Open Source Business Social Software

Two projects I’ve been looking at this summer show just how far the Open Source world has come with respect to social business software. Eureka Streams, which is a new open source project sponsored by Lockheed Martin, and based on the Open Social standard, and Drupal Commons, a project sponsored by Acquia and based on Drupal. Both offer a compelling feature set by leveraging existing platforms but with a focus on the needs of the collaborative, knowledge seeking business employee. Both also now have videos, feature tours, and communities of participation growing around them, so you won’t have to go it alone.

Photo by ThinkPublic, http://www.flickr.com/photos/thinkpublic/3042777307/

Spring Cleaning (in the Fall)

If you normally get Open Parenthesis posts via RSS reader, or syndicated on another site, you may not have noticed, but I’ve decided to switch things up here and install a new theme. I started this blog at the first WordCamp Boston back in May of 2006, right when I started working for Optaros, and I threw together a custom theme, based loosely on a very very popular theme called Rounded (to which I can no longer find anywhere to link):

Old Theme

It’s served me well, but over the years it’s come to feel a bit cluttered. Too many sidebars (more accurately perhaps too many widgets in the sidebars), too many colors, too many rounded corners (ah, the enthusiasm of Web 2.0), fonts too small, contrast too weak between text and background. The new theme is brighter (more white space!), lighter (less brown, blue, and orange – more red), and all around easier to read.

The new theme is based on one called Nameless by a German designer named Karsten Kuhnen:

Nameless Theme

I’ve made a few alterations, especially to the sidebar on the right, to better fit with the content here – but the design is very simple, clean, and modern. Hopefully less to distract you from the content.

WPBook – Posting to more page types, new site

(photo by hobvias sudoneighm, click for photo page)

Thanks to troubleshooting help from mommyknows and other users, I’ve been able to track down and fix an issue with posting to different kinds of pages.

Thanks to Brooke Dukes, we also now have a site for the plugin itself: wpbook.net – with instructions, blog posts about the plugin, and the like.

Grab 2.0.8.1 from the plugin repository and check it out!

(2.0.8 somehow incorporated a nasty syntax error – whitespace ahead of the opening PHP tag – so skip that and go straight to 2.0.8.1).

For a long time now WPBook has enabled users to cross-post excerpts from their blog posts to either the wall of their personal profile or the wall of a Facebook fan page.

However, in setting up WPBook many users were ending up with:

Read more…

Park Mobile comes to the MBCR

When I’m not traveling to client sites or working from home, I take the commuter rail in to Optaros’ Boston office, because I’m not fond of driving, and the traffic in Boston is legendary for both its volume and the craziness of the individual drivers in it.

Generally this means being dropped off and picked up at the commuter rail station, but every once in a while I drive and park there.

Today was one of those days, and my first chance to try out the new “pay for parking from your mobile phone” approach.

Read more…

Facebook Changes, WPBook

Interesting post today on the Facebook developer blog regarding the roadmap. The post noted that, among other things:

We are also moving toward IFrames instead of FBML for both canvas applications and Page tabs. As a part of this process, we will be standardizing on a small set of core FBML tags that will work with both applications on Facebook and external Web pages via our JavaScript SDK, effectively eliminating the technical difference between developing an application on and off Facebook.com.

We will begin supporting IFrames for Page tabs in the next few months. Developers building canvas applications should start using IFrames immediately. By the end of this year, we will no longer allow new FBML applications to be created, so all new canvas applications and Page tabs will have to be based on IFrames and our JavaScript SDK. We will, however, continue to support existing implementations of the older authentication mechanism as well as FBML on Page tabs and applications.

Finally, due to low usage rates, we will remove application tabs from user profiles in the next couple months. Application tabs will continue to be supported on Facebook Pages.

Good thing I finally got around to updating WPBook to support FBML-based tabs, just in time for them to be discontinued. ;)

Oh well, once they allow iFrames on tabs we’ll get the ability to do things like embedded videos. But then they’ll take tabs away from individual profiles? So individual profiles won’t have boxes or tabs?

I guess that will just encourage anyone really using WordPress as a platform for promoting their blog will end up creating a page, and then using the tab in the page?

You can see a timeline of some of the updates here: Developer Roadmap

They also changed the developer app again:

We’ve also spent some time cleaning up some of our developer tools and documentation. We’ve simplified the Developer application by removing obsolete settings and tabs

So the instructions for WPBook which I just updated last weekend will need updating again to match the new settings look & feel. Ah the joys of depending on a third party platform . . .