CG Cookie is moving: our new home on Mavenseed!

❇️ We're migrating to our new home next week to Mavenseed!
❇️ The site is expected to be in maintenance mode for majority of the morning on March 1st, 2022 -6GMT.

This year, CG Cookie turns 14yrs old. A well-aged cookie with flavors that continue to evolve and delight the palate 🍪🤤

Next week,  we're moving the CG Cookie site over to our new startup platform Mavenseed.  

A place for you to build your own Blender site and for CG Cookie to thrive as a 100% focused content creator.  

It's a big deal for everyone, even those outside of the Blender community.  We expect the site to be  down for a few hours when this takes place, though we're handing all of the heavy lifting, and when we're back it should feel like home. 

What you need to know

For the most part, the new CG Cookie will feel similar. 

We're not reinventing the wheel, though there are a few improvements I think you're really going to enjoy. 

As with any big move, I and the team appreciate your patience and understanding as we serve up the next version of the cookie. There is likely to be a few paper cuts that we'll need to address, but be assured we'll jump on them as quickly as possible. 🙏

To be clear: we're moving code, not people

📦 The amount of boxes you need for this move: zero.  

We’ve been working as a fully remote team for a few years now, ensuring lower overhead, autonomy of each team member, and flexible work arrangements. CG Cookie hasn’t had a brick-and-mortar studio since 2018. 

So what’s moving?

The CG Cookie website in its entirety: all the architecture, content, your member accounts, gallery projects…you name it will be migrated over to the Mavenseed platform, with CG Cookie as a customer of Mavenseed. 

Pretty cool, right? The idea is once we're on Mavenseed, you'll login as you did before and continue consuming tasty Blender content. 

Our head engineer Nick Haskins is orchestrating an epic haul this February to our new home on Mavenseed. Which Nick also built, by himself, while roaming the country with his family in an RV!

Nick explains the move: "Migrating CG Cookie data to Mavenseed building over 60 different scripts to export the various tables into CSV’s. Then, 60 other scripts were built on Mavenseed to take that data, import it into the system, and reconnect all the dots. The import tools that we built are capable of handling up to 1M rows of data."

So what is Mavenseed?

Mavenseed is a platform we created to house entire communities built around content - just like CG Cookie, or to simply build your Blender site for free. 

Basically, if you are building a digital empire or looking for a place to host your work, Mavenseed is the fortress from which you'll conquer the world 👉  try Mavenseed for yourself. 

But Mavenseed wasn't built in day - in fact, it took all our 14 years worth of offering Blender educational content to get to this point, and we're just getting started. We, the CG Cookie 🍪 team, built Mavenseed to scratch our own itches to create an epic community building platform CG Cookie could thrive on, at the same time enable others to grow their projects. 

Mavenseed means that you can launch your own CG Cookie. It could be a simple blog with a paywall, or a full fledged e-commerce site, or a subscription based system…the sky is the limit!
~ Nick Haskins, CG Cookie developer and creator of Mavenseed

CG Cookie contributes 1% from each card subscription to fight global Carbon removal. Mavenseed is built with a force of good in mind, ear-marking 10% of our net revenue to making the world a better place from the start. We view it simply as a cost of doing business. 

Learn more about Mavenseed, and read our manifesto. 

A brief history of CG Cookie's site residences:

2008 - 2010 "The Dark Ages" aka living in humble WordPress Blog with Wes piecing together themes and plugins,

2010 - 2016 "Home Improvement Stage" aka pushing WordPress,  3rd party plugins + developing a handful of our own with the addition of smarter cookies,

2016 - 2021 "Our first own place" aka CG Cookie runs on Ruby on Rails making the switch from Wordpress,

2022 - beyond ***HOME SWEET HOME*** a.k.a. let's build our own home, for others to enjoy. Welcome to Mavenseed!

Mavenseed is the result of this and all the lessons learned along the way, distilled into a turnkey home that will make us run smoother and more flexible than ever before.

As our developer Nick Haskins put it: "In past migrations we  just built a new house using the experience gained over the years from previous iterations. Only this time, we built an apartment complex."

What improvements could you expect on CG Cookie?

Again, the intent is was not to drastically change the shape of CG Cookie, at least initially. 

Instead, we have the goal of feeling familiar with - hopefully - a few unexpected delights along the way. While Mavenseed was built from the ground up, with most notable changes under the hood there are a few front-facing upgrades to note. 

👉 Make your own CG Cookie Learning Flow Playlist

We renamed “Learning Flows” to Playlists - and you can make your own! 

Everybody has a different learning journey and our instructors will now be able to recommend the best one for you, with a unique progression of courses to follow. 

You can even craft your own playlist of content to follow-along, or keep in a safe place. 

👉 Focused private 1-on-1 exercise feedback

Currently when you submit an exercise on CG Cookie, your submission is peer reviewed and sometimes graded before an instructor can take a look at it. 

With Mavenseed, when you submit an exercise, a CG Cookie instructor or instructor assistant will grade it (“pass” or “fail”) and send you their comments in private. 

You can ask follow up questions, clarify things and get personal feedback on your work, ensuring you get individual attention. We know that nothing propels learning better than constructive critique - and now, we’ll have an avenue to bring it to you. 

Note: We're exploring the idea of re-opening exercise submissions for public feedback, while retaining the pass/fail ability to the CGC education team. 

👉 Updating Bookmarks to Saves

Bookmarks have been renamed to Saves. They operates nearly identical to Bookmarks, with somewhat interchangeable terminology. On each piece of content, you have the ability to simply [Save it], and or add it to a Playlist. 

What you save can be accessed through their Avatar Drop-down > My Saved Stuff on Mavenseed.

👉 We're a small team, let's get to know each other better.

CG Cookie is, first and foremost, about people. We're a small team of Blender fanatics eager to push the ability of this software beyond it's limits, while help you also create your awesome things in Blender. 

With our new home on Mavenseed, you’ll see our instructors (Jonathan! Kent! Wayne!) front and center. 

They will showcase what they are working on, courses, custom playlists and more. 

👉 Clear communication of XP opportunities and course badges

1 completed course = 1 unique badge now displayed on the Course landing page. 

Badges of honor, or proud battle scars? Whatever you call them, your badges will now shine bright on your profile as testimony of your learning journey. 

👉 Easier course building makes our instructors happy

Some of the biggest changes are happening behind the scenes: course building is going to be much easier with Mavenseed. 

That means our instructors will breathe a sigh of relief: the previously cumbersome course assembly will now be happening via a simple drag-and-drop form. Expect to see more rested instructor faces as a result.

👉 And there’s more!

On Mavenseed, CG Cookie gallery gets an update, user profiles as well as each course page. Look closely to find all the little nuggets we’ve added to make CG Cookie a better place. 🍪

Some frequently asked questions. 

“What’s going to happen to my account?”

Not to worry: your login, account data, membership status, course progress, Gallery projects and XPs will be securely migrated to Mavenseed. Once you've moved in, if you happen to notice anything amiss please let [email protected] know. 

“Where are my exercises?”

They are still here, just in a new location: your Account > Exercise Submissions.

"Wait, how many developers built Mavenseed?"

Just one, Nick Haskins over the past couple years has been working with Wes Burke to get the project off the ground. Recognizing this is just the beginning, we're looking to expand the team in the coming months. 

“I can’t find something, send help!”

Email us at [email protected] and we’ll help you find what you need. The migration we are preparing is massive, so small glitches can occur and cables do get tangled. 

And always keep this in mind:

If you perceive that there are four possible ways in which a procedure can go wrong, and circumvent these, then a fifth way, unprepared for, will promptly develop.
~ Murphy's Sixth Law

And finally: it's cookies as usual!

While the migration happens, the cookie oven will be chugging along happily (with brief outages that we will announce ahead on our social) In the meantime, we're loving all the renders hitting the Project gallery from our PRESS START course.

And behind the scenes, a monster-sized course on 4 wheels is in the works...vroom!

Stay crunchy and keep in touch on Discord, Community Forums, Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.