CONGO Registration System – The State of the Code

Remember CONGO, my convention registration software? And how over the last year I’ve been rewriting it from scratch?
This past week, the new rewrite, colloquially referred to as ‘v2’, went live for Arisia. Following is a bit of babble about the project, and the net steps therein.

When i started this project, I knew what a daunting prospect it would be. CONGO v1 was written over 5 years, and had a lot of features and power in it. But the structure it was built upon just couldn’t handle the new functionality I wanted to add – a richer public interface, event and resource scheduling, more powerful reporting, etc. The rewrite was necessary.
I had a setback in December when the first client who was ready to run with v2 cancelled the deployment at the last minute. Much of my motivation went out the window in spite of some great progress, and work on v2 screeched a halt. (Halt you say? Yep, just look at the numbers in the beginning of 2009 – January and February were cleanup from the work, as well as commits in on the v1 code for Arisia – but then things just die. Now, granted some of that is the fact we were moving to Cohousing, but no work is no work.
This summer has gotten me back into the groove, with the goal to have Arisia up on v2 by the time the reg season gets cranking again (for Arisia, reg ramps up at the end of summer). The last 8 weeks have been running tests, patching bugs, and getting buy-in from the reg team that the new code (which is a 100% code replacement for the old), is Doing The Right Thing.
Last Monday, we went live.
So far so good! We’ve identified only one major bug (and that’s during configuration, not during operation), and that’s already been patched. The team has been giving me feedback on things they discover, and giving the system a workout.
I really feel that the system is to the point where I can call it “stable” and start enhancing it beyond what v1 could do (it already has a FAR better accounting mechanism in it – using invoice resolution and transaction logging), as well as a public ‘web’ interface that lets attendees register themselves and look up information.
The ultimate goal, of course, is to release CONGO to anyone who wants to use it. To that end I’ve been working up a new website that has new licensing information (the code is going to be free to fandom / small gaming conventions – since that’s where I got the start), with licensing available for larger commercial ventures.
So. Want to give it a try? I need some testers for the new website and the process of downloads and installation. If you’re interested, drop me a line!