What a great day it is!

Silver Stripe has been working for some time on their release of version 2.2 and today Gally completed the integration of our Bootstrap drag and drop platform to that version. Currently we have upgraded only a couple of sites - all which are in development as opposed to live, but we expect to roll out the full version over the next few weeks.

• Some of the upgrades that the new system handles are:
• Much better drag and drop of the site tree menu
• Much nicer looking interface
• Way better handling of uploading and managing images
• A to do list on every page and then a report to identify what needs to be done
• Advanced security settings such that user access can be restricted to certain pages
• Page version history to see what changes have been made with version rollback
• Integrated basic analytics
• Search functionality
• Batch actions to delete or publish multiple pages
• The ability to save and publish a page at the same time

As you can see I am pretty excited. I spend a lot of time working in Bootstrap alongside our clients and just the look and feel upgrade has given me warm fuzzies.

We had to do a bit of development work to bring the Silver Stripe version 2.2 alongside our Bootstrap module, especially as we are using Prototype version 1.5 and Silver Stripe still uses 1.4 - but it seems we have got rid of any bugs as we don’t seem to be getting any Javascript errors etc.

The one bit of development work that we were hoping for from Silver Stripe was the language translation tools. This is pretty major but was broken in the Silver Stripe release. It is an important element for many of our clients so we will look to fixing this in the next few weeks ourselves and will release it back to the community.

For now though Bootstrap version 2.2 is out. We have not upgraded the demo on this site yet, but will do soon. In the meantime test the old demo here and feel free to contact us if you have any queries about Bootstrap and want to have a proper look and play with it.

It has been two weeks since I posted - but in all honest truth we have been so unbelievably busy. We have had a visit from Bruce Thurlow from Adventure Tours and Oz Experience for the past two weeks as we approach the final run in to the new Adventure Tours website as well as three websites going live - being Backpacking Queensland, Fletcher Living at Jacks Point and Waiata Lodge.

As most know the launch of Backpacking Queensland was drastically delayed by issues with hosting which are now thankfully resolved although Michael Gall had to do a last minute complete reprogramme of the Silver Stripe manifest builder to cop with the lower availability of memory on the host.

Anyway, today I want to address an email I received from Simon Gehert regarding Backpacking Queenslands’ new site and use it as an ideal opportunity to introduce you to some of the things we have done for the site. I quote

“Rarely have we seen something more obviously shoehorned into existing technology where it shouldn’t be. Take an open source CMS you didn’t develop complete with tag clouds, social network site links, unrelated blog headline feeds, google maps etc ,which was never intended for this purpose, add some crap interface design, a link to your site in the footer which says “Well made in New Zealand by Xebidy … and you have all the makings for a car crash of epic proportions.”

So ripping into it, for those that don’t know, the content management server that we develop on is based on the Silver Stripe platform. We didn’t develop Silver Stripe we just use it; and have greatly extended it. We chose to use Silver Stripe on this project (and most projects we do) because it is Open Source and we firmly believe in an Open Source philosophy. From a client’s point of view they get the code, the get a system that anyone can develop, and when the have moved on from Xebidy they can theoretically go out to any web developer and continued to get the system supported and extended.

Using a proprietary in house system restricts the website owner to that development company; if the company no longer drives the CMS development the client is inevitably left high and dry with a system they have outgrown and no one to support them. The Internet is moving so fast at the moment that you need a system that keeps pace with these changes, in-house systems inevitably are developed using clients’ money - if a client wants a feature then they pay for that to be developed in the CMS. In an Open Source environment many developers from all over the world are continually developing the system and trying to make it better for themselves and then sharing those advances back to the users. The system evolves faster and inevitably better. Take the example of the manifest builder in Silver Stripe; one of its’ weaknesses has always been the way it compiles all the PHP code when the site is first called - it uses a larger amount of memory than most hosting companies are happy to make available. When Michael Gall redeveloped the way the manifest builder worked to be used on the Backpacking Queensland host the first thing he did was put it back out to the development community, apart from being met with enormous cheers, he suddenly found himself with a huge amount of debugging help as everyone looks to incorporate it into their projects and into the main (trunk) system.

Silver Stripe is not the only Open Source content management system in the market, and is in fact in the whole scheme of things, a very small system; but there were a number of other factors in our decision making process. Firstly, it is developed in PHP5 which is quite a step up from PHP4, it is more structured, which suits a lot of the Java contractors we have had on board, and in our opinion is future proofing the development for some time to come. Secondly, at the time of choosing Silver Stripe it had recently been accepted for the Google Summer of Code which means Google sponsors a handful of projects across the world to have their projects developed under Google supervision - we thought this was a great tick of acceptance for the system. Thirdly, Silver Stripe actually provided a good framework for the guys to develop a lot of the other stuff we do beyond just the websites; such as our travel planner which is developed completely inside the framework. Finally, we choose Silver Stripe because it was developed in New Zealand and we thought that being a New Zealand company ourselves and promoting Open Source technologies to so many international clients is made sense to support local home grown that is well run and has a similar ethos.

It looks like this is going to be a long post, so I will break it into a few posts over the next few days and deal with some of the functionality then. But just to close there is one important point to reintroduce about the Silver Stripe content management server. Earlier on this year we undertook a huge interface change to the basic CMS. Having used lots of CMS’s over the years I wanted something in which the user interface and ability to build new pages was really easy and that the client did not have to keep coming back to get more pages developed etc. Xebidy developed the now popular Bootstrap interface which allows a user to drag components (which anyone can easily have developed by any web company knowing PHP) onto a page layout and thus build or redesign pages easily on the fly. This means a site can be easily extended or even redesigned at any point in the future without the massive effort that took place in the last few months with Backpacking Queensland in re-entering all their data. We think Bootstrap on the Silver Stripe platform is something very special and certainly the feedback we are getting from our many clients and the Open Source community says so also. For those interested in finding out more about Bootstrap here is a video of Davis Hammon presenting an earlier version and a demo is also available here.

We have finally got our Bootstrap demo up and running for all to play. It seems that whenever time was made to work on it something else would come up and we just did not have time. Nonetheless, here it is.

Feel free to login to the CMS and edit the content, create pages etc. The content is set to reload completely every hour.

Bootstrap is simply an interface change for the popular Silver Stripe content management server. The core of Silver Stripe is completely intact and Bootstrap can easily be added as a module. In fact, we are looking for developers wanting to get involved in helping us make it into a more off shelf open source module for all Silver Stripe users.

http://demo.xebidy.com

Well, its’ about bloody time some of you may say. But the first purely Xebidy designed website is live. The Park hostel in National Park.

This is one of the best hostels in New Zealand - evidenced by the blog stories we keep picking up. They might only be small guys but they certainly have an amazing product.

For this site we tried to bring the warmth of the atmosphere into the site - they have two huge open fires and being nestled in National park have stunning mountain views and a unique alpine feel. I have been lucky enough to have been there twice visits - once involving too many bourbons and an incredibly wrong decision not to jump into the spa pool with the Stray bus load of English girls after an eventful night in the National Park tavern - my wife is happy though.

Since then the guys have developed their own house bar and cafe which I am told is a roaring success for a chilled night in and a few quite ones (how many still end up in the spa, hmm?)

The unique things to look out for on this website are the inbound feeds from travel blogs around the Internet that feature The Park hostel. These travel stories are picked up by our Xebidy XEFEED product which is continually scanning all forms of social media including photo and video and video sharing sites, blogs, forums and review sites and feeding them back to a central server where we go through them sorting for relevancy and refeed these back to the website. Any criticisms or bad press can be picked up very quickly and sent through to management where they are immediately dealt with.

We also have a comments section on the site where guests are encouraged to leave their comments. We intend developing this further to produce a cool guestbook for reading of the comments - watch this space.

The site is built completely on our Bootstrap content management system (based on the awesome Silver Stripe open source platform) - which, if you have not heard about yet you must be in the dark ages! Have a look at Davis giving a seminar on it here.

Finally, we have linked the bookings part of the website to The Parks property management system, Starfleet. Our friends at Starfleet have integrated the booking engine so that it interrogates their database for availability and then populates with the booking - no need for endless double handling.

So, there you have it - a cool small site - lots of work to do on content to keep if fresh and happening but a site we are proud of as our first one purely designed and developed by Xebidy. We have retained a marketing contract with the guys at The Park and hope to do some really cool stuff over the next 12 months to get to the top of the search engines and lots of bookings!!

Over the last four months our team of long-haired, pierced, low-riding, caffeine-fueled developers have created an awesome CMS that we’re ready to show you!

Branded ‘Xebidy Bootstrap’, the Xebidy team have taken the award-winning open-source CMS - Silverstripe - and added advanced functionality that provides you, as the website administrator, functionality to easily drag and drop components into a number of preset layouts to create any page you desire.

Today I’d like to show you a video created a month ago that shows what we’ve been working on.

In a few days we’ll have a demo install of Xebidy Boostrap 1.0 ready online for you to play with.

We love open-source so much that we’re releasing Xebidy Bootstrap 1.0 source code to Silverstripe and the open-source community, and hope to see our work one day integrated into Silverstripe CMS. Check back in a few days for a source code release.

I spent the day yesterday with my mates at Base Backpackers finalising the go-live beta version of their new website as well as looking to the next few months advancement of the site. Xebidy did not design the site but we developed it onto our Bootstrap content management server which is based on the Open Source Silver Stripe CMS. The most exciting is probably the next 12 months however when Xebidy will be working with the guys at Base to develop the functionality into a new world with lots of great Web 2.0 features planned - I don’t want to let the cat out of the bag just yet; and also the implementation of an extensive Internet marketing plan that was authored by Jonathan Dixon at Xebidy.

One of the cool things about this project is the courageousness of management and foresight with respect to this project. A few weeks ago I posted about a real world web 2.0 dilemma we were facing on the project; in which we are taking automatic feeds of reviews and ratings from the independent Hostel World website and displaying them directly on the Base website. As I said while the reviews were not really that bad - there were reviews that you might not want to display on your home page necessarily. Nonetheless, it was decided that these reviews would be displayed regardless, unedited.

Base understands the importance of word of mouth and that in order to compete and achieve their objectives of being the best hostel/budget accommodation in Australia and New Zealand they simply have to provide the best possible product. A message has been sent out from head office to all hostel managers that the reviews and ratings will be considered as a measurement of success and that managers should strive to improve their ratings and address reviews head-on. Further a policy has been put in place to address any negative comments head on so that they are either turned into a positive or more importantly that the issue is taken on board, that if possible they are rectified and that the users are communicated that this has been done.

It will be great to monitor the reviews and ratings over the next 12 months and see what impact this positive attitude has. I am easily betting that all the Base hostels ratings will improve by at least 5 -10% (which is a lot when you consider they are already consistently the top rating hostels in their cities) over the next 12 months through both a positive influence on the ratings and review medium and also through increased focus of the manager directly on the feedback from their customers.

It’s going to be a great 12 months and I will keep you informed as we introduce some of the new functionality and rework the site - taking it from the soft beta launch it is today to the full functionality user-centric site that is planned.