Hey all,
Erik has just gone live with a beta of the new-and-improved BatchPCB.com. You can check it out here:
We’d really appreciate any and all feedback, especially if you’ve got time to put the site through its paces and see how things work.
I’ll be keeping an eye on this thread if anyone wants to post stuff here, otherwise please send issues directly to support@batchpcb.com.
Thanks!
Do we get free boards?? :lol: :lol:
I will have to upload some of my designs and check it out!
My thoughts:
(I will add my thoughts on it here as I go)
First thing off the bat, clicking in the username or password box does not clear the standard “username” and “password”. Kind of a pain.
You looked at it in IE yet?? :lol: 
On the PCB Designs page, “Results: No items found.” Is there any reason to display the Id/Model/Created On/Status headers? Would be cleaner if they weren’t shown.
The “A Sparkfun Service” image down the bottom should be scaled to its size. No point loading a big one.
“Batch PCB Upload process” image. Looks whacky and aliased…
File types page, with the purple previews… VERY nice. I like it.
Just a random observation. It looks like there is a bit of AJAX trickery involved, and clicking on some buttons (like login, continue) have a bit of lag before something happens. How about when they are clicked a “loading” type thing comes up in place of where the loaded text will go. Just to save impatient people mashing the buttons over and over.
Design ID #8, haha sweet looks like I am one of the first.
Interesting to see a weight there, could be handy. No idea what this oz thing is
There’s no more “batch bot last run” on the page. I liked that.
My design passed, as it should, but it took something like 10 minutes. Not as quick as it used to be.
Whats with the whacky white bits on the (boardnumber)_lg.png image?? Soldermark stop maybe? Looks odd.
Once I click on the link in the email, the page that it sends me to has a list of fields. These are all our of whack alignment wise. Really, what browser do you guys use??
Apart from that its pretty good. Not sure about the design yet but I am sure that will be fixed up before its out of beta.
Thanks for the detailed critique!
A few points…
Yeah, we definitely haven’t done extensive testing in IE yet, so stuff’s bound to be broken (anyone who works with web tech can probably appreciate just how broken is possible…). For what it’s worth, we always target Firefox first for SparkFun stuff, although the new BatchPCB is Erik’s baby and he’s a big fan of Konqueror, so he’s probably done some testing there as well.
I’m pretty sure we’ll be adding a bot status indicator at some point.
If anyone wants to take a look at source for the underlying CMS, Erik has put up a SourceForge project where you can get to the Subversion repository:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/quasicms/
The BatchPCB-specific stuff will stay in-house, but much of the new code for what you see is already GPLed.
Hi all,
I have just completed a round of fixes - especially for IE6/7. Hopefully things will look a little nicer now :).
@gussy - I think I got most of your points. Some are design decisions that are not entirely mine to make, but I picked up what I could - and IE works a little better now.
Thanks very much for the responses so far - helps me a lot to make the new site functional for you all.
Cheers,
Erik
Nice looking site upgrade.
The layer previews on the layer picking step are awesome! Each layer looks exactly like it’s supposed to. Even heavy usage of ‘scratch’ or ‘negative’ gerber draws doesn’t mess things up!
Hopefully this layer rendering code will be easy to transition over to the DRC bot. The DRC bot still doesn’t like how FreePCB draws copper areas and ground planes.
Looking better all the time,
Marty
My recent experience:
The good:
Wow! Much improved - I like the previews, how well it auto detects the file types, etc. Very slick.
The so-so:
It took a LONG time to get my DRC e-mail. Usually I need to submit 4 or 5 times in a row (with very minor changes between) because the DRC bot doesn’t like one or more things in my design. Having to wait 15 minutes for an e-mail makes this cycle very long.
Also, for one design I submitted, I never got a DRC e-mail one way or the other. The design still says ‘submitted’, and I haven’t gotten an e-mail after a day. I just submitted again, and then I got an e-mail.
The layer previews are very nice, but I would really like to be able to click on them and see a really big version (png) in my browser that I could scroll around and check for all of the little things you worry about. I.e. be able to see much more detail.
The login is also a tiny bit sub-optimal. When I accidentally put my e-mail address in for my username, I got a blank PHP page. It does not remember my username (which would be really nice - at least have a checkbox for it).
The Bad:
When I ordered my design (after finally getting it to pass the DRC) the image on the order page is of someone else’s design! I hope I’m going to get the right coaster in the mail. 
This should really be fixed. The order in question is 6185. When I click on the board (id=15506) it shows the wrong image file.
This service is awesome, the new code just makes it way better. Keep up the great work BatchPCB (and Spark!) You’ve become a service we all rely upon.
*Brian
My experience:
The menus on the left were seriously messed up when I viewed it in IE7, though that was a few days ago, before you’d have made the changes.
Right now, the front page seems to display fine in Opera 9.60 and Firefox. But, I seem to be having problems with the login. The first thing that threw me is that the top box says “username” and not “e-mail”.
Using Opera:
Filling in the wrong user ID brought up a page of HTML nonsense in Opera. No page, just a few lines of continous code at the top, with the URL “http://devel.batchpcb.com/index.php/Home”.
Filling in the correct user ID wasn’t an improvement, I just get the text " document.location=“/index.php/AccountHome/PcbDesign” ". And it loads the URL “http://devel.batchpcb.com/index.php”. If however I retype in “http://devel.batchpcb.com” I’m now logged in and see the front page.
Now that I’m logged in, clicking on “PCB designs” on the left brings up another broken page. The rest kinda work: The grey “A SparkFun Service” bar at the bottom is laid over the left hand side menu under the “Addresses” and “View Orders” pages, obscuring the “Shopping Cart” bit. Also for some reason on the address page under “Zone” it says “Colorado”. (I’m not even in the US.)
Beyond that the “BatchPCB FAQ” on the left and “Help” at the top seem to have almost the same info, except for the very top. Might be better to have just one of them, if only to streamline the site interface.
Hope that’s useful, I haven’t had a chance to pick through it with Firefox yet.
Hi Lucien,
I too just noticed the document.location bug; same thing in Safari. I am working on a fix for this.
As for the other Opera things - I wonder if your Opera is a little old? I have a very recent version and can’t reproduce the other things that you mentioned …
Also, IE7 should be working ok now and IE6 works but is not very pretty … no easy solution there I’m afraid, I’ll try some tweaks for that when things settle down; until then, at least it works.
Best viewing is in Firefox - that’s pretty much what I develop on and it is the majority browser on Batch.
And, yeah - the FAQ and Help are redundant; its temporary. The help page will be different later, we are going to add a bunch of other stuff there but for now I guess it doesn’t hurt to have the FAQ in two places - maybe more people will look at it that way ;).
Erik
Added: Ah, sorry - I see the ugly footer thing in Opera now …
I’m using the latest version of Opera, but I’ve upgraded many times Haven’t done a clean install in a while, so don’t know if that might affect things. I wouldn’t have thought so though.
Just tried logging in again wtih Opera. I can login fine and view the “PCB Designs” page fine now.
I’ve also given it a quick runthrough with Firefox, no problems that I could see.
Excellent - I just added some extra support for Opera and Safari users; glad to hear it works!
–Erik
Unfortunately I don’t have the time to do any real testing now, but what I missed when opening the new site (and I had the same feeling with the current site) is that I think it should show BatchPC’s affiliation with Sparkfun.
Maybe there is a reason, I don’t know. I think that the new site should look more like Sparkfun’s site IMHO.
Last two times I’ve tried to open the site, I got this error:
Fatal error: Class 'DOebjfreGlcr' not found in /var/www/batchpcb/quasi-0.1.9/includes/qcodo/_core/framework/QApplicationBase.class.php on line 272
I know i’m being nosey but i got the same error as hooziewhatsit in IE7 :? …
Fatal error: Class 'DOebjfreGlcr' not found in /var/www/batchpcb/quasi-0.1.9/includes/qcodo/_core/framework/QApplicationBase.class.php on line 272
Thanks for pointing that one out - should work ok now.
batchdev:
Thanks for pointing that one out - should work ok now.
Yep, works just fine now (IE7).
Any chance of getting a ‘keep me signed in forever’ option?
I was thinking (dangerous i know) that you could use [W3C’s Validator to view and weed out
any potential problems you could encounter…
Let me know if i’m suggesting a load of c**p. 
](http://validator.w3.org/)
Any chance of getting a ‘keep me signed in forever’ option?
Yep. I’ll put it on the wishlist - but patience is a virtue with wishlist items at the moment :).
I was thinking (dangerous i know) that you could use W3C’s Validator to view and weed out
any potential problems you could encounter…
Good idea actually - I forgot about that; checking it right now in fact.
I just logged on the new site and noticed that my address was out of date. I added a new address with no problem, but it won’t let me delete the old one. I click on “Edit” next to it and I get to a page to edit it, then I click on “Delete” at the bottom and get a popup asking me if I’m SURE I want to DELETE this address. I click OK, and get back to the list of addresses, and the one I just tried to delete is still there.
My browser is chrome, if it makes a difference. But I doubt it’s a browser issue.
I’ll poke around a bit more this evening from home, so I can try submitting a few designs.
Keith
How long does it usually take for an order (on the new beta site) to go from Paid to Panalized (or whatever the next step is)? I submitted and paid on the 14th, and it still says just paid.
*Brian
How long does it usually take for an order (on the new beta site) to go from Paid to Panalized (or whatever the next step is)? I submitted and paid on the 14th, and it still says just paid.
I am quite sure what you are saying - the new site is not taking real orders yet, in fact there is no way for you to actually pay! The payment is in testing mode and if you don’t use the CC number that is the default in the field it should decline the order. This is all only for testing!!
I added a new address with no problem, but it won’t let me delete the old one.
Bug accepted - many thanks; I’ll check into it today.