

Orchestra.io, PHP Platform, Enters Public Beta - aeden
http://blog.orchestra.io/post/4349232969/announcing-public-beta

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kingofspain
It would be nice if anyone had an option for deploying with mercurial. Purely
anecdotal of course, but most of my PHP chums run hg as well. I know there's
hg-git but for all the hassle it took to set up, I may as well have just used
git itself.

(Incidentally, I was quite interested in this originally, but while waiting
for an invite I ended up bodging together something on Amazon myself.
Amusingly enough, my invites for phpfog, orchestra and dotcloud all came
within 2 days of deploying!)

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EamonLeonard
We have support for mercurial that we are in the process of test at the
moment. When it's available, we'll announce on our blog:
<http://blog.orchestra.io/>

If you'd tweeted us, we would have bumped you up the list :(

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growt
The site itself loads really slow. Makes a bad first impression for a platform
service.

~~~
EamonLeonard
Thanks for the feedback. There are definitely front end performance tweaks we
could make to improve the load time of our marketing site. Right now, however,
the platform itself is our main area of attention :)

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petervandijck
The site is taking over 5 seconds to load, and the signup page is down. Don't
make excuses, that's not acceptable. You have to understand that we don't
judge your service by looking at the code you write, we judge it by any means
we can, which unfortunately includes whether your own site is accessible,
design (yes), writing (your writing has quite a few spelling mistakes in it,
no biggie but it helps if it hasn't), what others write about it etc.. All
thoroughly unfair. Don't take it bad, but that's the way it works.

Then, AFTER we sign up (if we ever do), we can judge it by how well it works.

Good luck!

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EamonLeonard
Thanks Peter. I don't feel I was making excuses, but communicating our
immediate priorities.

The signup page seems fine, would you mind checking it again? I take your
point on first impressions etc., well made.

Would you mind telling me where you've seen spelling mistakes, I'll correct
them.

Thanks :)

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petervandijck
The docs have lots of spelling mistakes, can't find any now though, but I
noticed about 3 while glancing through them earlier. The signup page is up
now.

Also, and I understand it's not a priority, the docs are a little wordy.

For example: "you will need to make sure you comply with the following
requirements". Why not write: "You'll need these:". Much friendlier.

Or "In order to deploy an application on the Orchestra platform, one is
required to login at <https://my.orchestra.io/login>. Once you've logged in,
click on the Deploy A New App from your Dashboard. You will be taken to the
Deployment interface where a few new terms might appear strange to you. Allow
us to describe the fields you will see:".

You can replace that entire paragraph with this sentence: "To deploy an
application, login at <http://my.orchestra.io/login>, and click Deploy A New
App."

Another one: "Memcached is an in-memory key-value store for small chunks of
arbitrary data (strings, objects) from results of database calls, API calls,
or page rendering. Memcached is trivial to use and a very important part of
any serious platform infrastructure. We are currently on an addon that will
enable application deployers and Orchestra users to use Memcached. We will
keep you updated with our progress."

Instead write: "Memcached support is coming soon". That has the same amount of
informational value and is easier to read.

Just nitpicking on the writing now :) It does sound like a great product.

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EamonLeonard
Really appreciate the feedback on the documentation, Peter. Docs are a type of
UI, I guess, and the same rules should apply.

Consider them a work-in-progress! :)

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troels
Well presented. It looks like it might hit the target audience very well, I'd
say.

