PICnet Blog

In 1998, the founders of Firefly Kids traveled to Russia to adopt a daughter. What they found when they arrived shocked them, as the orphanages in the country were simply unable to effectively support the neediest children, especially those with disabilities. Three years later Firefly Kids was created to help ensure that the children in Russia’s orphanages were better protected, and since have helped provide alternatives for these children.

Check out their new Non-Profit Soapbox site at: http://www.fireflykids.org.

Water. It’s something many of us take for granted in the United States, and thankfully we have people like those at the Virginia Water Environment Association who dutifully focus on the preservation and enhancement of Virginia’s water environment for today and future generations. We’re excited they decided to launch their new site with our Non-Profit Soapbox!

Check out their site: http://www.vwea.org.

In an effort to help spread the word of open source content management systems (CMS) and constituent relationship management systems (CRM), I was asked to give a talk at OneWorld on March 28, 2007 to the OneWorld Peer Learning Exchange. Roshani Kothari from OneWorld was gracious enough to write up some great notes on it (see below) as well as post a podcast of this.

Listen to the MP3 of the talk

Thanks to Roshani for her hard work to make these OneWorld Peer Learning Exchanges occur, and to my co-presenters Alan Rosenblatt and Guy Stevens for their contributions.

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We’re not about to let the secret out too quickly, but here’s an early Christmas gift teaser for all you following PICnet’s development of the Soapbox family of services.

We’re looking forward to the launch of Soapbox Events in January 2007. Stay tuned for more information.

We’re excited to share with the world the new Non-Profit Soapbox logo!

Lots of hard work from our great designer, Ryan Belisle, and creative juice from yours truly. For those of you right-brained individuals, here’s what the makeup is of this:

• Blue: #2D5798
• Non-Profit Soapbox font: 41pt DIN MEDIUM
• Tagline font: 21pt Frutiger 45 Light

As Non-Profit Soapbox continues to grow in the non-profit community, we have listened and responded to our clients’ ideas, pains, and comments. Surprisingly, what we hear most doesn’t have much to do with the core of Soapbox and Joomla, but rather the struggles of linking together a Web site with an organization’s database, or CRM system.

We haven’t taken this issue lightly, and as we discussed two weeks ago, we’re heavily involved in building bridges between Soapbox and the leading CRM systems for non-profits, starting with Democracy in Action.

What makes Soapbox a success for non-profits is that it goes beyond the core of just being a Web site manager, and allows organizations to connect more seamlessly to their CRM systems. That ability to present data from the database, and choosing the presentation of that data in the Web site is what will be the main differentiator between CMS choices for non-profits.

As CRM vendors are feeling the pressure from clients to provide open APIs, PICnet is stepping up quickly to act on this new opportunity for our clients. Although we’re weary of the all talk and no walk, we’re willing to take vendors on at their word. We’re building the bridges between Soapbox and the following CRM systems:

• Democracy in Action
• GetActive
• Salesforce.com

Our goals are simple when building these bridges:

• empower organizations to choose where they place their data
• provide choice for the presentation of data from their chosen CRM
• simplify the Web experience for organiation’s Web site visitors

Over the next few weeks, we will be releasing J!DIA to the community as an open source component for Joomla. Soon thereafter, we will begin working with GetActive and Salesforce.com to build similar functionalities for building bridges between Web sites and databases. Stay tuned, we’re empowering non-profits with choice.

We are happy to announce the launch of a new web site for Leadership Loudoun, a nonprofit dedicated to training new generations of civic leaders in Loudoun County, VA. Most exciting for us, the site is built on our new Nonprofit Soapbox system. Most exciting for LL, on the other hand, is that they have a new, slick site that is easy to administer and a great deal, to boot.

And for those of you too lazy to click over to their About Us page, the organization is dedicated to providing training to civil leaders to create “developing a pool of leadership talent from which organizations may draw upon to meet it community service needs.”

We thank Leadership Loudoun selecting Nonprofit Soapbox, and congratulate them on the new site.

Joomla 1.5 Beta is finally out. Its been 1 year and some since they began coding. Johan said at German Joomla! Day that:

“this represents 127,000 lines of code and had this been a commercial venture, about 32 man years of effort equivalent to $1.7 million in wages.”

It’s a great system. I love to code in. Would make sense since this release is made for us developers. 1.6 will be more for the end user. Some of the cool features include Internationalization (UTF-8), FTP Filesystem Layer (will allow access to folders that are locked down from the webuser), WCAG Compliance (508 etc.), and a better separation of logic and presentation layer. More explained in the Roadmap. Can’t wait for this to become stable so PICnet will start using it.

RobS over at Joomla just posted about the Joomla winning an award for security:

“During what is called the “Deface Realtime Compo” Competition up to 150 Security Specialists, hackers, and crackers bomarded the CMS with attacks for 2 days straight without success. Both Joomla! and PHP-Nuke were evaluated during the competition and both systems received positive evaluations. Along with the positive evaluation, we received a certification from the WebSecure Group, declaring that Joomla! was reliable and recommended for use.”

Read it here.

So I was just discussing some great stuff with Ryan this morning about integrating Odeo’s Studio into Soapbox. Odeo is the largest podcast directory outside of iTunes. Some exciting stuff is going to developed here. Odeo Studio steps it up with its easy to use Podcast creator. It is a great way to record and post your Podcasts. Integration into your site is easy too. Just a few settings and your ready to have your podcasts up and running. Might be easier than starting up a Soapbox site