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I will present you the CMF editor and some of its key features. It's a content editor for the CMF project that we designed at Liip AG to pave the way to better experiences in this somehow traditionnal field.

We didn't start reiventing the wheel, we wanted to create an editor based on the last technologies, leveraging the 'decoupled' content management approach to improve the user's efficiency and also to improve the fun while using a backend application. We based our work on some great open source components such as VIE and Hallo.

After having a first version we participated to the IKS semantic UX contest happening last winter. Winning the prize allowed us to add semantic functionalities in our product.

In the last weeks we also merged our work with the CreateJS project so that we would all work under the same project and share some important features that we did separately.

To give you a better overview of the software we built here is a list of the main features:

-  Edit in place: The editor doesn't live in the back of your website, it's right here on the front of your pages.

-  Rich but simple interface: The interface is very simple yet very powerful. For example, you can drag and drop your images in your content and directly see how it will look like or you don't have to worry about loosing your content as auto-saving and local recoveries are included.

-  Extendable: We wrote some plugins to pave the way, but the idea is that one can write new plugins for the users to have the right tools for each specific business cases. The interface has been designed to handle extensions and keep a uniform feeling even with plugins made by different people.

-  Semantic: We built many semantic functionalities thanks to IKS.

-    Tagging suggestions based on your content

-    Automatic tagging of assets to keep highly linked and qualitative content in your system

-    Automatic article relationship through auto tagging of content

-    Automatic external links suggestion based on your actual tags and semantic services

To present the editor in a more effective way, I created some Screencasts to show the main features of the editor and how to use them.

I hope you will get interested in this project and that you found this post interesting.

Further links:

-  The screencasts are on youtube.

-  Link to the live demo.

-  Link to createJS.

-  If you want to know more about the CMF project.

-  The live demo called sandbox is on Github.

Kind regards,

Loïc Schülé

I'm just back from the J.Boye Web and Intranet conference in Aarhus, Denmark. I went there to participate in the IKS Semantics UX contest that I had the honor to win. This invitation gave me a great opportunity to be a part of this unique conference. I would like to spend some time to share my thoughts with you on it.

The conference

Why is this conference unique? Because it focuses on the Web and Intranet from a user perspective. It is the perfect place for large organization members to share experiences, ask questions openly and discuss a broad range of themes that varies from going mobile to health oriented intranets. The talks were thus not really made for me and as much as I found them clear and well presented, they didn't rock my world. But that's fine, because I'm not the target audience and it's also my professional responsibility to be informed and on the front of the wave. On the other hand and as you can imagine, being a vendor in the middle of all these users was really great.

The social aspect

I didn't try to pitch for Liip so much because it was clear that this went against the spirit of the conference. What I tried to do was to be as open as the rest of the crowd and try to participate and help answering some questions and problems that most of web project managers, social strategists and intranet managers have. The effect has been tremendous, I ended up having enlightening and rich discussions on many different aspects of the business I'm in. I was surprised and astonished to see how much Liip and my professional experiences generally seemed to interest and impress others a lot. I heard many times "Oh really, and I thought there was no way to get this done...".

Conclusions

Here is a small list of some conclusion I could make after so many discussions.

On Mobile strategies:  Niwea is the trend governments and large corporations adopts for their intranet strategies.

On User Experience practices: Doing the workshops that Liip does (the 5S model) and integrating the UX process into SCRUM clearly appealed to the people.

On CMSs: Decoupled components and going away from a monolitic block is the future of CMS, open or not. We try to reach that with Symfony CMF

On project management: Successful project with SCRUM were common contrary to more traditional approaches that brought mostly cost explosions and years late delivered projects. 

I have more examples but what I would like to share here is that this conference has been an incredible chance to get a strong validation that Liip has a great strategy. It's difficult to phrase the overwhelming feeling that I constantly felt during the conference. Liip is doing the right thing, answering real needs and in the perfect way. The best part is that's it's not me saying this, it's the sum of validation I brought back with me.

On top of that I met some really great folks, inspiring, sometime challenging, always interesting and extremely open. This openness is the main speciality of the conference and make it totally worth it. It's my take home message. Be open minded, don't close yourself in a mentality and keep listening to other, there is everything to win doing that!

I had to relaunch a web site using Serendipity with a new Drupal installation. The old site had about 100 blog posts and lots of comments we did not want to lose. After some googling, i found this excellent blog post on creating drupal nodes programmatically and this useful resource on drupal node fields. i knocked up the following script that does the job. Just copy this to s9y-import.php and place it in your web root and call it in your web browser. Please back up your database in case something goes wrong (believe me, if you have no backup, it will go wrong!). You might want to read the code comments to know about the current limitations.

Read the full post to see the source code.

After Lukas asked me for the current Planet sources, I realized that I didn't really maintain the sources in the mentioned SVN repository anymore (for various reasons). So I decided to finally move them to GitHub. It makes much more sense there, since the most decent thing to do if you want to set up your own planet is to fork it and git (plus GitHub) makes that painlessly easy. Nevertheless I'm of course still interested in patches :)

Please be aware, that the code for the planets is pretty old, it uses a framework, which is declared deprecated and the code sometimes evolved a little bit too much (i.e. some refactoring wouldn't be too bad). You also may find files in the repository, which shouldn't belong there :) But OTOH, it's working day in, day out since ages and does what it's supposed to do.

The sources for Planet PHP are here: http://github.com/chregu/planet-php/tree/master
The "fork" for Planet Switzerland is located in the blogug branch at http://github.com/chregu/planet-php/tree/blogug

We don't like Spam 2.0 and we did our part lately for better declaration of paid stuff. And since last weekend, Google doesn't like it either and is penalizing webpages, which sell text links or paid reviews. Matt Cutts apparently always warned about selling links without proper usage (like rel="nofollow), but since the last PageRank update of Google, it looks like it indeed happened (but in general, PageRanks fall and raise all the time and as every other SEO will tell you, is not important anyway :) )

Is this the beginning of the end of Spam 2.0? If you need a high PR to get good money with textlinks, but your PR falls if you do that (and your search engine position with it), it's maybe a lot less interesting for the average and self-respecting site owner to do it. And if you do it correctly (with rel="nofollow"), your clients don't get any linklove anymore and paying for them doesn't look that attractive anymore ...

But maybe it's just a big plot by Google, so that everyone will use AdSense in the future, since that certainly won't have any decrease of your PR as consequence (but also doesn't generate linklove for the advertiser). It's certainly not only for the love of humankind Google does such things.

Via Markus Tressl

Just as the advent of the Web had a profound impact on the way business is made and deals or done, the concepts under the "Web 2.0" umbrella term (social software, blogs, mashups, all the Ajax glitter etc.) are starting to influence the corporate mindset - even here in good old Switzerland. Or, along the lines of Euan Semple in "The 100% guaranteed easiest way to do Enterprise 2.0": best thing organisations can do is get out of their employees' way and let "Enterprise 2.0" happen with the least amount of control possible.

So when Switzerland's most-hated company (Cablecom, our cable TV monopolist going for quadruple-play ..) came to us and allowed us to apply the lessons learned in our 2.0ish projects in corporate setup, something interesting had to come out for sure.

Now that thing called "Intraweb 2.0" has been presented and discussed in different places already and is going to presented, demoed and scrutinized once more at the upcoming Internet Briefing TechTalk, 2007-05-06 (next week!), 11.15-14.00, Zürich, Zunfthaus zur Schmiden.

The project is going to be presented by the client, but Chregu and me are going to attend as well (maybe you too?), so the entire range of topics should be covered somehow :)

... is over and I had lots of fun, met interesting new people and long-time-no-see "old" friends and had interesting discussions. I went to 2 presentations, the first by Jürg Stucker about namics' internal multi-blog platform, quite interesting, as we currently build something similar for one of our customers (which was present, as well :) )

The second presentation was by blog.benbit.ch about XSS or as he put it "Wie man sich mit einem Blog unbeliebt macht." (in English: "how to make oneself unpopular with a blog"). While he's completely right that XSS is a dangerously underrated security issue and should be taken much more seriously (we blogged about it more than 2 years ago), his tone, arrogance ("at least one third in here will hate me now") and technical half-knowledge was none the less a little bit annoying. One of his solution "don't use auto-login" for example just raises the entry-barrier for exploiting XSS issues, but usually doesn't help anything to prevent them at all. But at least he didn't claim he's a technical expert, so I can't really blame him for that. Nevertheless an entertaining presentation and certainly opened up the eyes of a lot of people in that room, so mission accomplished :)

Now last but not least, a big thanks to the organizers, a well done "unconference", I'll be happy to come again next time.

More pictures by me at flickr and by the others and tons of blogposts.

Tomorrow, I'll attend (together with approx. 200 other people) BlogCamp Switzerland. I'm quite curious how that will turn out.

It was suggested to use the tag "blogcampswitzerland" for all posts related to that event, and as planet.blogug.ch does understand and parse tags, you can follow the "show" over there with the URL: http://planet.blogug.ch/tag/blogcampswitzerland

I'll hopefully also blog from the event, but I don't promise anything right now :)

Really. It doesn't go any cheaper with the "user generated content" idea than what "bluewin/swisscom fixnet" is trying to do

Looks like their blog-hoster didn't consult them very well about how that web 2.0 stuff is supposed to work...

But anyway, looks definitively like bluewin is trying to jump on that train somehow, there's that other project called "My Bluewin World", which should be something like... mmmh, I don't know :)

Other (more articulated) opinions from the blogosphere on Planet Switzerland here and here

It happened to Jerome last week here, now it happened to me too on leu's blog: a comment declared as spam by akismet (I just had a link to a Bitflux Blog article in it and Jerome's was unsuspicious too).

Anyone else experienced such problems? Would be too bad, if akismet is getting less reliable...