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.
Though 2009 has only just begun, Plain Black has been preparing for the 2009 WebGUI Users Conference since before WUC 2008 happened. Now it's time to get the community involved.
We listened to the survey's that we pulled in from the last WUC and have decided on a 3 day / 3 track format which includes workshops inline with the conference, rather than having the workshops on separate days. The three tracks are beginner, intermediate, and advanced. The beginner track should cover only topics related to the WebGUI user interface, the content publishing process, or community related items; and in general should not require any prerequisite knowledge other than basic computer skills. The intermediate track covers building workflows, templating, HTML, CSS, minor administration tasks, advanced assets, or other items that have some prerequisite knowledge. The advanced track is all about the nitty gritty details of programming, administration, security, automation and other hard core topics. The conference is scheduled to be held at the Concourse Hotel in Madison, WI on September 9th through the 11th (Wednesday - Friday).
We can quite easily fill the whole conference with just our own ideas and staff, but the conference is more interesting when we have more presenters and their own topics. So we'd like to invite you to join us. Come speak. Talk about an area that interests you, or something you've worked on. No topic is off-limits as long as it has something to do with WebGUI or the community.
If you would like to speak at this year's conference we would love to have you. Submit your proposals by February 15, 2009. And as an added incentive, presenters get discounted tickets and other goodies that regular attendees don't.
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This is likely my last blog post for the year, but hardly the last bit of work I need to accomplish. But before I scurry off to finish the work before me, I wanted to take a moment to reflect on 2008. Both we as a company and a community have accomplished a lot this year. We introduced a number of new books, released WebGUI 7.5, saw hundreds of new faces spring up in the community (including several new WebGUI-related businesses), had a successful conference, met with thousands of new potential users through all our trade shows and speaking engagements, and completed major development on WebGUI 7.6.
Though the economy looks bleak I'm and both hopeful and optimistic for 2009 to be our best year ever. To kick off the year we'll have WebGUI 7.6 coming out with a few surprises I can't wait to share with you. Also at the start we'll be introducing Plain Black's new hosting automation system to the world. We have many important updates to our books planned and in development. We'll see the introduction of WRE 1.0. We'll be presenting at a lot of trade shows and conferences again to get the word out about WebGUI. And finally we'll see WebGUI 7.7. And all of that will be happening in the first half of the year! Then we'll finish out the year strong with our best WUC ever, and start development on WebGUI 8.0.
The future of WebGUI has never looked brighter. I can't wait to share it with all of you.
In whatever type of end of year holidays that you partake, I wish you well, and hope to see you healthy, happy, and invigorated in the new year.
PS.
Just a reminder that Plain Black is closed from December 24th through January 4th. A skeleton crew will be on call to handle emergencies, but all other inquiries will wait until January 5th.
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The last major new feature I haven't covered in the forthcoming 7.6 release is the rewrite of the Matrix asset. The new matrix is much easier to use and is faster.
Searching updates the compare list in real time to show you what effect your selection had on the list of products to compare. In addition, you can sort the compare list by score, most clicks, most compares, most views, or even ordered by the date each listing was last updated. These sorts also happen in real time.
Both when in the detailed view and the comparison view you can select which features are important to you and hide the rest. These selections remain with you as you browse so you don't have to select over and over again.
You can now dynamically add or remove items from the comparison while looking at the comparison.
Each product is now allowed a list of screen shots, and the screen shots will be displayed using the ukplayer (flash photo player introduced in 7.5 by United Knowledge).
We're in process of retemplating the Matrix now to make it pretty, but in the mean time you can check it out on the beta server.
We have several clients who earn their entire living with the matrix, and many more who use the matrix to do analysis of their competitors on their intranet. While the old matrix took quite a bit of setup, we hope this new version of the matrix will make it easy enough to be adopted by more users.
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WebGUI 7.6 has a new way to display grids of information, it's called Data Table. You decide how many rows and columns it has, what the column headings are, and then go to town adding in your data.
From there you can either choose a template that will build a javascript-based dynamic table with full sorting capabilities; Or you can choose to have it output a flat HTML based table. This table is much more powerful and less error prone than the table that you can build using the rich editor. In fact, that's part of the reason we built this one, the one in the rich editor causes more pain than it's worth.
As always, you can test out the new features on beta.webgui.org. The usual caveats apply, this is a beta, so treat it as such. Report bugs if you find them.
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Starting in WebGUI 7.6 you now have more options than ever for committing your version tags.
There's "commit automatically", which we've had for a while now. There's also "multiple version tags per user", which is the way it's always been done.
But now you also have "one site-wide version tag", which means that all committers are always using the same version tag. This is helpful on smaller sites where you want to use versioning, but don't want to be confused by simultaneous open versions. As soon as someone makes an edit they're automatically attached to the one version tag.
And there's also "single version tag per user", which is just like it sounds, and each user gets his own version tag. Again, as soon as each user makes an edit they're automatically attached to this version tag. This is useful on larger sites where you have lots of users that you don't want trampling on each other, but where you also don't want your users to have to "manage" multiple version tags.
Finally, there's one more option. Each user has a user profile preference to override all four of these options on a per user basis. So if most of your site needs "commit automatically", but you are a power user and want to make use of version tags, you get the best of both worlds.
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In WebGUI 7.6 the Survey asset has been entirely rewritten from the ground up. Longtime users of WebGUI will probably note that the old survey was powerful, but tedious to build surveys due to all the page refreshing that was required. The new survey makes heavy use of javascript and ajax in it's builder. This allows you to build amazingly complex surveys without a single page refresh. It feels like you're working in a native desktop application.
The new survey has all the old favorite features like quiz mode and survey branching, but it brings dozens of new features with it as well. For example, there are lots of new scales like certainty (certain, unsure), education (elementary, doctoral), ideology (liberal, conservative). You can also now do multiple choice answers.
There are now terminators, so you can stop the survey upon a given question. This allows for help desk like functionality leading the user through a bunch of questions until you're able to resolve their problem.
Branching has been expanded to allow a branch not only to a specific question, but to a specific section. You can also use the answer to a previous question in the text of a follow up question.
I've only scratched the surface of what the new Survey asset is capable of, but trust me, if you're in to surveys, this will blow your mind. This version of the survey now brings our feature set at least in line with, if not surpassing most commercial survey tools on the market today. Yes, it's even more feature rich and easier to use than SurveyMonkey.
We're still working on kicking out all the bugs, and we have a bit more templating work to do, but if you're interested, you can kick the tires of the new Survey on the beta server.
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WebGUI 7.6 introduces a new way to manage your account information. The new Account Manager is a tabbed interface that allows you to update your username/password, your profile settings, view your purchase history in the shop, friends, inbox, and more. In addition, it modifies how other people view your information when they click on your name through out the site like from a collaboration system.
The new system is pluggable, which means that developers and add new functionality to the account manager to support their custom apps, or to subclass existing functionality to enhance it for a specific site. System administrators can turn off components that aren't appropriate for their particular site. And users have a much prettier and easier to navigate system to manage and view their information.
It still needs some pretty templates to be applied to it, but in the mean time you can check it out in the latest beta release either on plainblack.com or on a beta demo site.
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If you run a brick and mortar shop, or you run cash registers at a trade show, concert, or other on-site event, you'll be glad to know that WebGUI 7.6 has two new features to help you out.
First, there is now a group attached to the shop called "Cashiers". You can use any group you want, but it defaults to Admins. These users have an extra field in the cart. They're able to type in the email address of a user, and then when they check out, the sale is registered to that user, rather than the cashier. The cashier is also noted in the transaction history so you can tally how many sales were made by a cashier if you want. Eventually we may add some reports for that too. If the user is not already in the system, an account will be automatically created for them. And any privileges that result from the transaction will automatically be assigned to the user's account rather than the cashier's account.
Second, there is now a default address in each user's address book. This will be useful to repeat customers that visit your site, but it's more useful to cashiers. Cashiers can set the address to the store that they are working at, and then when it comes time to check out, their address is automatically populated for shipping/tax calculation purposes. This address is also self populated for cash transactions so that no addresses need to be filled out in the case of a cash transaction. Then the only address that ever has to be filled out is in the case of a credit card transaction.
These two new features should make it much easier to run a local shop using your WebGUI site.
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Tomorrow is RFE day #3, the final RFE day of the 7.6 dev cycle. Please join us in IRC to work on RFEs and make WebGUI 7.6 as the most feature rich release ever.
The Plain Black staff will be working on some of the bigger RFE's that have made it to the front page of the RFE list. Things that take longer than a couple hours to accomplish. For this reason we expect that we won't be closing many RFE's tomorrow. However, the RFE's that we do close should be quite substantial.
As always you can help by programming, documenting, designing, or even just looking through the RFE list to close out duplicates, and to close out RFE's that have already been implemented and just not closed. As you can see, there are lots of ways to help. You don't have to be a programmer to add a feature to WebGUI.
NOTE: Due to the RFE day tomorrow, there will be no 7.6.4 release until next week.
Please join us.
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Since we've introduced the new line of WebGUI books they've been amazingly popular. We've been selling more and more every quarter, and we're also always putting effort into improving them. We've been absolutely amazed at how well you (our users) have received them. Today I have both good and bad news about WebGUI Books.
The only real complaint we've ever received about our books is that they are more expensive than people were expecting. In an effort to make our books more competitive with the prices you might pay for books from a traditional printer like O'Reilly we have decided to lower the cost of our books to $60 for the black and white editions. I hope that this change in price helps to alleviate those concerns. That's the good news.
Unfortunately the bad news is that our book printer has raised their prices dramatically on color printing. Therefore we can not offer the discount on the color versions. We never made much money on the color versions because they're so expensive to print, but we felt that it was important to offer the color editions because we live in a world of rich and vibrant color. Unfortunately the price hike is so large that we went from not making much to making almost nothing on the books, and we have to recoup the effort we put in to writing them. So as of today we're raising the price of our color books to $120 per copy.
We look forward to bringing you updated editions of our books in 2009, and we hope the price drop we just made can help you out in these rough economic times.
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