After a few minutes of banging heads against walls trying to determine why a blogcategory was not showing a category’s beautiful description we’d created for it, we determined that in order to show category descriptions in Joomla, you need to have at least one item in the category.
Give your category some content articles, and it will give you a description.
Close friends and clients of PICnet have known for a long time of our love affair with Basecamp. The project management system that popularized Ruby on Rails has been manna from the heavens for us.
Now, they’ve made it even better.
Well, actually I guess we made it better for ourselves by upgrading our package that includes time tracking for tasks. This was a big issue for us. With our support clients, we’d been finding that many trouble ticket systems were too technically oriented, and kept us out of step with clients’ real needs. The Basecamp system is really more like trouble-tickets crossed with storytelling. The main drawback from the bean counter’s perspective was that it didn’t allow us to track the time spent on interactions with clients, much like the trouble ticketing systems.
Now with our upgrade to a package that includes time-tracking for todo tasks, life has been considerably better. For those that need it, we highly recommend the upgrade to a Basecamp package that includes this valuable feature. Now if they could only allow us to track both estimated and actual billing times. That would be the icing on the cake.
Somehow, all us survived the four days of San Francisco LinuxWorld, and are alive to tell the story.
It’s nearing the end of day here, and amazingly, we’re all still standing. Johan has sneaked out of the booth, likely trying to take a nap somewhere to relieve his voice, and Louis keeps on trucking with myself, Casey, and Johnathan.
Great groups have been coming up to us, lots of “you guys rock”, and “you saved my so many hours of work”. good words to hear.
Cmdr Taco himself from Slashdot was hosting a Q/A near us, throwing black Slashdot t-shirts, and chilling on the beanbags. The ubuntu gang is talking some good game across the aisle from us. SugarForge has a slick booth with a nice 36″ screen (are they really a dot-org?). Eclipse is our good neighbor, getting the hardcore tech heads, while others like the Free Software Foundation and Creative Commons are part of the 25 or so orgs in our dot Org pavillion.
Just hoping to be able to talk tonight…
After meeting with a new client in Palo Alto early this morning, I showed up about 2 hours late to Day 2 at the Advocacy Developers Conference here in Oakland. Luckily, Gunner let me in without much more than a “morning Ryan!”. What a guy.
Today’s meetings followed up on the previous day’s discussions, and the one that intruiged me the most was the interoperability discussion lead by David Taylor. In the meeting, we had a great mix of content management systems represented, with Joomla, Drupal, Plone, AMP, and May First People-Link. After going around and around with what’s important in integration, we finally threw our hands up and said, “let’s just pick one small thing to tackle, and see what we can do.”
Or as Gunner kept reminding us, “get the low hanging fruit.”
We thought it would be interesting to see if we could get our various CMSes to talk to each other. One thing that we thought would be cool would be if we could query data from other CMSes, and then receive data and present it within our own systems.
An example would be allowing a visitor on our Joomla site be able to search other Joomla sites and Plone sites, and then have the data collected and displayed on our Joomla site. While we thought general content would be great, David thought the things that are most often shared among sites was events.
Based on events, we decided that we needed to follow a standard. Unfortunately, we had a very similar discussion regarding events and the RSS Events standard, which as David and Jamie McClellan told us their war stories from trying to get it to work. We decided that we’d build to the GData specs by Google, which is just an extension of Atom.
Probably would be a good idea to really stick to this experiment, don’t you think guys? It would be beneficial to our communities to share this data easily.
A great group of developers, strategists, and general good people from around the world came to Oakland, California, on July 31 to solve all the worlds online development problems.
We made good baby steps.
Follow along at home with the quick and dirty wiki that was created.
This is the third advocacy developers conference, and the second that I was lucky enough to attend. I remember the original controlled chaos (that’s speaking praise to the conference!) that our friend Allen Gunner and Aspiration lead back in 2003. While this year’s convergence wasn’t perched just a hill away from the Golden Gate Bridge, the great people at the East Bay Foundation did a great job making us feel at home.
The first day brought together a wide variety of groups, including our good friends like Chris Lundberg of Democracy in Action and David Taylor of Radical Designs. The goal of the first session was to really understand what works, and what doesn’t, in the non-profit/advocacy marketplace. Groups had a variety of thoughts on the topic, but mine had the following:
What Works
What Doesn’t Work
After coming back to the circle, we all realized that although we’d begun making good progress for the sector over the past two years, there was still much to get done.
After a good lunch break, we started speed-geeking the different wares of attendees. Lots of great stuff was shared, from Non-Profit Soapbox to CivicSpace, May first - people link to Plone. (Photos to come soon)
Finally, we wrapped up the day with a good, but mind-bending, brainstorm session on interoperability led by Chris Lundberg. My general feeling on the interoperability issue is that unless there are either commercial needs that drive this forward, or if the technology is at such a standardized level (think HTML or XML) that interoperability is simply a necessity, it will always be hard to get groups, companies, and software providers to make their tools more interoperable.
One way to help add market pressures to proprietary providers (they know who they are) was to have a public way to allow groups to give their own experiences as to what works well with what. As I called it, “praise or shame”.
A Web site could be constructed, say we call it www.playswelltogether.org, that would allow organizations to say what software or technology plays well with others. The market would then have a way to see what was working, and naturally gravitate towards solutions that allowed them to really increase their capacity.
After the first day, we all headed down to the famous Electric Embers BBQ, where I nibbled for the first time on veggie ribs (don’t ask, I have no idea what’s in them). Thanks to Adam Bernstein and the rest of the EE gang for hosting us all!
Yes, we’ve sorely got a case of the cobbler with holes in his shoes. Now it’s time we caught up with our clients and get blogging!
With each of us at PICnet now contributing to this blog, we’re sure you’ll find something for everyone here. Well, at least something for people interested in what we like! That’s what blogging’s all about, right?
Thanks for coming and enjoy!
-Ryan
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