News from July, 2008

Now there's no excuse to not develop sites using open standards - check out Opera's free online curriculum...

Chris at Opera sent this:

I'm contacting you because the first release of the Opera Web Standards Curriculum is now available at http://www.opera.com/wsc.

This is Opera's tutorial course, aimed at improving the level of education in web standards worldwide, and increasing the rate of standards adoption on the Web. Once finished, it will provide a complete coverage of web design theory, HTML and CSS, and a solid grounding in JavaScript basics. Even better, it's completely free to use and distribute - released under a creative commons license.

We think it will be useful to anyone who wants to learn or teach client-side web design/development "the right way", including students and teachers at schools or universities, trainers and employees inside companies, etc. It already has support from several universities and large companies, including Yahoo!

I'd like you to pass this on to anyone you think might find it useful, and blog about it, if you like it. Feel free also to give me feedback - suggestions for improvements etc.

There are over 50 proposed articles, and 23 are currently published.

All the best,

Chris Mills
Opera Software ASA

Been frantically busy recently and the workload shows no sign of slowing any time soon. Just taking a brain break and thought I'd blog about some stuff that's happening in the land of Adaptavist...

G'day Mate!

Yup, we now have a presence in Australia - many of you will be familiar with the work of Shannon Krebs such as the Social Networking plugin, Contributors plugin, etc. He's now a full-time Adaptavist member

Shannon's primary role at the moment is to accelerate the development of our Community Bubbles plugin and he's doing a great job!

The only downside is that my body clock is even more messed up - I'm now splitting my day across three timezones: UK, US, Australia!

Shannon pointed me to that cartoon on XKCD and yes, it's definitely me!

Community Bubbles 1.0 release draws closer

We're rapidly approaching the 1.0 release of Bubbles, complete with comprehensive documentation and support so keep an eye on our newsroom!

With the next release we'll have the stable versions of portals and widgets, bulk email (eg. email all recent contributors or new users, etc), user interest features (maintain watch and favourite lists at site, space and page level), favourites lists (now bugfixed!) and more.

The subsequent 1.1 release will add in the community features (a major part of the plugin that's taken an age to perfect) and later the 1.2 release will add in the social networking features.

Documentation is the new Feature Tour

On the subject of Bubbles, we've taken a new approach with the documentation. We get a lot of feedback from customers using our Theme Builder plugin saying that it's sometimes hard to know where to start.

So, the top-level of our Bubbles Documentation now acts as a feature tour explaining each key area of the plugin before linking to all the associated documentation.

This approach is working so well that we'll likely apply it to our Confluence and Theme Builder user guides:

• The feature tour is far more concise when developed this way
• It makes it really easy to learn what the plugin does
• It makes it much easier to find documentation regarding a specific task

So, check out the Bubbles Documentation and let us know what you think!

Improved Site Navigation

We've been spending lots of time simplifying the navigation and structure of our site - there's still lots to do, but if you are a regular visitor you'll hopefully already be benefiting from some of the changes:

• The menu bar has been redesigned so it links to useful stuff - from anywhere in the site you can get to all the key spaces relating to our products and services; no more wading through the spaces list on the dashboard!
• Most top-level pages are now cleaner and simpler, making it really easy to find what you're looking for.

Like I say, there's still a load of work to do - eg. space home pages, download pages, etc. - but hopefully we're headed in the right direction! Again, I'd love to know what you think of the changes.

Our online tracker hasn't been ignored either - the home page now links to a bunch of tutorials showing how to do common tasks like adding tickets, uploading attachments and adding additional participants to tickets. JIRA is still quite a techie application, but hopefully cleaning up the dashboard and providing some really good tutorials will ease the learning curve for new customers. We're quietly working on a longer term solution to simplifying JIRA, but I won't divulge any more about that until 2009.

Theme Builder 3.2.0 is almost here

Our team have been locked in dark rooms for months now, preparing Theme Builder 3.2.0. Some of the killer new features are:

• Open Search - now you can search your wiki from your browser's search box, even if you're looking at a different website. You can see where it all started in one of my old blog posts.
• Render mode selection for theme panels - now you can choose between HTML, wiki markup or velocity versions of either. There's also a noticeable performance boost when using the default wiki rendering mode.
• Blog macros - have you ever wanted to aggregate news from several wiki spaces, for example all spaces with a specific team label or those you've marked as favourite? Well, now you can! There's also a blog archive macro that displays a list of years and months allowing people to quickly jump to your old posts.
• Web UI lists - Builder has always allowed you to heavily customise the navigation, but there's never been a simple way to quickly add in the same structure of navigation as you get in the default Confluence theme - now there is!

We've got a beta of Theme Builder 3.2.0 running on our website so expect to see these features appearing all over our site sometime soon!

Some new services

We've added a couple of new services to the Bespoke Solutions arm of our business:

• Theme Customisation – fixed-price theme customisation services using our Theme Builder plugin
• Developer Mentoring – allow your in-house developers to tap in to the brains of our developers

There's also a "Confluence Health Check" service but we've not had time to get the documentation page finished for it yet. If your wiki is feeling ill, get in touch because we have an inexpensive remedy!

There's a load of other stuff going on, but I'm all blogged out for now. Time to get back to real work...

If you've not looked at the Word/DAV plugin for a while, I'd highly recommend paying it another visit - it's got some awesome new features. View an online demo.

Everyone knows IE6 is harming the Internet - it's the biggest source of pain for every web developer due to it's bugs, security issues and slow performance, yet there are still vast numbers of people using it as their primary browser. Time for change...

Introducing: Internet Explorer 6 Uninstall Day

Released in 2001, Internet Explorer 6 is almost 7 years old - in technology terms that's ancient history, in Internet terms is a whole geological era.

As the most insecure, slowest and buggy browser in widespread use today, it is causing severe harm to the Internet both for end-users, web developers and companies of all sizes.

To help retire this browser, we're holding the world's first "Internet Explorer 6 Uninstall Day" on the 27th of August, 2008 – the 7th birthday of IE6.

If you're not able to upgrade to IE7, there's plenty of other browsers to choose from such as Firefox 3, Safari 3 and Opera 9.

Join the facebook group, share it's link, spread the word – make the Internet a better place for everyone!

If you have mission critical business apps that require IE6, you don't necessarily have to uninstall it - just install a modern browser, such as Firefox 3, Opera 9 or Safari 3, alongside IE6 and use the modern browser for the majority of your browsing. You'll benefit from significantly better performance, reliability and security.