Welcome to the third 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.  My planned two week release schedule skipped by two weeks.  Being really busy can do that to you.

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

Most translations, are continuing to slip as new RFEs are added to WebGUI 7.7.  Someone out there is doing a bunch of work on the German translation, and recently 2% was added to the French translation (ranked 7th at 33.9%).  Translators, your work is vital to the success of WebGUI since not everyone in the world speaks English (or Dutch).  Thanks for your hard work!

No More New Blog Entries

Patrick Donelan has released Planet WebGUI, which aggregates all of the blogs that we have been tracking.  Since it's such a great tool, we'll just talk about some of the more interesting blog postings throughout the newsletter.

News Blurbs

2009 WUC News

The 2009 WebGUI Users' Conference has been shortened to two days, and due to an awesome sponsorships by Plain Black and SwiftySite, the cost of the WUC is now $300 per person!  I've been to four WUC's so far, and I can tell you that there is no better venue for learning more about WebGUI and for meeting members of the worldwide WebGUI community.  Additionally, if you are a developer, designer, translator or documenter (or want to start any of those jobs for the community), please come to the 2009 WUC Hackathon.

Tabitha Zipperer is the newest Person Behind WebGUI

Tabita is one of the Plain Black designers, and a super nice lady.  Thank you for your commitment to making WebGUI look so good.   (We hacker types aren't always good at that.)

Plain Black visits Ad:Tech in San Francisco

Plain Black handed out several thousand Gooey dolls at Ad:Tech in San Francisco on April 21 and 22nd.  We're hoping for a report from them soon. 

What's New in WebGUI?

Story Manager added to WebGUI 7.7

Are you tired of trying to bend the Collaboration System to your will to make it serve news?  I am, and I've only made three WNN newsletters so far!  New in WebGUI 7.7.5 is the Story Manager, a collection of Assets designed to help you easily serve news from your site.   If you need additional incentive to go to the WUC, your editor will be giving a presentation about the Story Manager.

Shop Improvements

The Tax system has been revamped to make it pluggable.  The first plugin is a European VAT system.

You can now sell advertisements on your site with the Ad Sku.

A change to the Flat Rate shipping plugin and the Sku allow you to set that items must be shipped separately from one another.  This is handy when ordering fireworks and the means to light them at the same time.

Code Editor Now Disabled By Default

The Code Editor, which is the HTMLarea like form element for editing templates and extra head tags, has been limping along for a while.  An upgrade of the javascript was added, but it still didn't fix all of the problems that occurred on many browsers.  To handle this, the editor is now set to disabled by default via the toggle button just below it.  The editor shows a lot of promise, and we hope to see its problems fixed soon.

"Packed" Templates, JavaScript, CSS and Head Tags

Each asset can now serve any JavaScript, CSS and Head tags in a "minimized" form where all the non-essential whitespace can be stripped out.  Templates can also have all their extra whitespace shipped out, too.  What does this mean?  It means that you can still edit your templates, snippets, and head tags with indentation and white space, but have it automatically stripped out to decrease download size and time.

Another interesting feature is the ability to set Global Head Tags for any page served by WebGUI.  This is now available in the Settings screen of the Admin Console.

A Whole Lot of Other Stuff

It's been a month since the last WNN was published.  Did you think we were just sitting there twiddling our thumbs?  I'll try to cover more of these in the next edition to keep you caught up.

New Versions Released

The currrent versions of WebGUI are 7.7.6 and 7.6.22.  WebGUI 7.7 is estimated to go into feature freeze on May 15th.

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. Make new themes for users.  You can find instructions on how to do this in the wiki.
   

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

4. 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.

5. 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.