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.

Posted by Martin Lloyd at 11:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I was wrong earlier when I said that you could login to the rhubarb demo as Martin, Testing

The combination you want is 'mlloyd' and 'testing'

Try it here...

http://rhubarb-fngtps.staging.greenpeace.org/

remember this deployment of the system isn't configured to send email, for obvious reasons.

Posted by Martin Lloyd at 10:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

• The Errors-To header is just not going to work most of the time. You have to set the email address you want to receive notification on in the From header. We're now setting the email adress of whoever wrote the message in the Reply-To header so that the receiver can still reply directly.
• If you send an email to multiple recipients, you will probably not receive a notification if the email cannot be delivered. It doesn't matter if the delivery failed for only one, for some, or for every single recipient. If you want to receive failure notification, it seems that you better send each email to a single recipient only.

Another thing to consider is that it might take up to at least 7 days before a MTA decides to give and you'll get the email returned. Right now, I'm still receiving return email from out first test run last week...

Posted by Thijs at 11:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This site in the UK (and apparently a few others) runs on the GCMS or Greenpeace Content Management System, which was developed on the OpenACS platform and delivers most of our global webpresence

Like www.greenpeace.org

Nice to see these Open Source things getting used. I have high hopes that Rhubarb will get picked up and used elsewhere as well. Since it's small, compact, easy to install, does a simple job well and so on.

Posted by Martin Lloyd at 4:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The new version of Rhubarb is coming together nicely. You can see the latest version on greenpeace servers by following this link. It doesn't yet send mail, although the development version does....

You can login as 'Martin', password 'Testing' , we'll add a guest account at some stage. Probably once we've built something that lets us add users easily.

So far I'm enjoying the fact that since I've got access to the Fingertips SVN repository I can see how the developments been going. They've also been keeping us up to date with regular updates on their staging server. All in all things seem to be going remarkably smoothly so far.

Next week though we'll be dealing with localisation. Making things work in multiple lanaguges / character sets / encodings is the bane of the international developer. We have ideas about this, but if anyone knows of a nice, lightweight approach to internationalisation do let us know.

Posted by Martin Lloyd at 12:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

About eleven minutes and thirty seconds into his talk on Django to Google Django creator Jason Kaplan Moss talks about Melt. So it's nice to get noticed.

As a more general update we're planning to get back to work on Melt this month, with a target of getting the first public site up next month. During our recent downtime we've been gratified to see Google adding more data to their Google maps, so that the system makes much more sense now when you're looking at results in Europe.

Posted by Martin Lloyd at 10:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Given that Greenpeace is the kind of organisation that sets a lot of store by things like community, democracy and five year plans you'd be forgiven for thinking that we don't have a lot in the way of internal competition. However you'd be wrong. Because Greenpeace is organised as a kind of franchise of 27 separate organisations there's no shortage of opportunities for competing solutions to develop, leading to an awful lot of 'cyberdiversity' within our systems.

Not everywhere though. Where a service proves itself best in class it tends to get adopted widely, sometimes even universally, indeed once Metcalfes law kicks in it's easy for a system to become 'best for us' even if it's not going to be 'best in class'. One system which is on it's way to such success is our content management system, which is known by the name 'Planet 2' and is currently in use by a large majority of our national offices, with more coming on board all the time.

One office considering moving to Planet 2 is the UK office, and they've engaged the services of Important Projects to help them make the decision. Which means our homegrown OpenACS solution is going to be duking it out with Drupal and Plone based tools for the right to deliver www.greeenpeace.org.uk . These kind of evaluations are a great way for local offices to keep us at the centre aware of whether we're delivering things they actually want, and make us work hard to deliver value through to the offices that rely on us.

I also like these contests. Drupal and Plone are newer platforms than Open ACS, and since they'll only have to support the UK office can offer more flexibility than our one stop shop. However when it comes to comparing a custom implementation to off the shelf software I'm reminded of something Fred Brookes wrote

"The real tiger is never a match for the paper one, unless actual use is wanted. Then the virtues of reality have a satisfaction all their own."

Posted by Martin Lloyd at 11:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)