On Wednesday morning, our crew got on what was to become the longest Slack call in CG Cookie history. 17hrs... though we at least impressed Slack. :)
With the press of a button, our head developer Nick Haskins (aka The Bearded Avenger) initiated the migration of CG Cookie FIVE, a WordPress-based system, to the new CG Cookie SIX, which is built in Ruby on Rails.
In the early hours of Thursday, several gallons of coffee and many a stressful moment later, the new site went live.
1 Year of Self-Funded Development
The migration concluded 1 intense year of development efforts by our whole team, who came together to create the new site. In keeping with CG Cookie philosophy of being a small, bootstrapped, independent company, we created the new system in-house with no outside investment. The project was funded exclusively through the memberships payments from artists who learn with CG Cookie and sell or buy their products on the Blender Market.
I am especially proud of our crew who ran the year-long development project parallel to creating fresh training content for you every week, running contests, responding to questions and generally being awesome.
All of the 16 current CG Cookie crew members, including our trainers Kent, Tim, and the 3 Jonathans (+5 cookie points to anyone who knows them all!), came together to tirelessly test the new system, identify bugs, log issues on GitHub, suggest improvements and get into (sometimes heated) discussions on what features would bring the most value to our members.
The site you are now looking at is the result of this incredible team effort.
Moving the Data of 400,000 Users
So what happened during the migration on Wednesday? Depending on how long you've been learning with CG Cookie, your account has stored information about your learning progress including videos watched, quizzes completed, gallery images uploaded, as well as your activity on our Community Forums. Multiply that by more than 400,000 users...and you're getting the picture of what we had to "shovel" from the old system to the new site.
On top of that, we rolled over all of our content, ensuring the Pancake Hobo, Sci-Fi Helmet, Pierro and all the other trusted CG Cookie characters make it to their new home safely.
New Features, Same Training Quality
From a fully integrated community which allows you to join the CG Cookie buzz directly on our main site, through curated content recommended based on your learning preferences, Live Events (yay!), and a brand new multimedia Gallery, the new site brings new features that will make your learning more fun.
A Faster and More Reliable CG Cookie
Below the surface, this version of CG Cookie is more stable, faster, and, most importantly, much easier for us to upgrade in the future as we continue to build a better CG Cookie learning experience for you. As you read this, we are still squashing bugs on the new site, but you are invited to search the site, explore the new features and let us know what you think.
Thank You For Being With Us
This is a new era of CG Cookie and we are stoked to have you with us on this incredible journey which started 10 years ago. The reason why we do this hasn't changed: to make artists succeed. Thanks for being with us and making it possible for us to continue writing the CG Cookie story. Onward!
F.A.Q.
Where did the Archive go?
We're aiming to find a way to release all of the archive publicly, for free, but it won't be available directly in SIX. If anything we may just put up a torrent or dropbox link for it.
The site looks great (although it's a bit harder to navigate) but I was wondering why the Blender course videos are no longer available for download? I have a pretty slow internet connection most of the time and it's really hard to stream them at a decent quality, so I am used to downloading videos and watching offline. That doesn't seem to be an option anymore?
As a Ruby on Rails developer, this excites me in more ways than one.
@jonathanwilliamson It seems to be fixed now, thanks!
While this new site is awesome, can you make it look better on the phone? Or make an app.
I find it much easier to watch a tutorial on my phone while practicing on my pc
Hi Guys, I don't know if it's just me but whenever I'm near the end of a video I get a grey box pop up that says "Congrats! You're making progress.
You've just finished this course. If you're feeling determined, proceed to the next course!
or " (yes, it ends with the word or).
It happens when there is a minute left of the video and covers up the videos. Is anyone else getting the same problem?
All the little things that I thought could be improved you guys actually tackled with this new version - great work,!
I love the new site. It looks like some of the filters aren't quite working right, for instance, when I go into Blender Courses and filter on Animation, I don't see the Animation Boot Camp and Animation Workflow & Body Mechanics courses.
Congratulations on the new site and kudos for doing it on Ruby on Rails. I noticed video downloads aren't in the Downloads tab anymore. Will those still be available?
This is great I Love the new look Wow 10 years truly life is short and you guys are making the best of it.