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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Yesterday I mentioned that I had been hard at work with a bunch of things relating to the future of Plain Black and WebGUI. Well I'd like to share one more of them with you today.
About six months ago we made a decision internally that we should start building sites that can showcase various aspects of WebGUI's prowess. These are sort of side-businesses that can benefit Plain Black perhaps financially, but also can show off the power and flexibility of some of WebGUI's features. Years ago we did this with CMS Matrix, and today that site has become one of the most popular places on the internet to research products like WebGUI. We didn't know it at the time, but we had also created a means by which we could show off one of WebGUI's cool features: the Matrix.
With CMS Matrix as our inspiration, we decided we should investigate building other sites that could be useful to the public, and also would showcase WebGUI's impressive feature set. As we started brainstorming we quickly realized there would be another benefit: we would get to see some of the real world problems that our users may encounter, first-hand, and we'd be able to do something about it.
We came up with an impressive list of ideas; far more than we could ever implement. The first one we decided to build was TheGameCrafter.com. Through this site people can create board games and card games to share with friends and family, or to sell for a profit. They upload the files, and the staff assigned to The Game Crafter will print off copies and ship them out as needed. Obviously the print world isn't our specialty, so TGC has it's own staff for that; Plain Black just created the software that runs the site: WebGUI with some custom assets.
From a WebGUI perspective this site is an interesting showcase of what WebGUI can do. We're using the stock product and shelf assets, and then we created custom assets for game boards and game decks. We noticed right away that there should be a way to add a product to your cart from the shelf, so that feature was added to WebGUI 7.7, but we were able to use most of the shop's functionality unchanged.
Too late for WebGUI 7.7 we decided we were going to need a few more features to really make this site cool, so those features will be added to the next version of WebGUI. The first of these features is a UPS shipping plugin. With it you can tie in to UPS' online shipping rate calculations, and get real-time pricing for shipping via UPS Ground, Next Day, Second Day, and the list goes on. The second feature is vendor payments. This works a little like consignment in a traditional store setting. You can sell other vendor's goods in your online store, and then the system automatically figures out what payments need to be made to the vendors, and sends them out via PayPal.
As you can see building out this site has not only given us a great site we can point people to as an example of what WebGUI Shop is capable of, it has also brought improvement to the Shop that you can use on your own sites.
What feature should we show off on one of these showcase sites next? It's too soon to say what the future holds. As you can imagine we're already very busy with our client projects and with putting out WebGUI releases (we release twice a week!). Due to that, it's likely we'll only be able to do one of these showcase sites once a year, so we'll have to pick carefully. Maybe we should do a convention registration service with the Event Manager; or perhaps the internet needs a news site about a particular topic that can use the Story Manager; or maybe SurveyMonkey could use some competition. Who knows?
Maybe, just maybe, our next showcase site will come from you, our users! Maybe we'll be able to say, "Want to see a really great use of the calendar/gallery/map asset? Check out site X, by company Y!" If you've got one of those sites, make sure it's listed in WebGUI Sightings. There are already a lot of really awesome sites in there that we point people to daily to see the power of WebGUI.
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