Try new features before everyone else

A beta channel

Cellarion changes often. Most changes are small and go out to everyone the same day. Some are bigger: a page redrawn, a flow turned around, the kind of change where the only honest test is a few real cellars for a week or two. Until now those went out to everyone at once, and if the new shape was wrong we found out from everyone at once.

From today there is a middle step. A member asked for it this week, in the same message as feedback on what became our first test case, and we had been thinking the same thing: with more members, larger changes should be tried by a few first. So that is what Early access is.

How it works

• Open Settings → Early access and turn on "Show me new features before everyone else". That is the whole setup. One switch covers every feature in beta; there is nothing to pick per feature.
• The same page lists what is in beta now, with a line on what each feature changes and where to find it, and what was released lately. You can read the list with the switch off too, to see what you would get.
• A feature in early access carries a small Beta strip with a Give feedback button. What you write goes straight to us as a support ticket about that feature, and the answer comes back like any support reply: in the app, and by email unless you turned those off. If you file tickets through your AI assistant, that works there too.
• For larger features we may open a thread in the Community forum where testers can talk to each other; when there is one, the strip links to it.
• When a new feature enters beta, you get a notification. When a feature you gave feedback on goes out to everyone, you get a thank-you. We mean it.

Nothing is stored differently

The rule we built this on: a beta feature changes what the screen shows, never how your data is kept. Whatever you save on a beta page lands in the same fields the ordinary pages read. So you can turn early access off at any time, or we can take a feature back to the drawing board, and nothing you entered is lost or hidden. The only thing you could ever lose is a form you had open and had not saved.

The first feature in beta: one page for each wine and vintage

Version 1.254 added a page for a wine and vintage in your cellar, reached from the Info button on a stack of identical bottles. It helped, and it also showed a seam: with several bottles you got the new page, with one bottle you got the bottle page, and the two looked and behaved differently. The last bottle of a vintage should not change the experience.

With early access on, that seam is gone. Tapping any wine in your cellar list opens one page for that wine and vintage, whether you have one bottle of it or twenty, always in the same order:

1. The wine — producer, region, grapes, the tasting profile and the shared registry record.
2. The vintage — the sommelier's drink window, your own window, notes and your own data for that vintage.
3. Your bottles — one row each, showing what differs between them: rack and slot, size when it is not a standard bottle, price, shop, purchase date, opened or reserved, and its own note when the notes differ.

Drink a bottle, Edit vintage and Add bottle sit next to the title on a desktop and in a bar that stays in reach on a phone. Edit vintage writes the drink window, peak and note to every bottle of the vintage at once, and a field the bottles disagree on only changes when you fill it in. Every entry in the cellar list has its own Drink one, so taking a bottle out never needs the page at all.

Everyone else keeps the current vintage page for now. When the new one has settled, it goes out to all, and the Beta strip comes off.

If you self-host Cellarion

Early access is part of the release, not of our hosted service. A super admin sets each feature to off, beta or everyone under SuperAdmin → Feature flags, without a redeploy, and links the forum thread from the same page. Beta feedback lands in the support queue, filtered by feature.

What we are asking

Turn it on if you like being early and do not mind a rough edge. Then tell us what is wrong, what is in the way, and what you miss. The features that reach everyone will be the ones a few of you have already lived with for a while, and that is the point.