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Jappleng has been under development for quite some time but these past few years have been really amazing. 2016 marked the year when Jappleng\'s basic features were all done and many of the extensive features were also completed. Additionally, the Learning Management system, new layout, and a lot more happened so let\'s go through and review what happened this past year.
Brand New Server (Welcome to the Cloud!)After January\'s fiasco with our old ISP which involved a lot of down time due to DDoS problems, we decided it was time to switch over to a more expensive ISP but they provided a lot of features that we need. Scaling is now possible meaning we can just keep growing bigger with zero downtime, no downtime maintenance, cloud-based network meaning if one server goes down and gets clogged we can rent a new server within minutes and open up Jappleng to more people. The list of features keep going but more importantly no downtime is HUGE! We’ve also improved security and added SSL (HTTPS) to Jappleng. If it’s not HTTPS it’s not Jappleng.
New Jappleng Layout and EcosystemOh yes, all of Jappleng was completely redone from the ground-up which took many months to do but in the end was well worth the effort. What you see now is entirely different than the Jappleng of the old. Jappleng supports themes for the main site, J-Spot, and club Jappleng. This would have been impossible to do under the old system.
New Community ForumsThe new forums were introduced early into the year but aren\'t being used much as of now. However, next year we have hopes that the new forums will be very populated. The old phpBB forums were ditched in favor of new forums that were developed from the ground up. The reason was that the old forums were bulky, slow, and full of spam bots. The new one allowed us to create something that was tailored specifically for our members. Lots of J-Community features have been added along side of everything too!
J-Spot Social NetworkWhile there may still be some bugs in it, J-Spot was introduced in its final form this year completely rewritten. The previous version written in 2015 had too many problems and after learning from my mistakes, I had rewrote it all for the sake of all of our sanity. On top of new code, many new features were added as well as a new design. J-Spot is integrated with 90% of Jappleng too! Only a matter of time before its final form can be shown.
J-Spot GalleryAbout June of this year, the gallery released which replaced the old one from phpBB. The new one is linked to everyone\'s J-Spot, has maturity filters to toggle, titles and descriptions, comments, and public images can be viewed in a global gallery. These galleries will also soon be linked to Club Jappleng and News in Japan.
Good-Bye Travel, Hello Culture!The Travel Section was merged with the culture section earlier in the year to prevent confusion with what is what. While there\'s still work to do to both sections as consolidated as they may be, we believe this is a good start for the amount of new articles coming next year (lots!).
Brand new News in JapanEvery section has been remade this year, that’s a fact. However, News in Japan had more than just a few design changes which makes it much better than before. On the last site update in December of 2016, the new article submission system was published and it works wonders. It is a full visual editor written from the ground-up and while it hosts a lot of new features, there are some features that are still being tested but are out of this world awesome like drag and dropping images and resize them as needed, customizing images and video presentations, auto-upload to your own gallery (the files you upload), tables and polls.
RIP JVShare VideosWe took down the JVShare videos section even though it took about 2 months to make the first version work (bought a license for video sharing software) and another month to develop JVshare from scratch in the past few years. The reason behind it was that Jappleng was too large for its own good. Last year we took down the Entertainment section because it was too much content to support with virtually no staff. This doesn\'t mean it won\'t ever return, we just can\'t afford it right now.
New Learning Management System for Students and TeachersWe introduced the new LMS this year completely re-written and teacher / tutor ready! It supports courses, chapters, and lessons. Teachers such as myself can create a course, assign lessons to chapters, give out grades and assign a subscription fee. JPLearn! is free to use and so are the Jappleng mini-lessons. Fees will be used for those wanting to tutor or create lessons of their own such as teachers in public education. We will continue to improve our system to support many new features and in January of 2017 most features will be made available.
New J-World MarketThe J-World market of 2015 was meh at best. It looked stranged, it behaved even more-so and good luck using any of the items you redeem your J-Points for. Now the J-World market looks nice, supports item purchases very well (100% guarantee), and a whole bunch of new items were added. It\'s beautiful!
New Settings SectionThe settings section was completely redesigned and re-programmed from the ground-up. Nothing about it is the same and just about every feature works now. Items bought in the shop can be customized in the settings section which was previously not possible.
Say Hello to the new IMChat V2!While the IMChat v2 Alpha was available last December, it wasn’t until the end of January 2016 when the new IMChatv2 was completed. Many new features were added but more importantly it is mobile-friendly. As a bonus, it’s now possible to see how many people are online from almost anywhere on Jappleng.
JPLearn! Chapter 1 and Chapter 2JPLearn! Is our flagship Japanese education program which took many years of research to refine it to what it is today. This year, JPLEearn! Chapter 1 was re-written and re-formatted and all lessons and homework assignments were completed. Chapter 2 while all lessons were being worked on, I am sad to say I couldn’t meet my deadline for before the holidays. However, roughly 80% of it was completed and most of it will be made available on the first week of January 2017.
Club JapplengWhile Club Jappleng is not complete and not yet ready for full public consumption, development has begun and those with a Club Jappleng BETA pass can gain access to it.
J-Mail Version 2The new J-Mail system supports invite-based conversations which act kind of like a private message board. It’s quite neat and a bunch of nifty features are planned to be released sometime next year to really make J-Mail shine!
We can’t forget the etcetera!A lot has been done this past year and we’ve just overviewed a big chunk of it. But beyond this there were hundreds of minor features implemented and re-written. The little tiny things are what makes the big features shine. While it would take a lot of time to go over the minor details, I thought it would be nice to honor those little details like live notifications, save for later, and so on...
When you look at the weekly updates you may not realize just how much is being done until the year-end review shows just how much was actually done. Now that 2016 was the year for Jappleng to be completed, 2017 will be the year when we invite a lot of people to join in on the fun and create lots of content. For more details about 2017, take a look at our next editorial “What we have planned for 2017”.
Once again, this page is from a old section called News in Japan which hasn't been a thing since about 2016. But Jappleng has a lot more to offer such as:
- Entertainment section for Anime lineup, news, reviews and more (over 14,000 anime titles!)
- Education section to learn Japanese and about Japan for free
- Club Jappleng to create and join fan clubs, study groups etc...
- Travel Guides to learn more about Japan, immigration and tourist attractions
- Community forums, dedicated chat system, J-Spot social network
- Japanese practice games and other fun stuff like Yokai Trainers
- Massive Japanese <> English dictionary with over 500,000 words
- Achievements, unlockables and more!
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