Hi, I'm JT and these are my thoughts on community, content management, Plain Black, and WebGUI.
Hi, I'm JT and these are my thoughts on community, content management, Plain Black, and WebGUI.
I'm very pleased to announce that we've launched a new webgui.org site. This new site is now completely separate from plainblack.com, and has a completely new structure and look.
I'm sure there will still be many edits and tweaks we need to make over the coming weeks and even months, but this is a good start in the right direction. We still plan to make the front page a dashboard asset if you come to it as a registered user. And I'm sure you'll want to leave some feedback for us as to how we can make it even better. But over all, it's a vast improvement. Enjoy.
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One of the things that has bothered me personally (and I know a lot of you) is that WebGUI hasn't had a real solution for dealing with long running operations. For example, do you know what would happen if you cut/paste a page that contains a collaboration system with 100,000 posts in it? The answer is very bad things, but not anymore.
With the new version of WebGUI 7.7 beta coming out next week we've finally cracked that nut. Today we implemented a new progress bar system, that allows long running tasks to inform the user what it's doing so that the web server doesn't time out, and the user doesn't leave the page while it's working. I know it seems simple to do this, and ultimately the solution was simple. Unfortunately some of the simplest things aren't so simple until you do them for the first time.
I've attached a screenshot to this post so you can see what it will look like.
You'll see more and more of this used in WebGUI as time goes on, but initially you'll see it on the biggest problem areas: paste, edit branch, changing page rank. These areas all can affect huge branches of assets, so they had to be done right away. I hope when you upgrade to the next version of WebGUI you love this feature as much as I do.
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WebGUI was featured on the Today Show on NBC today. Well sort of.
There's a video clip from the Today Show here (at about 1 minute, 13 seconds in) that shows a site built in WebGUI, and it's referenced as part of President Obama's initiative to open a dialogue with Muslims around the world. The site it shows is America.gov, one of hundreds of sites that Plain Black helps build and maintain for the Federal government using WebGUI.
I know it's not really about WebGUI, but sometimes its cool to see something you had a hand in get this kind of media attention, even if it is only for 15 seconds.
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About two and a half years ago I came up with the idea to create a feature on WebGUI.org that profiled The People Behind WebGUI (PBWG). At the time I remember being concerned that we might run out of people to interview. We interview approximately one person per month, and then feature them on a banner on webgui.org. We just posted our 29th interview, and we don't seem to have any shortage of people left on the list that we want to interview.
As much as I like PBWG, I'm not sure it's enough to just recognize the people in the community for their contributions. Unfortunately I don't really have any other ideas, except one. If you talk to one of the PBWG on IRC, email, IM, the forums, etc. Be sure to give them a pat on the back. Remember that they are the reason WebGUI thrives. They deserve your praise.
If you happen to have some other ways we could show our appreciation for them, definitely post your feedback here. I'm all ears.
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In WebGUI 7.7 the shop got a huge list of improvements. There are so many that it's hard just to enumerate, so I'll let you try out a demo if you want to see them rather than taking screen shots of everything. Here's what's changed:
I'm sure there's a ton more that I'm forgetting, but as you can see there were some massive improvments to the shop in this release. If you're running a shop, or thinking about running one, WebGUI just got a whole lot better for your needs.
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If you're a Perl geek or you want to be, YAPC (Yet Another Perl Conference) is for you. Since WebGUI is written in the Perl programming language, I of course have a vested interest in seeing people further their Perl skills. And having attended several YAPC's in the past, I can tell you that there's no better place for you to go. And best of all, these Perl conferences are the cheapest conferences you'll ever go to of this calibur. They all cost way less than $200.
On related note, Plain Black peeps Graham and Doug will be in attendance at YAPC::NA 2009, in Pittsburg next month. And I'll be doing a WebGUI workshop and a speech at YAPC::EU 2009 in Lisbon, Portugal in August.
These conferences have great schedules lined up, and I'd encourage you to go.
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Next Wednesday (June 3) we're having another community-wide bug fix day. We hope you join us. While we have staff working on fixing bugs every day, our goal is to crush a lot of bugs in a single day through a co-ordinated event. WebGUI afterall, would be nothing without it's community.
Right now the goal is to eliminate every bug on the list, as we're in the stabilization phase for WebGUI 7.7. So we want to once and for all eliminate any remaining bugs in WebGUI 7.6, and get WebGUI 7.7 ready for mass consumption.
Even if you're not a programmer you can help. What you can do is go to the bug list, and try to replicate each of the bugs. If you can't replicate it, note that. If you can replicate it try to help the original bug poster by adding the details to the ticket that they left out. Like what are the steps you need to take to replicate the bug. What did you expect to happen that is no happening. If that data is already in the ticket, then simply reply that you can indeed reproduce the bug as described.
Those of use working on bug fixes will be in the IRC channel. So you can come hang out there if you have questions or want to just participate in the discussion.
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WebGUI 7.7 feature freeze just went into effect on Friday. In the two weeks leading up to the feature freeze there was a flurry of new features added. Over the next several blog posts I'll be discussing each of them. Today, I'm pleased to share with you the new Google Maps asset.
Attached to this post is a screen shot of what the new maps asset looks like, though that's not nearly as important as what it can do for you. Most CMS's that implement a Google Maps feature basically just make it so you can publish a map with maybe a single pushpin on the map, but not us. We go the extra mile.
Our asset allows you to set all the familiar options like how wide the map should be, what it's start focus point is, and how zoomed in it should be. And then it lets you add as many points of interest as you want to the map. Each point of interest has over a dozen fields you can attach to it, including a photo of the location. But we're still not done! We also let you set a group to add points to the map, which allows you to let your users put points of interest on the map. And that can even be tied to a workflow approval process so you can review the point of interest before it goes live on the site.
We think this new asset will help everyone from school districts who want to locate their schools, to manufacturers who want to point out their dealer stores, to open source projects (like WebGUI) who want to publish a map of where their users are around the globe! Where will you use it?
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Finally after many months of back and forth with Apple, our iPhone based photo upload utility has been approved in the iTunes app store. It's free to download and use.
This app integrates with the WebGUI Gallery, so you can publish photos directly from your iPhone to your WebGUI Gallery seamlessly. It works just like the iPhoto plugin we developed except that you can only upload one photo at a time, and this app is free.
Click here to download the app in iTunes today.
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A new feature has been added in 7.7.6-beta that will allow you to participate in a worldwide survey of WebGUI sites. The data will be used to determine what features are most used in WebGUI, and how WebGUI sites grow. This will be useful for developers to make WebGUI faster, easier to use, and all around better. But it may be useful to you as well, whether you want to know how your site stacks up against other users, or you want to see how many other sites are deployed on the same operating system as you.
This video shows you how easy it is to enable this new feature:
A summary of all the data collected will be published to webgui.org/stats.
I hope all of you will choose to particpate in this survey after you upgrade to WebGUI 7.7. For those of you concerned about privacy, don't worry, we've got you covered. None of the data sent to the central repository will contain anything identifiable about your site or you. It is all generic data like how many users you have, and how many assets you have, but no site name, company name, email address, or any other personal information is sent in the survey data.
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