Oec

After releasing the redesign of the site last week, we received a lot of feedback! The version 2.0 launch happened to serendipitously coincide with Walter Frick's post for the Harvard Business Review blog about "[Visualizing the Economic Ties Between Russia, Ukraine, and Europe](http://blogs.hbr.org/2014/03/visualizing-the-economic-ties-between-russia-ukraine-and-europe/)" which made use of the new embedded apps. This drove in lots of traffic and helped us iron out many bugs early on. Below is a list of the major bugs/improvements made:
- Return of net-exports/imports! This was a feature that was removed in the redesign to reduce some of the redundancy in the navigation but it was been added back in as a net/gross toggle on the bottom of all the apps that show values.
- Site-wide translation updates.
- Better translations of app titles for French, Spanish and Italian (taking into account the use of the article and gender when forming these sentences).
- A product "conversion code" was added to the product dropdown menus to ensure switching between SITC and HS classifications brings you to a similar product in the requested classification.
- Moved Russia's continent classification from Asia to Europe.
- Improved usability for mobile experience

The OEC Redux

The Observatory of Economic Complexity or OEC as we're now calling it has been completely rewritten from the ground up including updating the database. We've migrated the code base off of the Django framework and are now opting for the more lean Flask. The database is still stored in MySQL with a Redis caching layer. The other big change on the front end is the implementation of [D3plus](http://d3plus.org/), the open source visualization engine built on top of D3 initially for [DataViva.info](http://dataviva.info/). You will also notice a brand new visualization on the site called "Rings", used to visualize the product space connections centered around one specific product.

Completing this version 2.0 overhaul was a much overdue project but now that it is released and in the wild you can expect much more frequent updates. One step back, two steps forward. As with any software release there are bound to be some lingering bugs and we urge you to post any issues you find to the [GitHub Issues](https://github.com/alexandersimoes/oec/issues?state=open) page.

Major Changes:
- Database restructuring, using compound indices for data tables instead of unique IDs
- Greatly improved SITC and HS product names
- Moved Django back-end code base to Flask
- Using Flask-Cache to cache full pages as well as DB queries
- Using D3plus for all visualizations
- NEW APP: Rings
- Explore page now uses the same embedded iframe used throughout the site and API
- Explore page renders top 20 results of page query as table for SEO optimization
- Explore page titles are now translated
- Search box shown throughout the site to quickly find results

On The Horizon
- Better mobile support
- New visualizations for comparisons
- More accurate data cleaning utilities
- Improved translations for all languages