Over the past few months a few of the ZWave database maintainers have been working on a new database editor. The current editor was written nearly 5 years ago and while it has served the community reasonably well, was probably always a bit of a “clunky” interface and by todays standards, it is a bit slow and outdated (IMHO). For those not familiar with the database, it provides an editor to edit all the thing definitions and create the XML files for the ZWave binding - it can ingest files created by the binding by reading out device data, to actually create these in the first place. In all, we have around 1250 devices in the database - most of these contain the manuals etc, and we also automatically create the documentation you find in the OH docs from this.
So… We’re now in the position where the new system can be rolled out for some final testing to see if you can break it 
The new editor has been completely rewritten, and is on a new website so it’s not running at my house, and is designed to be more responsive and easier to use. Gone are the endless clicks from one page to the next when editing parameters or configuration - we’ve tried to integrate this into a more streamlined system where data is edited in a single page with pop-up dialogs for editing content like configuration parameters. Search is also a lot quicker and hopefully things are generally better all round…
There will of course be some differences, and no doubt I’ve missed something or broken something, so I wanted to have a few days at least of testing before we look to close down the old site and move over to the new. The new site will require re-registration - at least for now. I might migrate over users who have been given editing rights already such that they only need to recover their password to use the new editor.
Behind the scenes I’ve also improved the admin interfaces, and specifically there’s now a system in place that will directly deploy to the ZWave binding repository on GitHub so maintainers can easily deploy updates from the database into the binding. This eliminates the need for me to manually do the binding update which typically requires me to be at home to copy the files across. Hopefully this will make it easier to update the binding.
So, the new site is here. If you want to have a play, please feel free to register - you will automatically get editing rights, and you can edit whatever you like. The database contains the data from the live database from a week or two ago, and any changes will be removed, and the “real” database copied over when we go live, so don’t worry about breaking anything at the moment. Note that I’ve not copied over all the manuals and images yet, so these links will fail.
If you find any errors with how things work, then please open an issue on GitHub or discuss here. I plan to release parts of the site on GitHub once we’re in reasonable shape so that users can propose updates to the exporters to fix issues etc - on the old site these were poorly written and hacked together (by me 
) - @Bruce_Osborne spent quite some time tidying my poor PHP into something that we can publish in case the community needs to make updates (thanks Bruce 
) .
Special thanks to @Bruce_Osborne and @Sihui for their help with this and also @5iver and @mhilbush for testing so far, and and the time put into maintaining the ZWave database for all users of the ZWave binding.
