again on piracy: a very smart method to create retro-compatible serials and read them

The forum Joels on Software ROCKS - as usual!

while looking for a solution to this keygen thingy, I started a thread on Joels on Software. One guy named Rui came out with a really smart concept, so smart and simple that we didn't think of it first (here) and I tell my ideas about the benefits of such approach here.

Then conversation goes on, I get moved and can't help showing our love to our community: here. Of course I had to explain the concept using some capitalistic arguments, but I hope that the "love" comes out of my post     

peace and love,

A.

Our joomla setup: how a web-dummy did setup a website from scratch

HELLO WORLD,
have been thinking of posting this for a while... the purpose of this post is try and share what I learnt in roughly 8 months moving from 0-level-web-newbie to wannabe-webmaster :-)

Why Joomla? 

As I started looking for a CMS I had (for obvious reason) PHP + MySQL + Open Source in mind. Maurizio (my partner in crime) has been working with ASP .NET, and my brother developed his own CMS in PHP (which btw kicks ass...it powers huuuuge sites including one selling plane tickets). Since the website was supposed to be my baby from day 1, then I just thought I needed to find something I could handle 100% by myself (and I can't code at all...).

The dilemma was initially between Joomla and Drupal. Later on I also discover (or re-discovered) that you can do pretty much everything with Wordpress as well. After spending a few days googling (in february 2009) I made myself an opinion based on rumors, late me summarize:

Joomla	Drupal
lots of extensions and skins available no-multisite support used for small sites and e-ecommerces the Administration panel takes a while to figure out	developer-friendly and larger development community multisite support (a bit) less extensions available skinning reportedly more difficult no default wysiwyg editor (!) used mainly in large sites

There are several well-done comparison on the web (e.g.: 1,2), what comes out is that both Joomla and Drupal (and Wordpress) can serve your purposes equally well if you have something small in mind and maybe  in that case Joomla is a bit less expensive/time consuming to set-up.
I went for Joomla and still I'm pretty happy about it since whenever I needed some new functionalities, in most cases I did just browse the Joomla extensions directory and found what I needed + had the site updated within minutes (and again, I can't code...no php, no Visual Basic...nothing :-))



The Joomla extensions we can't live without

Components

1) JCE, wysiwyg editor: Joomla comes with TinyMCE built-in. I can't recall what was the issue with it, but I couldn't quite like it...therefore I browsed a bit the joomla extension directory and immediately realised that JCE was by far the most popular wysiwyg editor, based on the amount of plugins available for it.

- Now guys, let me share a basic tip: you can quickly smell the quality of a joomla extension based on how many plugins it has available. While this is might not always be true, it was true in this case and helped a lot in most other cases -

Anyway, I installed JCE and had initially a bit of pain in having my css used and googling around (apparently!) didn't help... I eventually found out how to get it right: I made a copy of the .css and told JCE to use that one instead, using a path formatted as showed in the pic below. As this was achieved by pure trial&error, I'm not 100% sure about what really happened, all I can tell is that this one worked :-)

Now, I'm not only incapable to code, I was also 100% HTML un-savvy when I began working with joomla (now I'm only 90%! :-D) to the point that I had no-idea what a table was...obviously moving from Word 2007 to a web-based wysiwyg has been a nightmare. After banging my head on the wall for a few months, and getting to learn some HTML, I realized that JCE is not that bad considering how complicated its job is.

JCE still has some weekpoints such as:
- it doesn't format the code decently nor keeps the handmade formatting
- pressing "return" while you're editing can have different results depending on where you are on the page, while all I always want would be a to have a < br / >
(instead of a bunch of  < p > < / p > )
- sometimes the code gets nested&messed and you need to dig into it to fix the formatting...

But still I can't say that JCE does a bad job, and most important I found it considerably better than the alternatives (browse to the end of the post to find out) :-)

2) Joomlapack, site backup suite: Joomlapack is AMAAAAAZING! It's one of the few applications that surprised me for the both functionalities, stabilty and even the creativity one can see in the app.
I hear you say: "oh come on, it's just a backup tool!"...

Well, using Joomlapack I did, within 20 mins:
I) backup my site and download the backup
II) edit the backup on my desktop using the Kickstart tools (available for free on the Joomlapack site)
III) upload the site on a different server (I use a dummy account to make tests)
IV) get a perfect mirror of my site (include the forum and wiki!) up and running on the dummy account, with absolutely 0 problems/warnings!!!

Well, that's a big WOW for me anyway :-)

3) PollXT a tool to create customized polls: this one did totally blow my mind...when I realized it was working for real and doing all those things as promised, I couldn't help but cried.

Why we needed PollXT: 

following this article on the excellent Jason Cohen's blog, we figured out we needed to know what happened to all the people who were trying Tabbles and then disappeared (i.e. did not buy it). We figured out we needed to track installations (as an opposite to track downloads, to see how many downloaders did actually install and try the software) and find a way to ask the users a few questions when they were uninstalling it (where uninstall = giving up).


We started tracking installations by automatically opening a "Welcome page" the first time the user would run the app, and then counting the visitors to that page and comparing these figures with the downloads.
And using a similar principle, we send users to this page when they're uninstalling...the poll you see in this page is power by PollXT and works like a charm! The configuration is relatively easy, specially considering the amount of options available. PollXT sends us an email each time someone fills up the poll.

- Whenever I think about PollXT I get emotional, I can't help it! :-D

4) Xmap creates sitemaps for all your needs: (New 27/01/2010)

Alright, I guess we all use google/webmaster and therefore we all need a sitemap.xml. Being a complete lazy-dummy, what I did was google sitemap generator and pick the first on the list and that would be xml-sitemaps.
The xml-sitemap works quite ok, still I can't help mentioning 2 relatively large sources of annoyance:
I) the site indexes until 500 pages (ok, not an issue by itself) and it offers no chance to filter out pages (or at least I couldn't find any...). The reall issue is that we have on the same domain both the forum and the wiki  and not being able to prevent the site to look into those 2, we hit the 500 pages wall and got an error message.
II) the second annoyance is that (obviously...) the xml-sitemaps sites doesn't check my site everyonce in a while to see what changed, meaning that each time I move/rename a page or menu, then I have to redo the sitemap.xml... just in case.

Both the issues are gone with XMAP! Plus:
- It has no page limit (read: it's 100% free)
- It has options to not include some pages in the list, and by default it doesn't go and dig into the forum...
- it updates the sitemaps automatically!!! YEAH!
- at least in our case it needed 0,0 configuration...wow

...on top of this - surprise surprise! - it provides both a 100% google-friendly sitemap.xml AND a visitor targeted sitemap which is even customizable via CSS! Amazing :-D - Check out what it spits out for our site:
sitemap.xml for google
sitemap for human fellows



Plugins

1) Multithumb, a dumb-proof plugin to generate a simple gallery.  Everyone needs a gallery at some point. If you have no clue whatsoever and don't even know what lightbox is, then things may get a bit confusing :-)

I tried a bunch of different gallery tools, at least 4-5 of them, including the well known Phoca Gallery and no-one was simple enough for my 2 neurons to get it to work. Plus, I needed something really simple, so why looking for a monster-size tool?

How it works: it couldn't be easier, just write once the text {multithumb} somewhere on the page where you want the gallery to be. The screenshot shows exactly what the page looks like in JCE... could it be easier? :-)

3) Lazybackup2, backs-up your db and emails it to you automatically. I'm a bit histerical about our db...since we have also have phpbb, MediaWiki and Mantis on it, one could think that something could go wrong screw the db and take the whole site down... isn't it? Well, with lazybackup2 I can sleep a bit tighter, as I know that whatever happens, I always have a backup of my db (not older than 24h) in my email.

4) Sourcerer, allows you to write custom code in a Joomla article. 

The story: At some point I needed to copy&paste some Javascript on some pages (not on the whole site) to track some stuff (I guess it was something related to tracking downloads with Google Analytics, which of course ended up not working in the end :-D), at as I tried writing the code in the Joomla editor I found out that Joomla doesn't recognize that text as code (obviously!) and the code would be visible in the page and do nothing. After googling I understood the problem and found that Sourcerer is the solution. The instructions are here and are really straightforward.

Modules

S5 Quick contact, simple and efficient contact form. Having a friendly contact form on your site is very important. Of course you need to have a proper contact page with all your email addresses nicely written, but you have to consider that opening a mail client and typing in an email address can be perceived as a lot of work by some people and they may even miss-spell the email address...most of the first contact messages from prospects do indeed come from the contact form, I wonder if these people would still write us if the contact form wasn't there? :-)

I tried several of those and with most of them the problem was integrating it into our existing skin. S5 Quick contact is easy install, easy to configure, it blended better with our existing template and works just fine.

Changing the spam check: the only limitation I found is the fact that the spam check is static and not configurable from the plugin configuration...not a tragedy  though as all you need to do is manually editing 2 lines in 2 different files.

1. Find the folder where S5 Quick Contact is install, it's probably something like /your_www_root/modules/mod_s5_quick_contact, you'll find a php file and an xml file, download them both.
2. Open the file mod_s5_quick_contact.xml, find the line   and change both the fileds where you read "Spam Check: 12345-1=?" to whatever you want your anti-spam question to be. You can write for example "what is the capital of Italy?"
3. Open the file mod_s5_quick_contact.php, find the line:  if (document.getElementById("spambox").value != "12344") and change the "12344" to the answer to your previous question... if you asked for the capital of Italy, then you should write "Rome".
4. Upload the 2 files back (backup the previous ones if you're not sure)...and that's it! :-)

The Joomla extensions we could so far live without

1) Artio Joomsef, advanced SEF engine for joomla. Joomla 1.5 comes with SEO/SEF support built in. You enable it from the general configuration and it should work straight ahead  (as long as you have the RewriteEngine On in you .htaccess file). To be honest I don't think we need anything more than that at this point...Artio Joomsef can help you if you need to work more with SEO/SEF stuff i.e. you have a large/complex site and need to enhanhce the searchability of some areas.

2) Joomfish, website localization management. Joomfish makes your site localizeable: if you need to have your site in several languages, it's gonna handle the administrative part, meaning that it will keep track of the parent article and all its localization. Basically what you have to do is enable the target language with Joomla (e.g.: German) and Joomfish will graciously add a button on top of each article to let you translate it. It will also handle the change among the languages in the frontend. If you're looking to localize your site, Joomfish is the tool to go!

3) Virtuemart, the largest joomla e-cart. Virtuemart is a monster application that has the horsepower to handle a big e-shop with thousands of SKUs/producers/resellers. It is also discouraging complicated, the documentation is sub-optimal and skinning it is a pain. We were planning to go for Virtuemart in the beginning (and even had a look at other e-carts), but we made a U-turn and chose to sell through avangate (great choice, they deserve a blog post just for themselves :-)
The reasons where:
I) It's just our products: We are not planning to have 100 SKUs anytime soon, and we're not planning to sell other people's stuff...therefore we don't need anythign that complicated.
II) Security: we're currently 3 guys working from home and none of us knows anything about web security, and whenever there are credit cards involved you definitely need to know what's going on on your website.
III) Payment providers: you can go for Paypal, google checkout or any of the 10-15 payment providers out there, they'll always charge some 3%-5% per transaction...why not paying a little more and get a more taylored service?
IV) Sending the serial number: this was probably the most critical issue at all. We sell software = we sell serial numbers. Serial numbers need to be unique, trackable, and their creation and sending needs to be automatized. Well, I spent several days looking for a viable solution to have this done in Virtuemart and just couldn't find any...The closest thing is PHP-KeyCodes, a php app that handle the e-purchase through paypal and then sends an email with a serial number in it - probably a good-enough solution, but you still have to pay the payapl fees.

4) Vemod, newsletter software. I hate to be negative about things, but I got really disappointed by this software. I actually tried several emailing tools and none did meet my requirements. As a pennyless self-employed I'm looking for a solution that works decently and is free. One day I'll be a rich enough to pay for a service or even a consultant to take care of this, but until that day, I would have loved something that:
I) works decently well
II) is free
III) preferably integrated with joomla (and phpbb through Jfusion)

Well, I couldn't find such a solution and in the end I installed the excellent phplist.

5) Jfusion, integration between the joomla users db and other software. When we initially were planning to use virtuemart for the sales (and have phpbb as forum), we thought that it would have been cool to  have everything integrated together, where resellers would have special accounts allowing them to both use protected parts of the forum and to buy with special rates. As we're not using Virtuemart (yet?), and it doesn't really make sense to have integration between the user db of the forum and of Joomla, then I simply turned it off... but it works fine and it may come in handy one day!

6) FCK - XStandardlite - TinyMCE, alternative wysiwyg editors: as mentioned above i'm using JCE as editor in joomla, but I tried pretty much everything else. FCK is a very popular one outside the joomla world (I installed it on our wiki and is the default editor in phplist) but imho JCE is still the best.



The Joomla extensions we'd die to have

1) a decent, simple and clean download counter: we need a piece of software that counts how many people downloaded a certain file and shows a graph... am I asking too much? Is there something I'm missing??? I browsed the 7 seas of the web and all I found was complicated stuff, hard to configure and with the few or too many functionalities. Tracking downloads with analytics is a pain and doesn't work with direct downloads (often requested by PAD sites....sucks!!!). Currently we're counting (not even tracking!) downloads using this little script which works fine but has some limits.

2) A real blog component with comments and stuff.  Ok, I admit that probably it's me who didn't do my homework as joomla can for sure be configured to work as a blog (not sure about the comments though)... but still I had hard time finding a fully featured blog that is also free...therefore here we are on blogspot :-)

wow, that was a long post, I hope someone can find it useful! :-)

Tabbles got cracked! This time it's a real patch :-)

Hello crackers and pirate worldwide,

Tabbles got cracked again - a real crack this time (a dll was patched). I guess it's pretty uncommon to see a software developer blogging about his software begin cracked, but in reality the thing its quite cool. We're still at the very beginning of our journey in enterpreneurship, no one knows us and probably some 1000 people have seen Tabbles...seeing that someone out there cares and takes the time to crack it is quite cool...and feels rewarding.

Plus, there are a bunch of case studies out there showing that the more the software gets cracked, the more cash flows in and even that easily crackable softwares win over hard-to-crack competitors.

While I'm writing this I'm happily looking at google analytics and I can see a traffic spike... to us it looks pretty much like free advertisement so we can't complain at all!

Therefore thanks to uncleua (the cracker) and to the people who posted the release! Looking for the cracked version itself? Google "tabbles crack 1.3.8"... or you could also check this post and if you can lend us a hand we'd be happy to pass you a free license. Uh, don't forget that Tabbles is free for bloggers! 

P.S.: a friend posted this to Slashdot! Coolness :-)

Peace,

Tabbles = free for bloggers - and Crowdsourcing

HELLO WORLD

Crowdsourcing

Today my bro posted this link on facebook: 8 ways to kill an idea.

Now, the link itself is funny, being being the curious monkey I am, I couldn't help from digging into the site...which led me to find the M.Sc. thesis of the blogger and there I found this word I've been looking for a long time. This is the definition of crowdsourcing on wikipedia and the article sounds a bit "capitalistic"...


- How do we apply the principle of crowdsourcing?
In our tiny software house we’re bringing users on this forum page.

- Does it work? YES
We had our software localized in 4 languages by our community plus we have a small crew of beta-testers checking and writing on our forum everyday.

- Is it all about the "profit"? maybe...
Well, it's always about the profit... depends what kind of "profit" one is looking for. At this stage, we're not yet profitable, but nonetheless we deeply love what we're doing. When you love something, one of the most rewarding thing is sharing what you love - and this is a very strong motivator. So, in this sense, we get a large  "profit" from crowdsourcing: we're building a community, we LOVE THEM and hopefully they love us too.  Probably one day we'll make some money too, but until then, we're still getting a lot out of our crowdsourcing.


- the more you give the more you get back?
Once again this let me think of the Balsamiq blog... connecting the dots is so straight-forward this time. 

Free for bloggers, do-gooders and charity (link)

Yes, no hidden trick here! :-)
If you belong to any of those categories, just drop us a line!

best,
Andrea

micro weekly update 09 -> 15 November

HELLO WORLD.

Guys, probably this week for the first time, we started seeing some real interest in Tabbles, coming from different fronts. It feels good.

Development (1.2.1 is very close) -> look at this

- Recursive untabbling added

- Improved auto-categorization (just "sticky" for the moment)

- "Bleached" file window and graphical tweaks 

- Tracked (and hopefully fixed) 2 very buggy bugs causing to database corruption. We're probably preventing future bugs too.

- Layed out the basic functionalities of the shared tabbles (we'll blog something about this later). Basically soon we'll have something similar to a server-less shared tagging app.  Sounds like sci-fi but apparently it isn't.

Marketing

- Updating stuff here and there
- Getting ready to a real press launch (yes!). We're making a list of magazines... wanna see it?
- The wiki is alive!
- Our Combine feature is officially Patent Pending 8-)
- I finally added an OPML with all our feeds.

P.S. another great idea from the balsamiq blog: whoever has a webcam and is willing to tell about how Tabbles is making your life easier, just shoot the video and we'll add it to our youtube playlist :-D

Weekly update 02->08 November - and how we (don't) fight piracy

HELLO WORLD

Development

1.2.0 is out and 1.2.1 beta1 was out 1 day later...why that? Read on...

Marketing (shopping list style)

• Homepage update: it was just about time! Our homepage described Tabbles as it was supposed to be (8 months ago), but the way it evolved is a bit different from what we initially planned (not much though).
• Main product page update: check this out.
• Special pages appearing when users interact with the installer: welcome page on installation, the un-installation poll and to "special users". This is a part of our plan to find out what happens with trials and also to deliver the most information possible to the user. But who are the special users? does it have anything to do with piracy? Maybe... just read on.

Piracy, free-riding, friendship and building a community.

Ok guys:

-> anyone who has never downloaded a pirated software/videogame/song/movie, raise your hand.

-> anyone who doesn't currently have any pirated software/videogame/song/movie, on your home pc, raise your hand.

I have the feeling I won't see many hands up in the air :-)

And what's the problem with it?

Piracy = revenue loss.

Really?

A 3 mins search on Wikipedia will show Microsoft's point of view (one and two) on the issue, and also a nice article about the "piracy controversy" is here. I guess we all read/heard/thought about the problem already.

What I want focus here, is 3 aspects of piracy.

1) Natural born pirates. I'm a west-european and as a such I'm a part af that privileged part of the earth inhabitants who can afford to pay for software. There is a great quote I heard at a university which sounds like "the western countries are like people sitting in a limousine and drinking champagne while the rest of the world is outside starving". Well, that's just the way it is... beside that (not even) 1 billion people who may afford buying software, there are more than 5 billions who probably can't, but they still can afford a 400$ computer to run software. Maybe they can still do something for my company?

2) Pirate = free-rider... really?. Well, it would be futile denying that I have or had illegal copies of software. At the same time, I remember spending a lot of time on forums and communities of various kinds.

A real exemple here: I didn't pay for my Quake 2 license back in 1997...but in 1998 I did this (which eventually led me to get a job working on this). While doing that I spent a lot of time advocating the verb of Quake on forums, websites and among friends. Now, do you think that the id software guys would run after me claiming their 50$ or would they rather thank all the kids like me who contributed to make the community that generated so much added value to their products? (Not to mention that while I didn't pay for Quake 2, I bought Quake 3 and Doom 3 afterwards...)

3) The only thing I can get from you are your 30€...really?. On the amazing balsamiq blog I found this very interesting article about keeping the press' attention when the spike is gone... Well, I guess you could guess the answer already: The Community.

Of course: if time = money, a passionate user can give back much more than the license price, and can drive the product and the company into new directions by giving his/her opinion or by actively joining the development and/or the marketing processes.

For this reason we wrote this shameless post on our forum. And for this reason we say "pirates, be our friends, we need you!" :-)

So: why 1.2.0 and one day later the 1.2.1?

We're aware of an illegale version of Tabbles floating on the net (hint: try use the google blog search for it :-D ).

The Auto-categorization feature kicks ass: for this reason we're making sure that everyone who has that pirated version (which uses the serial number released on the GOTD offer) will understand that they won't receive it unless they "go legal" and this is what our friendly message (inviting them to join our forum and contribute) is about . That's it :-)

Peace!

Andrea

1.2.0 is out...and how to get feedback from your users - quickly!

Ladies and gentlemen, the 1.2.0 is out...

the change-log itself looks scary :-D But of course we're not sleeping: the 1.2.1 beta1 is already available in the forum, featuring the long awaited Auto-categorization rules.

Something useful now: how to get feedback from a trial

We're fans of the excellent a smart bear blog, and we got inspiration from this article about getting feedback from the users.

How did we implement it? How long did it take?

What we needed was a way to have a user communicating with us what was wrong with Tabbles, this should have included a list of options with check-boxes as well as a few empty fields to write something into. Coding this into our desktop app would have been a nightmare (open a socket, and write into a remote db making sure that the user's firewall wouldn't get too angry about it... ) and it would have been even worst having the thing to run when the user was uninstalling... :-|

Well, our website is based on Joomla, so we thought: why not using joomla to do this? Joomla has a built-in poll, but it's pretty limited: only radio buttons, no free-writing field and max 12 questions (!).

After a 5 minutes tour in the joomla extensions directory I found the excellent PollXT which does exactly what I needed and within 10 mins our poll was online. This looks like the best component I've seen in a while... it does everything it's supposed to (and as you need more, it's there already), it's stable and very intuitive: A+ to the author! Uh, did I mention that it's donationware? :-D

All we did is calling a custom action on uninstalling, so the uninstaller calls a web page (which opens without ringing any alarm bell) and PollXT does all the rest.

P.S.: there is in an interview of me here :-D

Weekly update (I'm starting a tradition here)

Hello guys,

This one is the first post of a series. I think it's great idea to write here what we're doing on a weekly base.

Development

a little flashback: Tweaking the GUI

In the last 3 weeks we've been mostly focusing on tweaking the GUI based on the feedback we got from our early users and friends. Among the things that mostly bothered people were the lack of a "normal" menu bar. Many people asked to have more integration with windows explorer, my brother (the guy from julay.it) mentioned a list of things to be fixed in the current GUI and Tim from the joelsonsoftware forum suggested us to reskin the windows. All of this has been progressing very well without any majour surprise, and surprisingly even the explorer integration went smooth (thanks to the use of ez shell extensions which saved us months of work...).

Graphically speaking, we got from here to here.

(still flashback) The desktop mode - stage 1

Maurizio has been secretly planning to develop a "desktop mode" for Tabbles, then a few weeks back he told me about his naughty desire but added that this would take months of development as he need to hook up with some hideous Windows libraries using the C language (to which he is strongly allergic). Then, one day, he googled the right thing ("pin applicaton to desktop") and found the 4 lines of code that did the trick... the feature was implemented in literally 30 mins and this opened a whole new world in front of our eyes.

What could this mean? Well, it would mean give the user a desktop where one could zoom and a pan, as you do in google maps. Not bad at all!

Implementing this stuff can be considered a success story.

(Happened this week) The desktop mode - stage 2

This one is a little bit less of a success story :-)

Last Tuesday Maurizio told "look I think we should make the first floor detachable, and run in a window... I can make it happen in a couple of hours"... of course I said "great, go ahead!", but a couple of hours later he called me back and said "actually this will take a bit longer...". It took him indeed until Friday :-)

Well calling an insuccess would be a bit overdone, given the value added to the app.

(also happened this week) The desktop mode - stage 3

As Tabbles will probably be installed in desktop mode by default (the user can switch it's behavour in real time), we also needed to to draw the files that the user has on his real desktop. This is nearly done and it took a couple of days of work and will probably need one more.

This is what we have today:

So, we wished we could release another beta before the weekend but we couldn't make it...expect something early next week. Maybe it'll be a bit broken, but we're sure you'll be impressed :-)

Sales and Marketing

a little bit of a flashback again: rethinking the sales and marketing strategy

We started off the whole project thinking on focusing on a corporate app, therefore we shaped our site and our communication in order to look like "what we thought would be appealing to a company". Things were actually not going too bad for a startup, but when we learned about the balsamiq success and we read this post, we realised we could be trying a totally different path...not only that: while we were reading this post we already started a lively dialog with our first users on our forum (we love you guys, I hope you know that by now!) so basically we did already jumped in this "friendly small company" trend even if our website would still give the feeling of us looking like a greedy impersonal corporation.

Therefore we planned to rework our website a bit in order to show what we are instead of trying to hide it.

The last couple of weeks: some GUI stuff and some maintainance

We usually work like this: Maurizio writes the code and grosses the GUI, I try and make the GUI look prettier, do the icons, the user manual, the default databases and take care of the translation. There has been a lot of this stuff done in the last weeks, and precisely:

• Icons tuned up and re-exported (before they were all vectorial XAML, now they're all png), in 2 different color flavours.
• Minimalistic default databases, in EN, DE, IT, NL, RU (now, that's a boring task!)
• Arrange the translations using the fabulous Zeta Resource Editor tool, on this post

The last couple of weeks again: Mantis, Wiki, getsatisfaction.com vs phpbb3

- getsatisfaction.com vs phpbb3:

On top of this, I've been having a look at getsatisfaction.com and Maurizio made me notice how cool it's rating feature is. Well, getsatisfaction has a clean and nice design but it's true power is in the fact that finding meaning information is made so much easy since users have the chance to vote the stuff they find useful.

Because of this mechanism, an average Joe (or a casual user looking for some support but not willing to invest not more than 3 mins on it) will probably find what he needs within seconds, leave the site with a pleasing feeling and come back soon.

With phpbb information is way more scattered. The point is that phpbb is meant as a generic forum software, one you could use to setup a board on butterfly collecting, on politics or on forum...getsatisfaction.com is very different.

On the other hand, the upside of phpbb is that it allows things like a poll, uploading a file, creating a poll and even some integration with some other online softwares (such as the populare mediawiki).

Looking for a nice way to allow users to rate posts (and other users?) I've been browsing the phpbb mod repository reading a quite a chunk of the phpbb mod development forum, looking for a "rating mod" (a mod is a sort of plugin for phpbb). I found a few WIP, a few abandoned but nothing I could just install and play with...at the same time, many people are hungry for such a plugin, I can see why.

-Mantis

I installed Mantis a couple of weeks ago (here), it's now up and running and it works pretty well given what we need right now. The fact that it's not integrated with phpbb annoys me (and our users!) so extremely much!!!

Obviously here too there is quite a lot of people crying for a solution, and quite a few projects, but nothing easy enough for me to install... the best thing I found was this and I honestly got scared after reading the first half of the howto :-\

(if anyone out there is brave enough to try that, we'd be more than happy of lending him a couple of licenses in return...as long as he doesn't get our website melted :-D )

- Mediawiki

This is the the platform powering wikipedia, it's huge, powerful, open source, free and it should integrate pretty well with phpbb (here). Mantis also integrates pretty well with Mediawiki (here)...so installing Mediawiki could allow us to (at least) have a shared user database (so that user don't have to create different accounts each time) but maybe also to have dual login! Yeah!

Of course there is a but: we're currently using an inexpensive (read cheap) shared hosting, with 1 mysql database, and I'm pretty sure that this db won't resist long if we install Mediawiki on it...

Any opinion on this would be highly appreciated!

Real marketing stuff: re-segmenting?

I started saying that we initially targeted businesses (small and medium, but still businesses). A refining of the marketing material was needed as even on the joelsonsoftware post we got criticized for not having a clear target.

Well, two things happened since then:

• we decided to go "Freemium" earlier than expected: we'll soon launch a featured limited version with no expiry date, free for personal use.
• the desktop mode fell from the sky as an unexpected (at least for me) gift.

What is gonna happen to "Tabbles | your personal document management system"? Probably it's soon gonna move to the attic, and be replaced by something like:

• Tabbles | smarter folders
• Tabbles | beyond folders and tags

Or probably something that names the new desktop mode like:

• Tabbles | deeper desktop and smarter tags

On top of this, I've been thinking a bit about 4 bullet-points which would quickly give the read an idea of what Tabbles does. Those are 4 candidates:

• Zoomable desktop: gives your desktop a third dimension
• Unique file organization system based on tag-bubbles
• Virtual file system: all your disks look as one
• Ultra-easy project sharing system (we still need a feature to be developed for this, but a low development-cost one)

Ok, we put the zoomable desktop line on top, the fact has quite a meaning for us. Who are we trying to appeal? Who are we competing too? However I look at this, only one name comes to my mind: Bumptop. This topic is indeed not clear at all. We're not sure if we want to push on appealing home users and early users, and create a community (Winamp style) or we should stick to the path we decided initially and try and hit big contracts with big companies?

But the second line, Unique file organization system based on tag-bubbles, is indeed the most controversial one. While a zoomable desktop is a not-too-hard to describe concept, the core features of Tabbles are everything but easy to tell about. Let me just tell that we went to 8 variation of that line, but none of them made us 100% happy. Any comment on this is extremely welcome!

Uh, I wrote a lot!

Next week I'll keep it shorter, I promise :-)

Andrea