Jon Carlos (webmonger) personal blog itsux.com

Wow, we made it.

After 3 3.5 4 days of development and a few hours here and there we've finally made it the launch of our first release of SocialFront.

Personally I'd like to thank David for all his help. Those of you that have been following the project will know I've been working with David over the last few month to make this happen and without him it would not have been possible or as quick! Ross for working on the styles (Not quite finished!).

I'd also like to thank the the Umbraco community who are one of the friendliest I've come in contact with. These fantastically positive people and their blogs which I've been using over and over have been a constant inspiration on what we've done in SocialFront.

Big thanks go to Screenmedia for allowing us to camp out in the meeting room on Saturdays while developing SocialFront.

Finally my wife for putting up with me ;-)

Where do I get SocialFront?

SocialFront website
SocialFront on Google Code
SocialFront on our.Umbraco.org
SocialFront feedback, suggestions and bugs

Labels: Launch, Social Networking, SocialFront, Umbraco

So after a great lunch at our favourite local pub Chinaski's we put the issues we had in the morning behind us and started to hack our way around packaging issues and how to install SocialFront on Umbraco.

15:00

Jon started to look at the possibilities of editing the umbraco core so we could fix the issues with exporting document types but as we did not know the Umbraco code base too well decided after about half an hour that it would probably be best just to manually edit the package.xml

This took a little time but was not too much of a hassell so by about 16:00 we had a package that we had tested on a couple of Umbraco installations.

During this time David was making good progress on coding the install mechanism so once the package contents were installed the user would be able to just click a button and they would have a ready built community setup.

17:00

David was continuing to work on the code to do the install so I started to work on exactly how we were going to edit the web.config to add all the SocialFront providers that are required.

I found a post on StackOverflow that seemed to do what I was need but found it a little hard to follow then I found an article on MSDN that was exactly what I needed.

I had to extend the number of properties in SocialFrontProviderConfiguration for me to be able to populate the web.config properly but then all I needed to do open up the web.config programmatically then add the SocialFront provider sections:

Configuration config = WebConfigurationManager.OpenWebConfiguration("~");
SocialFrontProviderConfiguration configuration = new SocialFrontProviderConfiguration();
configuration.Name = "name";
configuration.Default = "Umbraco";
configuration.Providers.Add(new ProviderSettings("name", "type"));
config.Sections.Add(configuration.Name, configuration);
config.Save();

As we were using xml for the setup of the site structure I figured that I would also setup the provider definitions using the same technique. So I created an xml config file to enumerate through that meant we could add any providers we needed at runtime when SocialFront was installed on a site.

18:30

Unfortunatley we were unable to get our package created by the end of the day. We're not far away from having it ready so we've decided that we're going to meet again this week and finish the installer and get the package release before the end of the week.

So after a hard day of planning and coding we made our way to the pub for a quick pint and to reflect on the day.

SocialFront Testers

As with any project SocialFront needs testing and we're looking for some people to give us some feedback on what we've done and make suggestions on how to make it better. If you have any time you can give us to install our new package then we'd love to hear from you. Please email me and I'll email you as soon as the package has been released.

We've also setup a uservoice site for SocialFront feedback, suggestions and bugs if you could put any ideas you have there we'll review suggestions and get to work ;-)

Labels: Open Source, Social Networking, SocialFront

So we've started Dev Day 3 on Social front.

9.30

So this morning we've been planning the install procedure for the Umbraco package, discussing how we've going to manage names of files, alias names, macro names and drinking tea.

Having discussed all this stuff so far we've found that it's not quite as simple as all that and now we're getting down to the hard work of coding up some custom install functionality.

12:30

So far we've created a package for the site and found a couple of bugs in the package setup system. The bugs are more gotchas in the export function, I've listed them here so you can vote them up ;-)

http://umbraco.codeplex.com/WorkItem/View.aspx?WorkItemId=24438
http://umbraco.codeplex.com/WorkItem/View.aspx?WorkItemId=20572
http://umbraco.codeplex.com/WorkItem/View.aspx?WorkItemId=24407

I've just blogged over on central station about my visit yesterday to Realtime Worlds please go and check it out.

Dundee Popup / Realtime Worlds

You can also check out their profile and I'm sure they'd be happy to answer any questions you have about their new game APB.

Labels: Central Station, Games, Realtime worlds

Here is the video of me taking about Central Station.

Jon Carlos talks about ThisIsCentralStation.com from TechMeetup on Vimeo.

I just wanted to do a quick update as I'm speaking at the Glasgow TechMeetup on Jan 27th 10. It's a very short introduction to how we build Central Station

I'm going to show a couple of little things we did that are quite cool, like how we converted the standard KickApps Member Profile pages from the standard to what we have.

There will also be a quick overview of Umbraco the open source CMS we use at Screenmedia

Anyway if you're in Glasgow need some food and drink(Free Pizza & beer) come see us at:
TechMeetup #8
Kick-off at 7pm, finishing at 10pm.
Ground floor of the Saltire Building.
Glasgow Caledonian University

Also speaking is Jay Jagpal he'll be talking about Adobe Flash & Flex, how it can be used today and how it will drive iPhone and multitouch development tomorrow.

Labels: Central Station, cms, Kickapps, screenmedia, techmeetup, Umbraco

While looking at the market for social networking applications there are some big issues with them. The main ones were display, portability and plugability. When working with any SaaS/white label product you are at the development companies mercy as to when, how and what extensions are released and when.

For anyone who has a client that wants a product that does not exist on the market or wants more functionality than is currently available this is a bit of a problem. Now API's are all good and well, and for many products they make mashing so much easier but even if a social network has an API they are generally really complex to consume.

This is especially difficult if you want a little from here and a little from there. You have to learn each API and it's intricacies and apply them to one system. Once this is built you have one system that is good for what the client that wanted it setup in that way, but what about the next client that wants to use a different video provider or blogging system? These are the issues that we are currently trying to brain storm and work out.

In the meant time we've decided that Umbraco is the way forward for us at the moment. We're working on a prototype that developers can use to create social networks based on the Umbraco Content Management System.

So far David and I have done a days development chronicled at SocialFront for Umbraco and SocialFront for Umbraco - Development Day One.

Later this month we intend to do another days dev to get a little more code cut but in addition and due to the feedback we've had from developers interested in the idea, we'll be concentrating on functionality and how we can get others involved in the project and how to manage it.

If you're interested please give me a or David a shout and later in the month we should have a better idea of how this is going to be extensible as a project and as an idea.

Please leave comments or email me jon at socialfront dot org

Labels: Open Source, Social Media, Social Networking, SocialFront, Umbraco