WUC 2008 Wrap Up

The 2008 WebGUI Users Conference in my opinion was the best one we've ever done. We had 37 sessions and attendees from four continents. Things ran quite smoothly, and we had some very interesting topics.

That said, we've gotten lots of great feedback on how we could make the 2009 conference even better.

This year we had a new format. We did two days of three tracks (beginner, intermediate, and advanced). Almost everyone that replied in the survey liked the three way split, but they wished that the conference was longer. They missed the three day conference we've done in the past. In addition, for some reason many people either didn't know or didn't think about the workshops that we did before the conference, because about 20% of the surveys were wondering why we didn't cover topic X. But topic X was covered at the workshops, so we thought we shouldn't cover the same material twice.

In an effort to remedy those things we're going to make another change next year. We're getting rid of the workshops and merging them into the conference. We'll then have three days of three tracks each day. And instead of just having just lectures in the conference, we'll also do a lot of hands-on stuff right in the conference. That's going to be more than 50 hours of training available to attendees.

Unfortunately the cost of putting on the conference has gone up significantly over the past five years. We never make money on the conference, but this year even though we had a record attendance, we still lost a bunch of money on it due to increased prices of food, facilities, travel, swag, shipping, and more (and that doesn't include the human cost of writing speeches and organizing the event). So next year we're going to have to raise the rate of the conference by $100. The early bird price will be $600 and the standard rate will be $700. But the news isn't all bad. For your extra $100 you'll be getting an extra 20 hours of sessions to choose from. It seems like a fair trade to me.

Another big area for improvement is after hours events. It seems a number of you would like Plain Black to arrange after hours gatherings, like pub time, restaurant meet ups, etc. For the past few years we've told you what's going on after the WUC each night, but we haven't actually made arrangements for you to go do those things. Next year, we'll make reservations in advance for several after hours activities, so you'll know where everyone will be if you want to hang out, make some new friends/contacts, or just get some food with people you know from the conference.

A couple of you pointed out that some presenters had some problems with the quality of their presentations this year. The big example was that screen shots were often too small to read. While we have direct control over our own employees, we can't control the presentations that other people in the community give. However, next year we'll provide all presenters with a list of guidelines they should follow to make the experience better for you the audience. And we'll provide a review service for presenters that wish to get their presentations critiqued in advance by Plain Black.

Overall the biggest hiccup of the conference was the flakey wifi. It worked great for some, and not at all for others. One of the reasons that we use the hotel we use is that they have a pretty hefty (as far as hotels go) pipe (10 megabit full duplex) to the internet. And they have wifi repeaters on every floor in the hotel. Not to mention free wifi in all the guest rooms. We'll be working closely with the hotel over the coming year to make sure that the internet is up to our specifications. If they are unable to provide us with what we need, then we'll bring in our own internet pipe and wifi for the WUC.

The only other area of the survey that seemed to hit home with everyone was that half of you love the fact that the WUC is in Madison, and half of you want it somewhere else. Of those of you that want it somewhere else, nearly all of you want it at your home town (or close to it). The fact is that in order to do that we'd have to double the price of the tickets for the WUC, and then none of you would come. We'd have to fly to these cities to do a site visit, because we don't have people on the ground there. We'd have to fly all of our staff and equipment there (most of which live in and around Madison), which would cost more. And many cities around the country are more expensive than Madison is, especially the bigger ones. Madison is a central location, so people on the west coast, and east coast, and down south all have to travel about the same distance. And finally, if we moved it to *your* home town one year, and then somewhere else the next year, and so on, we'd still have just as many people wanting us to move it to their home town; so we therefore wouldn't really change anything from how it is now. 

Overall most of you also thought that this year's conference was the best you've attended. 94% of you gave a positive response that you would either definitely be back, or would probably be back in future years. I'd say that's a success no matter how you measure it.

If you're interested in taking a look, we've uploaded all the photos from the WUC to the gallery. If you have some photos you've taken, please feel free to add them to the gallery.

Also, if you have ideas on how we could make the WUC better, please feel free to reply here and let me know.

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And the winner is...

We did something a little different this year with Contributor of the Year (CotY). First, we split it into two awards, one for individuals and one for organizations. Second, we recognized the efforts of everyone, not just the winners.

This year's organizational winner contributed to the Windows WRE, posted wiki entries, fixed bugs, contributed patches for SQL Form, created many templates and other uploads for the community to download, and helped out in IRC and the forums. In general, they churned out a lot of work for the community. This organization is Knowmad Technologies, a small WebGUI integrator from North Carolina.

The individual CotY winner did some bug fixing, increased standards compliance, and occasionally hung out in IRC. But his big contribution is so big it's immeasurable; especially when you consider that until spring of 2008 no one in the community (myself included) had ever heard of Ernesto Hernandez-Novich. Ernesto's feat is that he single handedly got WebGUI listed in the next release of Debian. It may not sink in just how big that is, but it potentially opens up millions of new users to WebGUI and allows them to install it by typing nothing more than "apt-get install webgui".

Ernesto couldn't join us at the WUC, so he sent a little video expressing his thanks.

But the news doesn't end there. Ernesto edged out someone that's familiar to pretty much anybody who's been around the WebGUI community in the past few years. His name is Colin Kuskie (aka perlDreamer). Colin is a two time winner of CotY and was well on his way to winning it a third time until Ernesto edged him out. So to reward all the work he's put in over the years, we've decided to rename the individual contributor of the year award to the Colin Kuskie award. 

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New Roadmap Unveiled

At the WUC I unveiled the path for the remainder of WebGUI 7.x. Now I'd like to share that with those who weren't in attendance. These are the things that I think will be in 7.6 or 7.7. As usual, schedules and needs change, so don't anticipate a feature until it's there.

I spoke about the continued improvement to the WebGUI administrative interface as we get closer to WebGUI 8. The two main things will be to make the asset manager even faster by adding even more ajax calls, and enhancing the search to have even more options so you can search based upon who created an asset, or how big it is. We'll also be adding a new New Content menu, which has categories. That should make it easier to find your way through the New Content menu.

We'll also continue to improve the shop by adding Pay Pal and USPS support. We may even add a point of sale mode to the shop for in-person sales.

The gallery will get some image editing features (crop, rotate, resize, and maybe annotate). And we might even add a video plugin to the gallery.

Next we'll completely rewrite the Matrix and Survey assets, to bring them up to date with modern techniques and user expectations.

And finally we'll be building a new asset called Story Manager, which will make publishing static content and news oriented sites much easier in WebGUI.

You can read all about these changes, and see some screen mockups in the roadmap. And as always, I'll update the roadmap periodically through-out the year as things change.

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New Karma Policy

At the WUC I unveiled some new policies around karma, which created quite a bit of buzz, so i thought I should share those with you here.

First, now that we're doing only 2 major releases per year, the old karma RFE policy doesn't really work anymore. So instead of knocking off the top 1-5 RFEs per release we (Plain Black staff) will be having karma RFE days once per month, where we all work on closing as many RFE's from the list as possible. We'll announce these days on the community calendar so anyone in the community that wishes to join us in closing RFEs can do so.

In addition, you may now gift your karma to other users in the community. This can be a nice way to say "thank you" to someone that has helped you out.

And finally, you may now spend your karma on physical goods such as Gooey Dolls, T-Shirts, and WUC tickets. 100 Karma == $1. That makes karma just a little more valuable. No you won't be able to buy stuff in the Bazaar or pay for recurring subscriptions using karma. For the bazaar, we can't very well pay our vendors in karma. And for the recurring transactions, like hosting, you might run out of karma and then we'd shut down your site, and you wouldn't be a very happy camper.

I hope that these new additions to karma, will make the karma system even more useful and exciting to the community. It created quite a buzz at the WUC, and the WUC is usually a good indication of the community at large.

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JT for President

Even though I knew the Democratic National Convention was going on during the WUC this year, I had no idea that I would be nominated for President of the United States. But the Dutch team had a surprise for me.

But maybe I should have known better.

Not to be outdone, my American friends also had a surprise for me, which got the local channel 3 news team involved.

But the Dutch team had one final stroke to top off the entire event.

That's right. They even had JT Guevara t-shirts made.

All I can say is it's the craziest thing I've ever seen. Thanks much to all involved. I haven't laughed so hard in forever. And I accept your nomination.

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The WRE, Windows, and WebGUI. Oh My!

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WebGUI 8: Search

While WebGUI's internal search engine works great, it has become clear to me that we're going to need to replace it with something better.

One of the things I want to do with WebGUI 8 is switch WebGUI to use the InnoDB storage engine rather than MyISAM. This will allow us to have foreign keys, and database level transactions. However, if we make this switch, then the search engine will break, because we rely on MySQL FullTextSearch fields to do our search. And those field types are not allowed in InnoDB.

In addition, the current search isn't capable of stemming. That is, if I type in "jobs", it should search for "job" as well; or "mining" will search for "mine". There's no way to add that using the current search engine.

There are a couple other features I want to add, which can be added to the current search mechanism, but we might as well add them to the new search instead. They are spell check and plugins.

Spell check is a rather trivial thing to add. When you search it checks your search terms for spelling errors and then offers you an alternative search. So if you search for "collabration systm" it could say "Did you mean collaboration system?".

The second thing I want to add are query filter plugins. These plugins would allow you to attach your own functionality to WebGUI search. So if the pattern matched number operator number (like 9*9) and if there were a plugin that could handle math, that plugin would respond with 81 rather than a search result. That may not seem terribly useful, but consider these ideas. You could have a plugin that would search google, so the user could type "google:cars" and it would search google for
"cars" and return the results inside your site design. Let's say you were a parts dealer, you could also have a search plugin that looked for part number patterns and returned links to those specific parts in your inventory database. So if the search saw "LNB9065" it could directly link to the "Champion Spark Plug" in your product catalog.

Replacing search is a somewhat big todo item along with the other stuff we have planned, but there may be some small API changes when we do it, so WebGUI 8 is the perfect place to make that happen.

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A Greener WUC

This year the WUC is greener than ever. A little while ago I said I wanted Plain Black to become a bit greener. I'm happy to report that the WebGUI Users Conference will be greener than ever before.

This year our business cards and conference programs are printed on recycled paper. Our conference SWAG bags are made from recycled plastic, and are 100% recyclable again. In fact, they are made out of old water bottles, polyethylene terephthalate, which is the easiest plastic to recycle. And our new conference t-shirts are made from 100% sustainably grown organic cotton, which itself is recyclable.

We still have a long way to go, but this is a step in the right direction.

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Another Reason WebGUI is Perl

One of the more common questions we get is "Why did you write WebGUI in Perl?" I've covered this before, but I just read another interesting article on the same subject and I couldn't agree more.

This sums it up nicely:

The important thing about Perl is that we have a culture of writing good libraries. No Perl programmer would write a few lines of code, post it to a blog, and call it a "library". Everyone feels obligated to create a CPAN distribution, with documentation (sometimes a bit on the minimal side, but not everyone is a writer), a test suite, a Makefile, etc. I'm not sure why, but this always happens. I think it's because there is a strong convention, and tools that make following the convention easy.

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OSCON was a Success

I know I've been lazy about making Black Blog posts this month. Sorry about that, but I've been traveling quite a bit. Most recently I just got back from OSCON.

We had a booth at the OSCON exhibit hall for the first time this year. As you'll see by some of the photos I've attached to this post, we had a good turn out of people interested in WebGUI. We spoke with over 1000 people at the show. How do I know? We went with 1500 Meet WebGUI brochures and 1100 Gooey dolls.  We came back with 300 Meet WebGUI brochures and no Gooey dolls!

While we were setting up the booth, Colin Kuskie (two time contributor of the year) and his wife Kathy, and their two boys Tim and Peter, all stopped by. So we took that opportunity to find out if 1100 Gooey dolls could bury two kids. Indeed they can! See the attached pictures to see what that looks like. True to form, Colin stuck around for most of the two days we were exhibiting to help us spread the word about WebGUI.

Even with four of us at the booth talking about WebGUI there were times we couldn't keep up. I remember one specific occasion where I was giving a demo to two guys (one on either side of me). And I looked back to make sure they were still with me and saw a crowd of about 15 people that had gathered around to hear the demo. At that point I wished I had a microphone. We were so busy in fact that the people exhibiting around us said they were getting a halo effect from our booth (more people talking to them because we had such a draw).

While there Tavis met with Red Hat and Canonical about getting WebGUI into RHEL, Fedora, and Ubuntu. And I met with some people who have some interesting products that might make good alliances for the WebGUI community. A couple of companies who make open source media systems. And I also spoke to David Wheeler of Bricolage fame. He's interested in building a connector between WebGUI and Bricolage, so WebGUI can handle all the dynamic stuff that a user might need, and Bricolage can handle the static publishing stuff for a site that has a lot of static content (like news and magazine sites).

All in all, I'd say the trip was successful. Our primary goal is just to get more people to know about WebGUI, and so we can add at least another 1000 people to that list. Not to mention all the people they may go and tell.

With that trip we only have two more conferences left for the year. The first being the WebGUI Users Conference. And the last is the Pittsburgh Perl Workshop, where I'll be giving a free WebGUI programming workshop.

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