No matter what we add to the site and what goodies or features we introduce, our core business is tutorials and we will end where we started, submitting tutorials.

We’ve added quite a bit to the site over the years, but from day 1, we’ve been about the tutorials and finding the easiest ways to submit them. We’ve mentioned in the past that we were looking at an auto-submit API, and that is still a possibility, but we’ve had to shelve that for now while we work on other features. BUT what we did do was streamline the submission process for our most basic feature: submitting your tutorial links.

I think you’re really going to enjoy to changes we’ve added to this process overall… the submission process is basic, but it’s easily the most used feature on the site, so naturally tweaking this to even shave off seconds will amount to hours of saved time overall for the hundreds of webmasters that submit to our site. Here are some of the changes you will find with the new submission page:

Multiple Category Submissions

You will no longer have to submit your tutorials 1 category at a time… on the current system, you have to fill out and submit the form for each category you want to submit. So as an example, if you have 5 PHP tutorials and 5 Photoshop tutorials, you would have to fill out and submit the tutorials in 2 sessions… 1 for PHP and 1 for Photoshop. With the new system, you can submit all the categories in a single session.

No need for numbers!

You no longer need to worry about how many tutorials you are submitting.. you add each tutorial on-the-fly! So you fill out the form for your first entry, click add and it’s added to the submission list and you can fill in the next tutorial entry, or go ahead and complete the submission.

The Submission List

As you add tutorials to your submission session, the page maintains a submission list that is updated via AJAX as you add each tutorial. The list is gives you an instant preview of how your submission will look, and you can instantly edit or delete any tutorials in your submission list. Once you’ve added all the tutorials you want to submit, you can preview the entire list in the submission list, then go ahead and click Finish and the submission is processed.

Intelligent Form Processing

On top of the streamlined system, the submission form itself has some additional validation intelligence to help make your submissions easier and prevent submission errors. We often receive submissions with URL errors, so the site automatically validates your tutorial’s URL and alerts you if it is not valid when you add it to the submission list. You also won’t have to manually fill out your email address to receive the approval alerts, it will automatically fill it in for members based on your account email address, and from there you can change or opt to remove it if you wish.

So there’s a look at the new submission process for submitting your tutorial links, I hope you like the new improvements!

See you next post and keep those comments coming!

Thanks,
Dan