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 just got an email from Monty (the creator of MySQL) asking me if I'd help get people involved in a petition to keep MySQL open source. So here I am asking you to get involved. You can do this quite easily by simply going over to http://www.helpmysql.org and signing the petition.
Thanks for your help, and have a happy new year.
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As you may have noticed, webgui.org went through a major overhaul at the beginning of this week. We still have some changes to complete, mainly to the features section, but is live, so I thought I should take a moment to let you all know about it in case you haven't been there in a while.
The new site focuses on new users coming in to learn about what WebGUI is and how they can benefit from it. That's why the home page and features and sightings pages have all been made prominent.
We've restructured the rest of the old site into a new "Community" section. This brings together all the uses of the existing site into one place that's easy to browse through. We've also made the community section stretchy so it can fit the wide content posted to the forums, RFEs, and bugs.
We've roughed out a partners section to show off all the companies that both provide services around WebGUI, and are active in the community. More content will be added there in the coming weeks as the partners design what they want the section to look like, and what information should be displayed about each.
We've worked hard to give you a site that's more usable, and to attract the thousands of new potential users that come to the site each month. Enjoy.
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We've arranged some new bug fix and RFE days in the next couple of days. Please get involved and help make WebGUI better.
For those of you interested in seeing WebGUI 7.7 more stable, help us out on the community-wide bug fix day October 26. Even if you're not a programmer, you can help us out by trying to reproduce bugs, and commenting on them as to how to reproduce them, or whether they are reproducible at all. In addition, if you have HTML/CSS skills, there are some template bugs that could use your attention.
We'll also be working on adding karma voted RFE's on October 20th. Please join us and let's see if we can knock off several dozen of the community's top wished for features.
As usual we'll be coordinating things through the IRC channel, and many members of the Plain Black staff will be putting their effort behind these days. And all of the work we get done will go into the releases that come out the very next day after each of these community days. So block off your calendar, and come help us make WebGUI better. Get involved!
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At the beginning of the year we put out WebGUI 7.6, which had web service API's built in to publish photos directly to WebGUI's Photo Gallery. Since then we have put out iPhoto and iPhone plugins to upload photos directly from your Mac or your iPhone to the gallery. Until now Windows users have been left in the dark, but no more.
We've just uploaded the Google Picasa Plugin for Windows. Now Windows users can upload entire albums of photos to WebGUI in just a couple of clicks. The price is the same as the iPhoto plugin, which is just $10. Get your copy today.
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The new WebGUI roadmap is up. It shows off the new WebGUI admin interface, and discusses the major API changes for WebGUI 8. It also sets up the timeline for releases over the next 18 months. Enjoy.
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WebGUI 8 is going to be the fastest version of WebGUI ever released. We're only a few days into the development of WebGUI 8 (way more ahead of us than behind us), and already we've seen some massive improvements.
The new caching system in WebGUI 8 gives us a measurable performance increase of 400%. That means that the raw speed of the new cache layer is 400% faster than the raw speed of the old cache. But there are other intangibles, like the fact that the cache is no longer database backed. This means that all those queries that were going to the database aren't anymore, which frees up more disk IO and database query cache to perform other queries more quickly.
In addition, hot sessions will reduce on average, two reads from the database and one write to the database on every page view. And this is increased even more if you are serving CSS and javascript out of snippets, or privilege protected images, etc.
After implementing just the above two changes WebGUI already feels quite a bit snappier. And we've only just begun. Right now we're working on replacing WebGUI's underlying database with a whole new one, which by all indications is about 300% faster under load than the current database.
As you can see just the basic stuff we've started on is going to make WebGUI 8 much faster than all it's predecessors, but that's not even close to all we're doing. Those 3 things only represent 2 line items out of 28 in the WebGUI 8 todo list. WebGUI's future has never looked so bright.
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At the WUC I let everyone know some of the details about what's coming with WebGUI 8. Today, I posted the todo list for WebGUI 8 to the developers mailing list.
The todo list is a scope document to let you know what we're planning for WebGUI 8, and what we're not planning. If it's not on the list, then it isn't planned for WebGUI 8. However, that doesn't mean it's not planned. It might be for WebGUI 7.8, 7.9, or 8.1, 8.2, etc. For this todo list, we limited ourselves to things that need to break API's in order to function.
I'd like it very much if you, our community, would read over the todo list and provide feedback. Individual specifications of each feature will be coming in the next few weeks. This is just a starting point for the discussion.
That's all for now, stay tuned for more exciting WebGUI 8 news.
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Since we're very close to the WUC now, I thought it was about time that I shared the list of nominees for the Contributor of the Year (CotY) and Colin Kuskie Award (CKA) for community excellence.
Just as a reminder the CKA is given out usually for volunteerism, and overall dedication to the WebGUI community. It is more based upon community spirit than raw contributions. Whereas CotY is based upon raw contributions and is therefore usually only given out to organizations rather than individuals.
The nominees for CKA are as follows:
Bernd Kalbfuß-Zimmermann & Klaus Hertle for their tireless effort at spreading WebGUI in the German speaking world and the massive effort they put behind the German translation.
Ernesto Hernandez-Novich for his continued effort on getting WebGUI into the Debian GNU/Linux distribution. Ernesto won CKA last year and his efforts are no less staggering this year.
Wes Morgan for his countless patches to both WebGUI and the WRE.
Lauralyn Ninow for her tireless bug reports and community involvement through forums and IRC. No one submits more bug reports than she does, and knowing that there is a bug is half the battle.
Graham Knop for his WebGUI Dev (wgd). Technically Graham isn't eligible for this award because he works for Plain Black, but he build this utility mostly on his free time, and it is now used by all the core developers and contributors. For that he deserves at least an honorable mention even though he can't actually receive the award.
The Template Working Group for the zenification of the WebGUI template system. The Template Working Group is made up of volunteers from several different organizations in the WebGUI community, and they've put in hundreds of hours making the templates much more modifiable via CSS in 7.7, and their efforts continue.
The nominees for CotY are:
perlDreamer Consulting for tireless advocacy and community help in IRC, not to mention additional tests, bug fixes, and feature enhancements.
SDH Consulting Group for the dozens of contributions this year including, but not limited to File Pump, Survey enhancements, the Carousel asset, and Passive Analytics.
ProcoliX for being the most active member in the translation community, for lots of bug reports and RFEs, and for the massive amount of effort they put into the WRE.
Pluton for the pile of templates they've contributed to the Bazaar.
Oqapi for the vendor payments system in the shop, the ogone payment gateway, template working group, and other contributions.
United Knowledge for continued work on the UK Player and the leadership role they took in the Template Working group.
Knowmad Technologies for the active involvement in the wiki, bug reports, RFEs, template working group, and irc.
SwiftySite for sponsoring the WUC to allow us to offer tickets to the community for $100 less than we could ourselves, and backporting features that they created for themselves such as the version tag mode selection system.
As always, the winners will be announced at the WUC. See you there!
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The sixth WebGUI User's Conference is almost upon us. It seems like it has come up so fast.
Registrations have been coming in very quickly this past week and now there are only 12 seats left. So if you plan to make it, please register soon.
Those of you speaking: I hope you've put the final polish on your talks, as there are only 2 weeks left until you have to give them for real!
I also wanted to point out that several members of the community have scheduled a hackathon for the day before the WUC. Plain Black has paid for the room, and sponsored food and beverages for the hackathon. 18 people have already signed up to attend the event, so it should be both fun and productive. And NOTE, you do not need to be a developer. You could work on some new documentation for WebGUI, clean up the wiki, work on translations, hack some templates, or even work on a new set of icons for WebGUI 8.
Even in the miserable economy, it's good to see our community coming together once again. This is shaping up to be a great event. I can't wait to see you all.
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Right now we put out a new release twice a week. One is a beta, one is the stable with new bug fixes. We're going to move to a rotation of just putting out one release every Tuesday from now on. On one week it will be a beta, on another it will be a stable.
The big reason for the change is that we are releasing too fast for the big linux distributions like Debian. They have a 10 day waiting period for a release before putting it into their repository. But since we release every 7 days, there is a new version out before the waiting period expires. Therefore we are perpetually kept out of the loop.
Our current release process takes 2-3 hours of human time. Most of it is automated, but if a test fails then there is human time; And some of the sites we announce on don't have API's for publishing, so we have to post manually to them. Dropping to 1 release per week means we get those 2-3 hours back to put into more bug fixing, test writing, and other improvements.
There are a couple of down sides. For one you have to wait an extra week to get a bug fix if you don't want to manually patch your site. For another, we won't get as much marketing as we do now because we won't have as many release announcements. However, I think the benefits outweigh the detriments. I hope you agree.
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