now only 25% of users seeing CAPTCHA at sign in, which is down from 75% beforehand.


• We’ve simplified the sign-up form, reducing the number of steps it takes to create an account.


• We’ve been working on making improvements to the author experience, so if you see any small changes, they are a part of this on-going project.

We’ve been working on a number of small tweaks, some of these include:

•  Adding spam control on collections


•  Creating a HTML5 compatible player for AudioJungle


•  Added a buyer survey for first time buyers


•  Better password validation on signups, reseting passwords and update passwords


•  Provide a single consistent starting page for the upload process (/upload) and added “Upload” to the user menu


• Fixed collection page layout to allow for wider images


• Update search indexes for an item when a sale is made, so that sales
  
  counts remain in sync better.

With the help of the community team I’ll be keeping you all up to date on a monthly basis. We hope you will be delighted with the many more upcoming changes, as we swing our focus heavily towards making your experience as good as possible.

We also want to give our community an insight into the more technical aspects of our architecture and development process, so we are launching a new tech blog very soon (stay tuned). In the meantime,  enjoy this picture of me after a big climb, it’s great to meet you all!