Pod1 Blog

We’ve implemented Wordpress for many of our clients, and the social side of blogging is one of the main reasons to do that. The options for doing social networking around a blog have just got broader, as an enhanced version of the Buddypress extension to Wordpress has just been launched.

Buddypress offers bloggers the following:

• Enhanced membership and profiles for registered members (who might be anyone)
• Groups so those members can organise around shared interests
• Ability to have lists of friends among other members of the blog’s community
• Activity streams, showing what members have been up to
• Messaging and discussion tools that extend Wordpress into a true social application

Buddypress has matured and become very reliable, and the latest version addresses 2 important limitations of its predecessors:

• You don’t have to install Wordpress-MU any more, which made set-up and administration more complex. You can still use Buddypress with Wordpress-MU if you want to.
• You don’t have to create Buddypress specific Wordpress themes, as they’ve developed tools that make existing Wordpress themes work with Buddypress.

I’ve installed Buddypress on my personal blog so that people can see it in action if they’re interested. It doesn’t have much of a community at present (just me!) but you can see all the features in operation.

Pod1 has become a Magento Enterprise Partner – the highest level of partner qualification offered by Varien, the developers of Magento. This is in recognition of our work to deliver a huge number of Magento websites this year, from London, New York and now Cape Town, the latest being Gieves & Hawkes, launched yesterday which combines Magento with the Wordpress blogging platform.

We’re very excited about our relationship with Varien and Magento. The new official link opens up access to a wealth of information and contacts, and will make our service offering to current and new clients even better.

See http://www.pod1.com/magento-ecommerce/ for more details on Pod1’s Magento offering.

So, I just heard that Google has open-sourced Closure Tools. Closure is Google’s set of tools that “help developers to build rich web applications with JavaScript that is both powerful and efficient” – http://code.google.com/closure/. It includes a Javascript Optimiser, comprehensive Javascript Library and easy templating system for Javascript.

Closure is what powers the frontend of Google Docs, GMail and Google Maps.

Anyway, what all this means for developers like myself, is that I can finally make a decision on what Javascript Library to use. It’s always been a hard decision for me because, really there are only 3 choices:

• Prototype
• JQuery
• Do it yourself

Now, I’ve always been a “Do it yourself” kinda guy,  but I do admit that things are almost always easier with Prototype or JQuery. The problem with these libraries is that I simply don’t like them. They each have strengths and weaknesses, which I won’t go into, but suffice to say that I never felt at home with either of them.

So now, there’s a new player, with a big name, and a proven track record, and while I probably won’t like it either, I have decided that it will be the one I stick with.

Does anybody out there have experience with all 3 and can you provide some feedback on what you prefer and why?

Google Commerce

Google, has now expanded its online prowess beyond its “Shopping Results”, just in time for the Christmas season. With Google Commerce Search, Google can now pull products from various retailers and e-commerce sites to reduce time spent hunting down specific items while enabling easy comparison.

Google Maps Navigation

Last week saw the introduction of a free turn by turn GPS navigation tool, a certain a game changer in the GPS turn by turn market seeing the stocks of Garmin and TomTom drop more than 20% since the announcement. Available on Google’s mobile OS Android and hopefully coming soon to the iPhone if Apple approves it. With Google’s wealth of information, would we be hearing “Turn left in 15 meters for a special offer on a McDonalds happy meal!”

Google Music Search

Google steps up to challenge iTunes with its new-found music searching capabilities, which will allow you to preview and purchase tracks right from the first page of search results.

Sage Pay

We’ve been working with Sage Pay (the leading UK payment services provider) for several months, to develop an official, tested Magento module for the UK market. The module will allow our clients and any other retailer who wants to work with Sage Pay to use their Sage Pay Server solution, which serves all the payment pages from Sage Pay’s server, making the solution very secure.

We’ve developed this module from the start with the intention of open sourcing it. As I’ve said before, Pod1 loves open source, and we’ll be doing a lot more of this sort of thing in the future. We’ve benefitted considerably from open source over the years, and we plan to contribute regularly going forward.

If you download the module and use it, please let us know of any problems. We’ve had it independently tested, but we plan to continue supporting it and enhancing it going forward.

We’re getting very busy with projects on the Magento open source eCommerce platform, and to meet demand we’re even opening a new office in Cape Town next month. I can’t name names now, but all the projects look really exciting, and we need your help, especially if you’re experienced with Magento. If you don’t have Magento, but know Zend that could be interesting too.

Free Toast, all you can eat, at Pod1!

Whether you’re in the Northern Hemisphere or the Southern Hemisphere, Pod1 could be your next job. We have free toast (as much as you can eat!) so get in touch at iwanttowork@pod1.com

There must be something in what Varien is doing with the open source eCommerce solution, Magento, which Pod1 among others is using for so many of its clients. If it wasn’t important, I wonder if Demandware would be going to such great lengths to disparage it in this blog article.

Of course, lots of open source projects fail: this is an example of the Long Tail. But some projects are phenomenally successful. Apache drives more websites than any other competitor: almost half the world’s websites. Firefox is a huge success. Linux is growing stronger and stronger. Relying on the statistics of open source failure is like saying music hasn’t taken off because 99.9% of all music written never gets into the charts. The failures are a necessary consequence of the innovation that is such a critical part of open source: ideas get tried, most fail, some do OK, a few do incredibly well.

Pod1 is committed to open source, and an increasing number of our competitors, peers and clients are feeling the same way. We believe we can deliver a very competitive version of Demandware’s software as a service model using open source software like Magento alongside great hosting, support and development services, at a fraction of the price. And because so many people are working with Magento and extending it, we think we can deliver new functionality a lot faster than the big closed source vendors like IBM, ATG and Demandware.

Updated 25/8/09 17:30: Roy Rubin has written a really nice comment on the Demandware article on the Magento blog.

The press yesterday was full of the story of the hackers who stole 130 million sets of card data from US companies including Seven Eleven and Heartland, a payment services provider. Some commentators in the eCommerce world were suggesting that the case showed the lack of value of PCI-DSS compliance, since several of the companies affected were PCI compliant. If a company can pass the official test for card security, and still get breached very severely, how much use is the official test?

We think the standards are important, and one failure, however high profile it is, doesn’t make them worthless. PCI requires companies to have regular scans of their security, including their firewalls, by independent assessors, which should highlight any weaknesses like the ones in this news story. It also requires applications that handle card data to be reviewed and tested to make sure they don’t expose card data. The problem is that the security business is a game of cat and mouse: hackers find holes, security experts fill them. It seems the hackers found some very useful holes here, and managed to keep them to themselves for long enough to get lots of data out of the businesses concerned, but those holes are known now, and we can protect against them being used again.

Openness about security around the World is really important if we’re going to share and plug security holes quickly, and that’s one of the reasons being involved in open source software is such a good thing: because anyone can see the source code for a program that’s open source, anyone can point out potential problems, and they tend to get found and fixed a lot faster than they would have, in the closed source, proprietary world.

The stories yesterday attributed the hacking to something called SQL injection, and I think this cartoon explains what that is a lot better than anything I read in the press yesterday.

We’re putting the finishing touches to a microsite explaining our Epifony content management system over the next week or two. We built Epifony so that we can create rich and dynamic websites that our clients can manage themselves. An example of what this means can be seen here.

With Epifony, the business completely controls what pages there are, what’s on each of those pages and all that kind of thing. Pod1 has done 4 projects using Epifony now, and it’s proving to be a very powerful and flexible tool. One of the websites it supports is delivering over 5 million page impressions per month, so it’s scaleable as well.

There are plenty of commercial options for content management, and quite a few open source ones too, so why did we build our own? The solutions we looked at weren’t able to give our clients the total creative control they needed, and so we chose an open source framework called Symfony to give us a head start, and built Epifony from there. Now we can give our clients exactly what they need, quickly, in a royalty-free commercial setting.

The new microsite will explain what Epifony is, how it works, and why we like it for content managed websites.

I recently had a demonstration of Magento Enterprise Edition, from the team at Varien. The demonstration and conversation were very helpful, so I thought I’d blog some of the key points.

Magento is now offered in 2 editions:

• The free open source Community Edition
• The paid-for Enterprise Edition

Both are based on the same Magento Core code, which will be kept in parallel ongoing, The differences with the Enterprise Edition break down into 2 categories:

• The support for the code
• Additional plug-ins and modules that are not available in the Community Edition

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