Yesterday was a big day here at BuildingWebApps/Collective Knowledge Works.

We have transitioned to a new code base, in which nearly all of the code underlying the site has been rewritten. Initially, the site should look exactly the same, and have all the same features, so in one sense this was a great deal of work whose goal was to have no visible change.

We had a few rough spots yesterday, but things seem to be in pretty good shape now, so please let us know if you encounter any problems.

So why did we do this? The big change is that our application is now a multi-tenant system, capable of hosting multiple sites within the same application. And in the process, we’ve cleaned up the system architecture and made it far more extensible.

We’ll be talking more about what we’re doing with this in the fall, but suffice it to say that anyone will be able to build a site like BuildingWebApps on our platform.

Now that we’ve made it through this big transition, we’ll get back to adding features, and you’ll see some results of that effort before too long.

At the same time, we’ve switched to Engine Yard as our host. The site is now running on two load-balanced slices, giving us greater redundancy and scalability, as well as the superb hands-on support from the Engine Yard team. Engine Yard is graciously providing us with these slices as the premier sponsor of the Learning Rails online course.

Kudos to our CTO Christopher Haupt and a small cadre of contractors (with Phil Misiowiec making the largest contribution) for pulling this off. (I wrote a large part of the original application, but I’m now primarily the business guy and am leaving most of the coding to the pros.)