We appreciate your patience and continuous support. We're committed to making our platform better every day. As always, we'd love to hear your feedback and suggestions!

Stay tuned for more updates coming soon!

I'm thrilled to share the latest updates on Plaza 365 as we transition from Alpha testing to Beta status. We've been hard at work over the past month, focusing on upgrading our platform from create-react-app to nextjs14. This has been quite a challenging task as we aimed to minimize the time invested in upgrading the entire codebase while ensuring the seamless integration of our beloved UI library, Chakra UI.

The decision to move to nextjs14 was primarily driven by our commitment to enhancing search engine optimization (SEO) and ensuring proper indexing by search engines. We understand the importance of visibility and traffic for our valued article authors, and this upgrade will significantly contribute to achieving those goals.

During this transition, we also made some notable changes to our backend infrastructure. We successfully migrated from Amazon EC2 to Lightsail, which has allowed us to leverage better resources and streamline our CI/CD pipeline processes for code deployments. This shift has proven to be a crucial step towards optimizing our development workflow.

In an interesting twist, we have decided to host our database outside of Amazon services. We have chosen Planetscale, a fantastic platform that offers seamless hosting for small applications like Plaza. By utilizing Planetscale, we are confident in delivering a robust and reliable database solution for our users.

That's it!

I'm incredibly thankful for this first month of Alpha testing on the platform. Our testers have provided us with valuable feedback that we have been implementing daily. We have been improving the user experience and polishing up various elements such as the email notification, the user menu, and many other smaller aspects.

However, we discovered that Google is not properly indexing the site, primarily due to the technology we chose to build Plaza with, namely, React.

Currently, we are in the process of transitioning from React to NextJS and migrating all the code. This process will take some time.

In the meantime, we will not be promoting the site and will postpone the official release.

Stay tuned for more updates!

Oh wow, so thrilled to announce the first version of Plaza 365.

So nervous! Okay ...

There's a ton of cool stuff about Microsoft Business apps out there. Lots of smart people sharing their experiences, know-how, and more. The only catch is, you might miss out if you're not connected directly with the authors on LinkedIn or regularly checking their blogs. Plaza wants to fix that. We want to make all this awesome content easy for everyone to find. Just drop the link, and our tagging system will help others discover it.

Imagine Plaza like a social network. It only works if everyone gets involved by sharing links, chatting with others, and staying active. If you dig the idea and want to help, join us on the site, Discord, or tell your pals :) The platform was built as a fun side project, to learn new tech and bring an idea to life that's been bouncing around in the founder's head for a while. It's not perfect, but it's a start. We'll keep making it better based on what you tell us!

This wouldn't have happened without the early feedback from many folks in the industry.

-Big thanks to you all–