Beta Today… Not Finished Tomorrow

Today is shaping up to be the day we overhaul the Knowledge Base. As if anything else couldn’t delay the the rollout, the MediaWiki team pushed out critical security updates which we, of course, were obligated to deploy.

Now here’s the early-morning bombshell. The new Knowledge Base will be so groundbreaking, we’re changing its name. Since every phone in America will have its own web site, have its own cornucopia of information… we felt it appropriate to give it a new name.

And the new name is? The PhoneNews.com Phone Encyclopedia. The name change reflects the expansion and new focus of the wiki-driven section of PhoneNews.com.

We’re focusing on three key features for the Phone Encyclopedia: Phones (obviously), a Carrier Wiki (which will drive the carrier-focused content of the site, in addition to phone details), and a Compare Phones tool.

Compare Phones will not be launched until after the Phone Encyclopedia is complete… but it is a powerful and innovative new way of finding the phone that’s right for you. In our tests, we found it to be much, much easier to use than any other phone comparison tool we’ve made. And yes, it is a major part of the reason why it took so very long to create the Phone Encyclopedia… we had to be extremely methodical in our rollout.

As you’ll see in the announcement on the news, this is just a first beta, it’s nowhere near done. But, we think you’ll see the promise of it… and we appreciate your help in building it out. We’ll need your help more than ever as we take our innovative use of wiki technology out of beta, and into the best phone information resource on the internet.

Update: Just as every single thing was done on the MediaWiki end, our Joomla-IPB bridge broke. So, I’ve been working on that non-stop since yesterday networking to get some patched code to fix the problem. Others are working on adding more phones and more details… but unfortunately, I’m the only one that can flip the switches. So, enjoy the wait… I’m certainly not.