Last changed: Jul 11, 2008 21:43 by
Guy Fraser
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:
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...
2008/07/11
