Beatport update 4.1 release notes

Beatport update 4.1 release notes

12 May, 2009 | 11.16AM

• Written by: Beatportal
• Filed under: Music News: beatport release notes

In an effort to keep our user community informed, we’ve decided to start posting release notes to Beatportal for each Beatport software update. Anytime we make changes to existing site features, add new features or fix defects, you can come to Beatportal to find out what they are and how they’ll impact your shopping experience.

Yesterday, May 11th, we released some updates to the Beatport store. Each change is outlined below; if you have questions please leave comments to this post and we’ll respond.

Territory restrictions auto-search
As the second phase of introducing a work-around to territory restrictions for our customers, we’ve implemented an auto-search function. When a track shows up as territory restricted, a search button is provided. Clicking this button will execute a basic artist/track name search for the same track on another label, where it might be available for purchase.

Search improvements
As an incremental improvement to the search component in the store, we’ve implemented a static auto-suggest function. When you begin searching for an artist or label, a list of our most popular matching search terms is presented. The list can be navigated using your keyboard, and selecting an item will take you directly to the detail page for the item, rather than present a search results list of one item. This is a simple and useful first step towards a much more intelligent search engine for Beatport shoppers.

The functionality of the store’s search component has changed too. The interaction sequence required by the component was previously not intuitive; it has been refactored to resemble other search tool sequences. The search context, though it can be selected in any order, is presented first, followed by the search term and search execution.

Top 100 downloads numbering
Due to customer requests, numbering is now included in the Top 100 Downloads list.

Cancelable services, faster browsing
Another significant optimization is the addition of a variety of different service requests, which give our customers the option - where appropriate - to interrupt one request with something else. For example, if you are interested in going to the Tech House genre page but you accidentally click on Psy-Trance in the dropdown menu, you can now simply open the menu again and click Tech House without waiting for the Psy-Trance landing page to load. That makes the whole experience faster.

Paypal checkouts now require billing information
For those of you who checkout with Paypal, please note that billing information is now required for Paypal transactions. We had to implement this change to make our Paypal checkout process more secure. Billing information, if you select Paypal as your preferred payment method in your Account Preferences, can include only an address.

General optimizations
In addition to these changes, this release includes many general optimizations to the store, from the user interface to the database. We’ve improved performance of many UI components, added a caching technology to our PHP stack, and simplified and optimized many database interactions such as the Top Downloads list.

We hope the sum of these changes, which we will continue to make incrementally, makes for a better overall shopping experience for our users.

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