Now that we have some idea of what the disparate elements of the Intranet should be, at least on the most basic level, planning how it all fits together can begin - bearing in mind, of course, we still don’t have anything but a general “feeling” of what the actual requirements will be! With Joomla! at the heart though, this shouldn’t be too much of an issue. Its extensible, modular architecture means that should our oh-so-fickle business change their minds, we can be prepared.
The core functionality (the CMS bit) will be provided by Joomla! 1.5.6 with the JCE editor plugin. We’ve yet to tackle the thorny issue of the content structure and user permissions, but there are plenty of interesting open source solutions that should plug right in to enable this (although why J! doesn’t do much of this out of the box is mind-boggling).
The ever excellent WordPress 2.6.1 will provide our blogging features, PHPBB3 (3.0.1) a definite winner for the corporate communication/message board with PHPChat rounding off the community side of things.
Stringing all of this together we’ll be writing a bunch of our own bridges (which I think I mentioned before), but I also came across some very nice tools from the guys at RocketWerx.
Right now it seems like a vast mountain of work we need to get through, but over the next few weeks my focus will be on two more important things in my life, here and here, while I take a break from my day job.
Posted on September 5th, 2008 by Shell
Filed under: Day Jobs, Intranet | No Comments »
Yesterday Google released their latest project, a new browser called Chrome. Based on the Open Source WebKit engine (as used in Safari and the iPhone browser) and parts of FireFox, it’s an interesting “take” on browsing. Google claim that the browser is “tab focused”, and have subsiquently placed the tab browsing UI elements in the browsers titlebar. It’s a little distracting at first, in my opinion, mostly because it breaks the usual UI guidelines. Secondly, its currently “Vista” branded, with Vista-like close/minimise buttons, even under Windows XP. You get used to it though, at least I did, and I’m rapidly falling for this browser. Partially because the new UI actually works well. It demonstrates clearly that not sticking to the letter of the law, so to speak, when it comes to traditional UI design can result in something that really offers a fresh, highly usable alternative. Tabs aren’t new, and sticking them in the titlebar is hardly a giant leap in UI design progress - but I like it.
The improvements aren’t just in the UI. The engineering below the pretty exterior is pretty special - a proper VM handling all the scripting, proper process separation (if a web site crashes a tab, that tab can be stopped without loosing the entire browser) resulting in lightening fast performance on script heavy sites. Even sites that are Flash heavy and previously dragged the likes of FireFox to the floor now sprint.
This is an early release, just a 0.2, but it’s a great start and will give FireFox a run for its money, and hopefully keep the folks at Microsoft working on IE8 honest.
Posted on September 4th, 2008 by Shell
Filed under: User Interface | No Comments »
Starting from scratch is always a daunting task; engineering large environments composed of disparate products is a headache, but at least if you are building all the products yourself you have the opportunity to define the interfaces that interconnect them. This is the downside with OpenSource; while there are brilliant projects that do CMS, Galleries, Message Boards or Blogging, the actual process of sticking them together is nightmarish. These projects, after all, are designed and developed by dedicated highly-focused techies - they are very, very good at what they do, but rarely seem to have an over-arching view of other projects. At least in my experience. Try integrate a product like PHPBB3 into Joomla! and you have to un-knot an overly complicated tangle of templates and bespoke plug-in mechanisms. They just do not want to talk to each other. Simple things like managing user sessions, in other words logging onto Joomla! also activates your PHPBB3 account and visa-versa, becomes a nasty mess of writing in-house bridges.
And then you have to consider extending the functionality of these products. One that hit me in the face this week was the lack of user-group control in Joomla! To me, I think this is a critical component of any CMS. You need to be able to control who sees what and when, and to define those “groups” of people. While Joomla! does have cursory usergroups, you cannot actually define your own. There are a few “hacks” our there and various extensions, but they don’t fill me with the confidence (yet) to say, “hey that’s what we need”.
So where is all of this leading: I actually thing sometimes it’d be a lot quicker, and easier, to write from scratch. You get exactly what was (y’know, the whole time/money/requirements juggling trick)
For our Intranet project, we have all of this to consider. Given the number of Open Source products involved, writing the bridges between them is going to be a real challenge. Extending their functionality is another equally daunting challenge. Making them all look the same, work seamlessly together and have that element of “User Experience” (for me this is critical) that makes the Intranet better than the mess we’re replacing - a project of this scale is difficult to grasp. Especially when, like me, you have little PHP experience.
Posted on August 28th, 2008 by Shell
Filed under: Intranet, Web design | No Comments »
Maybe something less than bitesized, we’re seriously considering bumping the magazine until April 2009. Why?
- More time to develop the publishing tools, although we’re not far from those being ready now.
- We want to revisit the look of the magazine. It doesn’t feel “right” yet.
- Content, content, content! We watch to launch with an archive bursting with information that our readers are interested in. Currently we have very little.
- …especially of the video content. We have some 10 hours of video to edit for the magazine, and thats very, very time-consuming.
- We watch to launch “in season”. October is a strange time of year; it’s no longer summer, and the popular Spring season is just around the corner in the following April.
- Commercial prospects. Okay may seem strange putting this at the end of the list, but this never was a commercial project. At the same time we’d like the magazine to pay for itself, which means we need to sit down and examine our business plan. Can we offer something that advertisers would like?
Posted on August 20th, 2008 by Shell
Filed under: BiteSizedJapan | No Comments »
We’re working around the clock on the magazine, and yesterday Sirin spent a few hours shooting some of the photos for the main content. Today I actually made some time to work up a pic. It’s nice to actually be doing some artwork rather than just coding!
By the way, don’t let the anime theme character fool you into thinking the magazine is going to be anime/manga focused, this is just part of the promo artwork. The magazine’s primary focus remains Japanese culture as a whole. You can find more details about the magazines progress and “goals” over at its own preview blog, www.japanesecultureblog.com.
Posted on August 18th, 2008 by Shell
Filed under: BiteSizedJapan, Photography, design | No Comments »
We’re having continuing issues with the iPhone 3G network here in Scotland and it’s starting to get really irritating. The network is periodically not available at all; the iPhone still works as a phone, but all if the Internet connectivity disappears - even Edge and regular GPRS.
The first time this happened (a week ago) O2 claimed there was nothing wrong. I spent two fun-filled hours on the phone to them trying to get it sorted, as they completely denied there was anything wrong with the network. Eventually when they told me to start swapping sims between phones, I gave up. Visiting an O2 shop on the way home the assistant told me without missing a beat “Oh yeah, the network has been down in Edinburgh all day”. O2s phone based customer service are pretty dire - they should at least try talking to their own shops once in a while.
Anyway last night I spoke to a very helpful, polite lady from their networks team when we lost connection yet again. She’s supposed to be calling back today with an update, but I notice this morning at least the Edge network is back so I can partially use the Internet services.
It’s funny though, after just a few short weeks how totally reliant I’ve become on the iPhone 3G. Sure I had a first gen iPhone since day one, but the net was to slow to be really useful on that. The iPhone 3G really changed everything. But as Kirsty asks here at the office, how would I cope if all this technology was to go away over night? Hah. Imagine the chaos…
Posted on August 18th, 2008 by Shell
Filed under: Apple, Hardware | No Comments »
I’m not particularly concerned about whether Joomla! can support our content, I’m currently investigating the infrastructure side of things.
This is a large scale project for us; while initially we’re just going to be supporting an Intranet for 2000 people, if this proves itself we’ll potential roll out Joomla! to the entire company (some 15,000 studio-based users). So as you can understand, the infrastructure side of things (especially scalability) is a big concern. Our current model of “
replicate everything from one server to lots of country specific mirrors” works, but it has flaws. Administration (content management) has to be performed against our central server or we enter a multi-directional replication nightmare. Data replication of large files can take time, so we have instances where say a file ref exists in the database, but the physical file is still stuck in a pipe somewhere waiting for replication.
One example of multi-site complication: We’ve not had to worry about usage stats before, but now we do; Obviously each Joomla! mirrored server will “want” to collate stats “locally” (each server has an MySQL instance), but then these would get zapped by the replication. We can’t simply “point” each Joomla! install to use the UK database as some of our remote sites are… well kinda remote, with rather unreliable narrow-ish network connections. There are lots of issues like this!
Oh, and we have around 6 months to deliver 
Fun project, eh? We’ve not got a start date yet, so this is all pre-project planning, but I suspect we have a lot of work on our hands. Today we got initial sign off of our proposal, so soon our service management people will start to ask difficult questions :s
Posted on August 13th, 2008 by Shell
Filed under: Intranet, Technology | No Comments »
We potentially have a very large Joomla! project on our hands, and I’m trying to figure out whether or not it’s actually capable.
We have a large, rapidly expanding Intranet, currently containing some 2000 pages. We have over 1500 users. Our intranet must contain the following elements:
- Gallery (eg; Gallery2)
- Wiki (eg; MediaWIKI)
- Chat (eg; PHPChat)
- Message Board (eg; PHPBB)
- Customisable homepage (eg; BBC homepage)
- User Directory, with User Groups, Biographies, user-to-user messaging (eg; ?? can’t find a solution for this yet, maybe we can extend Joomla!)
In theory, we want Joomla! to string all of this together. However there are a few critical elements which I’m still trying to figure out if Joomla! can provide (either directly, or via extensions):
- We have multiple physical locations. Our Intranet is distributed over 4 countries, each country having its own “mirror” server, with the central server being UK based. Our current Intranet *only* allows Administration via the UK intranet, and database content changes are automatically replicated out from that server to the remaining server. This is to avoid content conflicts. Is this something achievable under Joomla!? Or is there some other mechanism that could be used.
- We need to place a rather sophisticated homepage on our CMS solution. Basically we want to replicate much of the functionality of the BBC homepage; it needs to be user-customisable, different “groups” of users will have different default sets of content. There will be several feeds from different areas of the Intranet, specifically recent posts from the Forums, latest users from the user directory etc.
- We need an ultra-simple admin tool; a simplified version of the current Joomla! content tools. We have a real mix of user skills, and potentially anyone could be updating content. However this leads onto:
- Publishing control - all documents and pages need to be vetted before being published by our Intranet Editor (we have a person hired to do this)
- Document management & version control…
So, not much to ask then…!
Posted on August 12th, 2008 by Shell
Filed under: Intranet, Software | No Comments »
With a little work, anyone can put together a magazine design that works. Getting it online may be a technically complicated, but then you realise you have to actually provide a way of entering content into the magazine. After all, you don’t want to have to draw every issue in Illustrator, right?
The past few weeks have been more focused on the admin tools (the Editor) which will allow articles, bites and other content to be created and managed seamlessly.
We took WordPress’s simple interface and re-wrote much of it in ASP to better suite our requirements - adding the ability to manage the content of the “front page”, cover art, the way categories and content tagging works, as well as countless other requirements in the pipeline.
We’re not far off actually being able to generate content for the magazine, which is really good news as time is so very short!
As well as being modelled on WordPress, it has been carefully designed to be “low key”, with very little colour and not much in the way of graphics. The real visual creativity is being saved for the magazine itself!
The tool now duplicates most of the WordPress functionality we wanted, so hopefully we can adapt it and release it as an OpenSource ASP blogging tool after the magazine launches.
Posted on August 6th, 2008 by Shell
Filed under: BiteSizedJapan, Web design | No Comments »
Adobe Creative Suit 4 (CS4) introduces this new concept of “app bars” and chromeless windows - the chrome being the graphical frame and title bars of windows on your desktop. It allows for much better screen use, but at the same time “breaks” some of the standards you expect in both the Windows and OS X desktop environments.
I’ve been using DreamWeaver CS4 for around a month, and I actually love the new App bar (the top of the
new chrome); it provides uncluttered access to useful commands. But, at the same time maybe it takes up too much screen space? Especially on the Mac, where we already have the immovable bar across the top of the screen, to then add the app bar… that’s a lot of space killed. And if you spend a lot of time switching between the desktop and application, it could become a pain.
I’m undecided.
Posted on July 31st, 2008 by Shell
Filed under: Adobe, PhotoShop, Software | No Comments »
Now that we have some idea of what the disparate elements of the Intranet should be, at least on the most basic level, planning how it all fits together can begin - bearing in mind, of course, we still don’t have anything but a general “feeling” of what the actual requirements will be! With Joomla! at the heart though, this shouldn’t be too much of an issue. Its extensible, modular architecture means that should our oh-so-fickle business change their minds, we can be prepared.
