WebGUI Network News, April 4^th edition

Welcome to the inaugural issue of WebGUI Network News. The goal of this newsletter is to collect information from around the world-wide WebGUI community to help keep us all in touch.

Future editions of this newsletter will have a better layout, graphics and yes, more news If you're aware of news that you think the community would be interested in, please submit it to colink@perldreamer.com.

Your editor and reporter,

Colin Kuskie

Translation News

With the development of WebGUI 7.7, lots of new internationalized labels are being added to WebGUI, and this is affecting the percent completion of many of the languages. Below you'll see a list of the top 5 translations.

Language

% Complete

It's exciting to see the work by the Polish, Spanish and German translators. Recently, although not in the top 5, there has been work by the Swedish and Russian translators. And, of course, we cannot forget the Dutch team's commitment to keeping their translation at 100%. Good job, to all of the translators!

While the developers work on making WebGUI more stable and useful to users, the translators make that code available to people all around the world in their native language. If you speak a foreign language well, please consider spending some time translating WebGUI.

New Blog Entries

Currently, we're tracking four blogs. If you know of other blogs with WebGUI related topics, please let us know.

The Black Blog, http://www.plainblack.com/tbb

JT Smith's blog about Plain Black and WebGUI and other topics

The Staff Blog, http://www.plainblack.com/pr/staff/blog

Blog entries from the Plain Black staff, covering topics from graphics design, WebGUI coding and telecommuting from home.

patspam.com, http://www.patspam.com

This is blog of Patrick Donelan, from SDH Consulting. Recently Patrick was named one of The People Behind WebGUI.

Colin's blog, http://perldreamer.com/blog

My blog, about WebGUI programming, my business, perlDreamer Consulting, and other things.

Four blog entries this week:

1. JT Smith announces that WebGUI 8 will be written in PHP.

2. Doug Bell follow up with a blog about how simple it is to template in PHP.

3. Patrick Donelan curses at console.log.

4. Colin Kuskie is chained and bound.

News Blurbs

Koen De Jonge joins the ranks of The People Behind WebGUI

This week, Koen De Jonge was added to the list of The People Behind WebGUI. This is a list of people from the community who distinguish themselves through their volunteer efforts to help WebGUI. Koen is the owner of Procolix, a Dutch hosting company. He spends a lot of time working on the WRE, and you can often find him in IRC helping people troubleshoot problems, or submitting RFEs to help make WebGUI better software.

Koen, thanks for all of your hard work. We all appreciate your efforts!

What's New in WebGUI?

Keywords with Autocomplete

A new Form plugin was added for keywords, that does autocompletion as you type them in. Keywords are available under the Metadata tab when editing most Assets, and also in several search forms. This is available in WebGUI 7.7. Look for this feature to be added to other form elements in 7.7, and WebGUI 8.

RSS, Atom and RDF Feed Asset Aspect

Asset aspects are small chunks of code you can add to an Asset to provide functions, without having to write that functionality yourself. This week, an Aspect was added for making RSS, Atom and RDF feeds for assets. In addition to making feeds, it will also automatically export the feed when the asset is exported. The Aspect was added to the Collaboration System, Gallery, Syndicated Content, Wiki and Newsletter assets. The new aspect is available in WebGUI 7.7

Remove Old Cart Workflow Activity for The Shop

You may not know this, but when a user adds items to their cart, and then never checks out, that the cart that is created is never cleaned up! This was reported as a bug, and this week that bug was closed. A new Workflow Activity, Remove Old Carts, was added to WebGUI's Daily Workflow to remove carts that are older than 48 hours are cleaned up and removed. The cart timeout is adjustable if you want it to be longer, or shorter.

Helping WebGUI

If you use WebGUI, you're well aware of how much time and money it has saved you. Below you'll find a number of small, easy ways you can give back to WebGUI and the community, to help make both better.

Community Tasks

1. Translate WebGUI.

2. Report Bugs. If you find a bug in WebGUI, please report it so we can fix it.

3. Promote WebGUI. Write a blog entry about WebGUI. Talk about it in your area in a local users's group, or the Chamber of Commerce, or whereever you are involved. Contact Tavis Parker at Plain Black to give him your WebGUI success story.

4. Wiki Maintenance. The wiki on webgui.org is community maintained. Consider fixing up an article that is out of date, or adding a new article about something you've learned.

Development Tasks

1. Fix a bug. The bug list is long, and growing. Take a crack at fixing a bug.

2. Write POD. Large sections of the WebGUI codebase do not have POD. Find a subroutine that needs it, and write some POD for it.

3. Write tests. WebGUI has a large test suite,but it only covers a fraction of the code. We need lots and lots more tests. See the wiki for how to get started.