VHX moves to version 2.0 of its publisher admin pages

VHX is a website that enables filmmakers to distribute their work directly to fans, as flexibly as possible.

The Dumbo-based company launched with an Aziz Ansari special and has since come very near to securing its millionth customer (955,934, as of this writing). “Our constant focus has always been to make it as easy as possible for anyone to start selling video straight to their audience,” the company wrote in a recent blog post announcing its new admin interface. 

The priorities for the new version were:

• Faster, easier publishing.
• Integrating helpful information so publishers can get questions answered as they arise, from within the platform.
• A design that will make it easy and seamless to add new features that are still in the works.

We reached out to VHX Chief Technical Officer (and Vimeo alum) Kevin Sheurs for some under-the-hood insights about the new version.

He told us this was largely a front-end and design-focused process, with a serious orientation toward consistency and concise coding.

“From a technical standpoint, this meant implementing reusable CSS classes and modules and trying to build reusable JavaScript plugins whenever possible,” Sheurs wrote. “As a testament to this, our number of JavaScript lines of code was cut in half in the 2.0 release. The redesign was focused not only on consistent UX and aesthetics, but also on implementing a cleaner, more concise codebase.”

One element Sheurs emphasized was the style guide that designers and engineers wrote at the start of the process. This guided devs through building all the components and features so that each part of the site looked cohesive. They were also careful to make it mobile friendly. Sheurs told us that most of VHX’s users publish on the web, but, once the video is up, they check stats and revenue frequently on mobile.

Sheurs told us about a few tools that the company finds helpful: Asana, for task management; Screenhero, for offsite collaborators; JSHint, for error checking; Grunt, for generating scalable vector graphic icons (which the VHX dev blog has written about); and Foundation, as a front-end framework (which the VHX dev blog has also written about).

Here are some Brooklyn-related films that have been published via VHX:

• A Genius Leaves the Hood: The Unauthorized Story of Jay Z, about the poet laureate of the Marcy Houses.
• Mistaken for Strangers, about indie rock superstars and Brooklyn-based band, The National, a movie that sounds both almost exactly like and completely the opposite of the previous movie.
• The Phantom Tollbooth: Beyond Expectations, a film about the making of one of the most important children’s books of all time and its origins in a Brooklyn Heights brownstone. We covered its Kickstarter.
• This American Life: Live at BAM, the film version of the uber-popular public radio show’s second live performance, which was broadcast live to theater across the country from the County of Kings.

VHX currently has 19 employees.