The Qt Developer Network is finally live!

Winter is long in Oslo. This was particularly true for the last winter. In fact, we had a little snowstorm on Tuesday! But I am digressing…

We spent most of winter and the season known as spring in other areas in the world on the newest kid on the block - The Qt Developer Network. Now it’s live. Whew.

And what is the Qt Developer Network, please?

Before Christmas 2008 we took a look at the state of our web sites and agreed that it needed some serious work, we made a 3 year plan.
The Qt Developer Network was in there from the beginning but it wasn’t until the fall of 2009 that we got the time and money to make it a reality. Now we finally have an organized place to collect both internal and external Qt knowledge.

But the Qt Developer Network is not all new, we had some of the pieces scattered around from before. You might have seen the forums right here on Qt Labs. They are in a rather sad state and will be shut down once we open up for registration.

Qt Developer Network features a forum, a wiki, a fully fledged blog, a totally awesome Qt FAQ generated and auto-updated from our support database every night and most of the content that used to live in the developer zone on qt.nokia.com. We implemented a nice system of points and rewards - doesn’t Area 51 Engineer sound charming to you? - which was actually quite fun to come up with. And we strongly believe in fun at work!

This, however, is only the beginning.

We have a somewhat solid roadmap sketched out for the coming months. Apart from a tag engine which is still missing behind the dummy tags all over the site, there will be a group module and Ovi authentication coming soonish.

Looking at the content, we still need to move the books section and the eLearning videos. That will hopefully happen over the coming weeks.

And now, we are looking for your feedback. We have placeholders in our task tracker for requested features and lacking functionality to be implemented as we go along. So, don’t wait - have a look at what we’re building and let us know if we are headed in the right direction.

Hey, I can’t sign up! How am I supposed to test and give feedback?!

Currently, we are in a closed beta testing phase. We have sent out invitations to pre-registered users so we can start with baby-steps. We will not do a Gmail and stay beta for years; we should reach open beta soon and 1.0 should be out this summer.