Work in progress

We've got a lot of irons in the fire at the moment, which given that we're in the midst of holiday season may be a touch optimistic. Still, here's what we're up to...

We're very close to deploying not one, but two versions of our social networking platform Custard. Read about it on it's own blog.

We're working through some final glitches to switch our mass mailing over to Skylist's StormPost system. This will be accompanied by a new application codenamed Garlic, that will handle signing people up to mailing lists in the new system. It's been developed on our new platform of choice for small web applications (recent security scare not withstanding) - Ruby On Rails.

We're getting ready to deploy a vBulletin based discussion forum. Choosing a forum package is probably worth a blog post all in itself. The short version is that finding appropriate functionality wasn't hard - finding it in a package we were keen on from a technical point of view was.

We've got a major upgrade of Write-a-Letter ready to go as well, after which we'll probably make a bit of an effort to push this tool out to a wider community than just Greenpeace.

All that along with ongoing improvements to our intranet and content management system mean it's turning into a busy month. I'm optimistic that by the end of September we'll have a bunch of new stuff available to our campaigners on the ground, and that somewhere along the line that will translate into campaign victories...

As you'll notice from the product names above we're also moving away from building everything ourselves to taking as much off the shelf as we can. We're confident that this results in much better value for money, and means that when we do develop new tools it's for something of real value.