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

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

So over the last few weeks I've been working with the KickApps platform for a couple of projects. I figured I would share some of the problems I've come up against and some of the simple things that are possible with Umbraco and KickApps.

Firstly KickApps is really easy to setup all you do is go to KickApps.com and sign up for an Affiliate account and you get a 30 day free trial.

Once you've got you Social network setup you should head on over to KickDeveloper.com this is a community of developers that are working with various languages and systems and integrating them with KickApps.

Now I should point out that KickApps offer a few different APIs and depending on the size of the system you're building and number of hits you'll be recieveng different APIs are available to you.

With a standard account you recieve an API key for the SSO(Sing Sign On) system and you can also utalise the RSS Rest interface to call any of the data on your social network. KickApps also provide some nice utility classes for C# and other lauguages to use the SSO system. In addition to this there is JavaScript API for community pages hosted by KickApps.

If you are wanting to use the KickApps platform but not use their pages you can communicate directly with the KickApps system using the REST API. You have to enter into an enterprize contract with them for this.

RSS Feeds

So working with RSS in Umbraco is a piece of cake. In the umbraco.library namespace there is a Method called GetXmlDocumentByUrl all you do is send in a url string to an XML feed and it will leave you with an object you can work with using Xpath. Depending on what calls you make to the RSS will depend data you recieve but in general you will recieve a fully populated RSS document with some additional namespaces added. Ths most important of these are mrss and karss.

In addition to using GetXmlDocumentByUrl you can Cache the feeds using the Feed Cache package for Umbraco.

MRSS

MRSS is a modification to RSS that allows additional media to be added to the feed. More info can be found at Wikipedia and Yahoo.

KARSS

KARSS is also a modification to RSS and adds some really important nodes to the documents. Some of the most useful are the addition of:
ka:totalitems - This is the total number of items that are in the request
ka:uploadedByUrl - The URL to the Members profile page

So thats a very basic overview of how you can use Umbraco to get data from KickApps.

KickApps SSO and Umbraco

Umbraco has a built in Membership system that's been integrated with the ASP.net Membership Provider. There are some control thats have been written for Umbraco that helped me work with the membership system and we're also very simple to integrate. You can find them in the umbraco extensions repository on codeplex. Note these may be a little out of date for Umbraco v4 but keep and eye out for SociaFront for Umbraco ;-)

KickApps give you a a great ASP.Net Helper Class for communicating with their SSO API but don't give much in the way of documentation on how to use it. The KickApps Soap SSO page also contains helper classes for php and other languages.

One of the first things I found when using the SSO helper was that it was trying to write some xml files to the root c: directory. This location on my computer was locked from IIS so first I had to change lines 155 and 162 to use HostingEnvironment.ApplicationPhysicalPath in stead of the hard coded c:\

Next I needed to work out exactly how to use this class. Fortunatley a member of the EPiServer community had already been through the problems I was approaching and I found some good examples of how to use the KickApps SSO Helper here.

Once I'd finished getting sign up, sign in and sign out working I needed to add some information to the KickApps Member profile. I was needing to add tags to a member but I ran in to some difficulty here. In KickApps tags are dealt with by the content part of the system not the member part. This meant that to add a tag to the system I had to use the REST API not the SSO API.

This is something that could definatley be improved as I really don't think you should have to use 2 APIs when trying to add content to one object even if in your systems they are seperate. Another thing that is a little unclear in the documentation for SSO is what fields are required for Sign Up although reciently and I guess after some customer feedback the documentation has been updated check out Edit/Update profile.

So these are some of my experiences of KickApps and Umbraco so far on this development. If you fancy a look check out www.thisiscentralstation.com I hope you like it. The design is by ISO Design and development, technology is by screenmedia.

I also launched www.pocket-place.com this week for our friends over at Tern Digital
If you're a mobile developer in Scotland you should check these guys out. They are well affiliated with the Innovation Centre in Glasgow and well worth getting in touch with. This site is also Umbraco based with a KickApps community.

Labels: Central Station, Kickapps, Pocket Place, screenmedia, Social Media, Social Networking, Umbraco

ISO and Screenmedia have just launched thisiscentralstation.com a new community for artists in the UK.

Come have a look it's quite a site. Make sure you check out the Community as well as the Artist Collections and Members Showcase.

Personally I'd like to say thanks to Simon at KickApps for all his help over the last few weeks.

I've started writing a blog explaining a little about how the site and community are built. I'll try and get it up over the weekend.

Labels: Art, Community, ISO Design, Kickapps, screenmedia, Social Media, Social Networking, Umbraco