After months of planning, developing and implementing the new Social Edge 2.0, we are very excited that we are finally putting it in your hands and  seeing what you think of it. A lot of what we did was structural, the most obvious changes are visual and there are a few new features that we think are really nifty and hope you do too.

Invariably in a project like this, things go wrong and there are things that we wish we had done differently. There are also the pleasant surprises along the way that make you smile, grin or laugh out loud. With that in mind I wanted to take a moment to share with you some of the lessons learned along the way.

1) Figure out how to migrate your data early.
When you build a site from scratch you don't normally have to worry about data migration. When you're migrating a community site that has been around for years, migrating the data from one platform to another has to be your biggest priority. Our biggest headaches came in this part of the process, and things we tested early on and thought worked great ended up not working when we were in the home stretch. Which leads me to #2.

2) Be flexible.
Things are going to change. Roll with the change, don't fight it. Change happens, change is good. There are always going to be unexpected results that you have to adjust to, and most of the time they are going to make your end results that much better.

3) Ask for help.
I'm a stubborn individual, but I know that there are always people who know more than I do about, well, anything. (Well, except for bad entertainment trivia and lyrics. Six degrees of separation? Child's play.) In choosing to develop this site on Plone, an open source platform, we were able to benefit from the collective wisdom of the Plone community. I was amazed at how responsive developers and others who were using Plone were to share their knowledge and expertise with us.

4) Documentation, documentation, documentation.
The old maxim about the three most important things about real estate? Location, location, location. When it comes to site development it has to be all about documentation. Another thank you to the Plone community for all of the information that has been developed and put online for easy access. But it's more than that. Document what you do as you're doing it. I'm terrible at this, but I made an effort throughout this project to do this, and was better than I have been in previous projects. There were a number of times where my notes helped out considerably and saved me a lot of time. There were other incidences where I had failed to capture my processes and kicked myself for having done so.

5) Usability tests.
Users can be unpredictable. No, I'm not talking about you, I'm talking about all the other users. Really. Do usability tests early and often to find out what your users think of what you are building for them. I guarantee you that it will change your work for the better.

Again, we hope that you like what we've done with the place and that you'll enjoy what's coming next too.