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 only slipped by one week this time.  Hopefully, we'll see you again in only two weeks.

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

All of the translations are taking a heavy beating due to the new features being added to WebGUI.  However, the French team is actually making some progress.  I thought about taking my logged i18n completion data, normalizing to an average and then plotting that to show trends.  But it's Sunday afternoon, and I'm tired.

Translators, hang in there.  WebGUI 7.7 is now stable so there should be no slippage.

News Blurbs

WebGUI 7.7 is in Feature Freeze

WebGUI 7.7 went into feature freeze on May 15th as planned.  See below for a partial list of features that were added since the last edition of WNN came out.  Now, let's get busy and get the bugs fixed so we can declare it as stable!

WebGUI Community Statistics launched

JT is always looking for ways to see what people find to be useful in WebGUI, and what they actually use.  To help with this, he launched WebGUI Community Statistics.  Read his blog entry for the details, but in short, it is an opt-in way for your site to automatically send site statistics back to webgui.org with information about the numbers of users and groups on your site, what kinds of assets you use, and other information.

Google Maps Asset

You read that right.  There is now a Google Maps asset built into WebGUI.

Shop Improvements

The long awaited PayPal driver was added to WebGUI in 7.7.6.   It supports the "standard" payment method. Another pay driver for added for Ogone, a popular European payment system provider.  A bug was fixed in the ITransact payment driver where payments that had one or more trailing zeroes would cause the transaction to fail.  There is now a shipping driver for the United States Postal Service.

Bugfix Day is June 3rd.

At the time of writing this entry, there are 92 outstanding bugs in WebGUI.  On Wednesday, June 3rd, there will be a community-wide bugfixing day.  It will be coordinated on IRC, and we need all kinds of people to help, from programmers and designers to people just to help test the WebGUI User Interface.

One problem I've been noticing is that people are not responding to questions asked about bugs.  Answers to these questions really help with diagnosing problems, as well as making sure that the posted bug is understood well.  Please check back on your bugs, and respond to questions promptly.

Inbox Changes

Each user's inbox can now be sorted by sender, you can receive a copy of Inbox messages that you send, and you can configure how you receive notifications that you've received a new message to your Inbox, either by email, SMS, neither or both.

Inbox messages sent to groups are now handled differently.  Before, each member of a group would have to individually mark group messages as read.  Now, when any member of a group reads a message, it is marked as read for the entire group.

WebGUI on your Phone

If enabled, WebGUI will check the browser that you are using, and if it looks like it is coming from a mobile device, it will use a different style template to render the page.  This option is enabled in the Settings.

Adding Richness

In the Collaboration System, you can now specify a different Rich Text Editor (RTE, TinyMCE, WYSIWIG) for replies versus original posts.  The DataForm has a new RTE field type.

Karma King Koen Challenges the Masses

Koen De Jonge has offered a bounty of 200 karma for each WebGUI style added to the Bazaar.  If you're interested in the details, then check out his post to the Design Forum.

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. Come to help out with Bugfix Day!

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.