The Black Blog
Next: Version Tag Flexibility
Starting in WebGUI 7.6 you now have more options than ever for committing your version tags.
There's "commit automatically", which we've had for a while now. There's also "multiple version tags per user", which is the way it's always been done.
But now you also have "one site-wide version tag", which means that all committers are always using the same version tag. This is helpful on smaller sites where you want to use versioning, but don't want to be confused by simultaneous open versions. As soon as someone makes an edit they're automatically attached to the one version tag.
And there's also "single version tag per user", which is just like it sounds, and each user gets his own version tag. Again, as soon as each user makes an edit they're automatically attached to this version tag. This is useful on larger sites where you have lots of users that you don't want trampling on each other, but where you also don't want your users to have to "manage" multiple version tags.
Finally, there's one more option. Each user has a user profile preference to override all four of these options on a per user basis. So if most of your site needs "commit automatically", but you are a power user and want to make use of version tags, you get the best of both worlds.
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Next: Survey 2.0
In WebGUI 7.6 the Survey asset has been entirely rewritten from the ground up. Longtime users of WebGUI will probably note that the old survey was powerful, but tedious to build surveys due to all the page refreshing that was required. The new survey makes heavy use of javascript and ajax in it's builder. This allows you to build amazingly complex surveys without a single page refresh. It feels like you're working in a native desktop application.
The new survey has all the old favorite features like quiz mode and survey branching, but it brings dozens of new features with it as well. For example, there are lots of new scales like certainty (certain, unsure), education (elementary, doctoral), ideology (liberal, conservative). You can also now do multiple choice answers.
There are now terminators, so you can stop the survey upon a given question. This allows for help desk like functionality leading the user through a bunch of questions until you're able to resolve their problem.
Branching has been expanded to allow a branch not only to a specific question, but to a specific section. You can also use the answer to a previous question in the text of a follow up question.
I've only scratched the surface of what the new Survey asset is capable of, but trust me, if you're in to surveys, this will blow your mind. This version of the survey now brings our feature set at least in line with, if not surpassing most commercial survey tools on the market today. Yes, it's even more feature rich and easier to use than SurveyMonkey.
We're still working on kicking out all the bugs, and we have a bit more templating work to do, but if you're interested, you can kick the tires of the new Survey on the beta server.
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Next: Account Manager
WebGUI 7.6 introduces a new way to manage your account information. The new Account Manager is a tabbed interface that allows you to update your username/password, your profile settings, view your purchase history in the shop, friends, inbox, and more. In addition, it modifies how other people view your information when they click on your name through out the site like from a collaboration system.
The new system is pluggable, which means that developers and add new functionality to the account manager to support their custom apps, or to subclass existing functionality to enhance it for a specific site. System administrators can turn off components that aren't appropriate for their particular site. And users have a much prettier and easier to navigate system to manage and view their information.
It still needs some pretty templates to be applied to it, but in the mean time you can check it out in the latest beta release either on plainblack.com or on a beta demo site.
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Next: Point of Sale
If you run a brick and mortar shop, or you run cash registers at a trade show, concert, or other on-site event, you'll be glad to know that WebGUI 7.6 has two new features to help you out.
First, there is now a group attached to the shop called "Cashiers". You can use any group you want, but it defaults to Admins. These users have an extra field in the cart. They're able to type in the email address of a user, and then when they check out, the sale is registered to that user, rather than the cashier. The cashier is also noted in the transaction history so you can tally how many sales were made by a cashier if you want. Eventually we may add some reports for that too. If the user is not already in the system, an account will be automatically created for them. And any privileges that result from the transaction will automatically be assigned to the user's account rather than the cashier's account.
Second, there is now a default address in each user's address book. This will be useful to repeat customers that visit your site, but it's more useful to cashiers. Cashiers can set the address to the store that they are working at, and then when it comes time to check out, their address is automatically populated for shipping/tax calculation purposes. This address is also self populated for cash transactions so that no addresses need to be filled out in the case of a cash transaction. Then the only address that ever has to be filled out is in the case of a credit card transaction.
These two new features should make it much easier to run a local shop using your WebGUI site.
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RFE Day #3
Tomorrow is RFE day #3, the final RFE day of the 7.6 dev cycle. Please join us in IRC to work on RFEs and make WebGUI 7.6 as the most feature rich release ever.
The Plain Black staff will be working on some of the bigger RFE's that have made it to the front page of the RFE list. Things that take longer than a couple hours to accomplish. For this reason we expect that we won't be closing many RFE's tomorrow. However, the RFE's that we do close should be quite substantial.
As always you can help by programming, documenting, designing, or even just looking through the RFE list to close out duplicates, and to close out RFE's that have already been implemented and just not closed. As you can see, there are lots of ways to help. You don't have to be a programmer to add a feature to WebGUI.
NOTE: Due to the RFE day tomorrow, there will be no 7.6.4 release until next week.
Please join us.
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WebGUI Book Price Drop
Since we've introduced the new line of WebGUI books they've been amazingly popular. We've been selling more and more every quarter, and we're also always putting effort into improving them. We've been absolutely amazed at how well you (our users) have received them. Today I have both good and bad news about WebGUI Books.
The only real complaint we've ever received about our books is that they are more expensive than people were expecting. In an effort to make our books more competitive with the prices you might pay for books from a traditional printer like O'Reilly we have decided to lower the cost of our books to $60 for the black and white editions. I hope that this change in price helps to alleviate those concerns. That's the good news.
Unfortunately the bad news is that our book printer has raised their prices dramatically on color printing. Therefore we can not offer the discount on the color versions. We never made much money on the color versions because they're so expensive to print, but we felt that it was important to offer the color editions because we live in a world of rich and vibrant color. Unfortunately the price hike is so large that we went from not making much to making almost nothing on the books, and we have to recoup the effort we put in to writing them. So as of today we're raising the price of our color books to $120 per copy.
We look forward to bringing you updated editions of our books in 2009, and we hope the price drop we just made can help you out in these rough economic times.
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WebGUI Economy Strong
At the WebGUI Users Conference I had a meeting with the presidents of a dozen other WebGUI businesses (companies that derive much or all of their revenue from WebGUI related products and services), and I've spoken to many of them several times since then. Even though the overall economy of the world has been shrinking over the past six months or so, all of these businesses (including Plain Black) are not only doing well, we're all growing. Are times tougher now than 12 months ago? Sure, but we're all still growing.
Speaking of economies, at the WUC we launched the Bazaar and the new Karma system. Those have been growing in usage steadily too. We made our first payments to people that have been selling items in the Bazaar in October, so that economy has officially kicked off. And we're seeing more and more people looking to put stuff in the Bazaar for sale. And we've had about a dozen people purchase items with their karma, and hundreds of people spending their karma on RFE's. In fact, there's at least one RFE on the front page right now that has more than 10,000 karma donated from various sources.
And finally, in the past two months I've noticed at least five new WebGUI businesses spring up. You heard that right, new businesses forming during the roughest economic period that the U.S. has faced in nearly 100 years. The WebGUI market is worth millions of dollars per month, but these businesses aren't poaching from a small set of clients, they're creating new new clients and thusly new WebGUI users out of dust and ash.
Even with economy's shrinking around the world, the WebGUI economy is growing. The future looks bright for WebGUI, and that puts a smile on my face.
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Next: Site Maps
You've been able to create a site map using a WebGUI navigation asset for quite a while. We're not talking about the site maps of yesteryear, but rather the XML based site map document that search engines use to know how to better crawl your web site.
Starting with WebGUI 7.6.2 WebGUI automatically creates a siteindex.xml response for you with the pages you've created in your site. This should help those of you struggling with your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tasks, as it's one more thing WebGUI automatically handles for you.
I have no doubt that this will need to be modified as we move forward to accommodate the special needs of some of our users. No doubt they'll want to be able to tweak this and that. But it's a good start on what some consider a "must have" feature.
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