Part 2: The software

I’ve mentioned several times before that this whole site is built on a system called Wordpress MU (multi-user). This is a piece of software designed to run multiple blogs, and itself is built on the very well-known Wordpress software. The most famous installation of Wordpress MU is at wordpress.com, a website with nearly 5 million blogs (their homepage gives the exact number) which contains a vast array of authors writing about every subject under the sun.

Wordpress is free software provided by the nice folks at Automattic (hi Matt and Andy!). It’s also open source (I’ve talked about open source software before) which means anyone can take the code and do (almost) what they want with it. Which, of course, is exactly what we’ve done.

Wordpress offers quite a lot of the basic functionality we needed: user registration and management, blogs (we call them “sites”), post and page editing, and of course the back-end code which runs the site. For everything else (including media library, showrooms, the lists of members and companies, industries and a lot more) I wrote a series of plugins which work on top of Wordpress and result in what you see before you.

The advantage of this approach is we get all the advantages of a very well-resourced software application (over 150 people contributed to the last version of Wordpress), with our own customised stuff on top.

But Wordpress is just one of the building blocks, as it were. I used a lot of other tools to actually get this site to this level of complexity.

The other main building block is another piece of open source software: MySQL. For those of you familiar with Microsoft SQL Server, oracle, db2 or even Access you’ll know what a database is and what it does. You may even have a fair idea about how the myJournal database is set up. For those that aren’t quite that geeky, here’s a quick explanation.

A database is basically a piece of software that stores data. “Data” can be almost anything: lists of member names, company details, posts in a forum discussion and lots more types of textual data are stored for this site. The power of relational databases, such as MySQL, is they can also define the relationships between different bits of data. So, for example, in our database we have a relationship between each myJournal and the people who are their contacts. When you click “Add a contact” or “Accept a contact request” what you’re actually doing is modifying the data and relationships in the database.

It’s actually simpler than it sounds. Or maybe it’s more complicated, I can’t quite decide.

So, to actually put these building blocks together I used several pieces of software. My main development environment is a text editor called SciTE. Here’s a screenshot of some of the code in the myJournal homepage in SciTE (when in Windows I prefer Notepad++).

I don’t really like those visual HTML editors as I find they can too easily mess up what should otherwise be beautiful code. I’m a bit of a stickler for that. SciTE is where I write the HTML, PHP, CSS and JavaScript code for all the sites I’ve done. I also use the MySQL management suite extensively for testing SQL scripts.

Moving up a level from the back-end of the site to the front-end, I use a little tool of my own devsing to provide the cool interactive features of the site. Remember years ago on the web anytime you clicked something it would reload the whole page and everything took ages? Nowadays many sites are trying to be a bit cleverer with their interfaces (some people call this change Web 2.0). myJournal want to be on the cutting edge, and to provide members with a slick site so we’re using some of the same techniques.

For example, when you click the “Add a new member to this site” link instead of the page being reloaded, the form pops out under the link in a most pleasing and modern manner. That’s all due to the power of JavaScript – an often-overlooked and ridiculed programming language. I happen to really like JavaScript, which is why I wrote the Performer library. Performer works with a clever bit of JavaScript called prototype to make putting these modern interface techniques on websites really easy.

Obviously, you have to be a bit geeky to use Performer, but nowhere near as geeky as if you were trying to write all this stuff from scratch yourself.

So, I’ve covered the foundation of myJournal being Wordpress. The database system is MySQL. I code in SciTE and do SQL stuff in the MySQL tools. I also use Performer and prototype to add the interactive sugar on my little digital cake. What else?

Well, as you know I run a flavour of Linux called Ubuntu. But the site needs testing in Windows (as many people worldwide haven’t seen the light, yet). So I use virtual machine technology from VMWare to run a Windows operating system in a window inside my Ubuntu. Clever stuff.

Finally I wouldn’t be without the little browser that could – Firefox. With a selection of special add-ons, Firefox turns into a can’t-live-without tool in my arsenal.

So, there’s a quick introduction to the tools I’ve used to build myJournal. Next time I’ll be talking about some of the great features we have, and how I built them.

Part 1: My Computer and Free Software

Firstly I’m going to talk about my trusty steed, a dual-core AMD Athlon machine with 2 gigabytes of RAM (soon to be upgraded to 4 I think). It has a fairly standard graphics card, but a quite nice sound card (for the rare occasions when I have chance to do some music recording). The stand-out thing about it is I’m running a version of Linux called Ubuntu.

The vast majority of people will be used to using Microsoft Windows. Perhaps you’re aware of another type of computer called a Mac (made by Apple, who do iPods and iPhones). The problem with both Microsoft and Apple is they charge money. Call me a skin-flint, but I want something for nothing. When it comes to a computer there are two main bits you need: firstly a box of electronics, and secondly some software called an operating system which allows you to do things with your box of electronics. Windows is an operating system, but you have to pay for it.

With Linux, which is a free operating system, you don’t have to pay for it. That’s because rather than a company paying several roomfuls of people to make it, like Microsoft and Apple do, Linux is made by people who donate their time. They are just nice people doing something they enjoy for the good of all. Very egalitarian.

And because Linux has no single company forcing it to be what they want it to be, lots of different versions of Linux are available – just like in Starbucks you can make your own coffee, Linux allows you to pick and mix the bits of an operating system you want. A great place to start, however, is Ubuntu.

Ubuntu is free to download (they’ll even send you CDs for free) and contains not just an operating system which allows you to get on the Internet, but loads of other great software – all free! – as well. Things like the wonderful Open Office suite (fully compatible with Microsoft Word and Excel) and the GIMP graphics editor, plus some other things you may have heard of like Skype, Firefox and Tetris.

I actually use a modified version of Ubuntu called Ubuntu Studio which is tweaked specially for music and graphic production. It looks pretty cool, as you can see.

If you’re interested in trying out Ubuntu then just follow the instructions on their website. You can even use Ubuntu and Windows together (without messing up either) in case you can’t give up Windows completely. There are more great reasons for using Ubuntu here.

Next time I’ll talk about the specific pieces of software I’ve used to write myJournal.

Up until recently I’ve had to do a bit of hacking – changing the Wordpress source code – to make some of the more difficult things work. That’s meant it was a bit of a pain each time a new version of Wordpress came out, because upgrading meant redoing all my hacks. Well, no more! After bouncing some ideas of a member of the Wordpress team (specifically Andy Peatling who is developing BuddyPress) many hacks have gone, replaced with just one hack in one place – much easier to manage.

Does it work? Well, the site is now running on the very latest version of Wordpress with the new hack-light system in place, and it seems to be holding up well.

So what else has been happening? Firstly I’ve made the title and text boxes for the “Write a new entry” quick writing form on your journal page much bigger. I started to write this article and realised it was rubbish. I’ve also just put live a new “Latest products” list on the homepage which shows products which have just been added by any company. That’s a great way to get a bit more exposure for your products, so it’s now even more important to write a clear title and description so people know what they are looking at.

I’ve also done quite a bit of work in the Control Panel, adding a new “Get started” box and a wizard that takes you through the first steps in setting up your myJournal profile. That’s great for people who aren’t sure what to do once they have a myJournal account.

Speaking of the Control Panel, you may have noticed the new “Blocked members” page in the Contacts section. That’s where people who have annoyed you will go when you block them. You can block someone when they send you a myJournal email, a Wire message, or a contact request. Once someone is blocked they won’t be able to contact you again. We’ll keep an eye on who is blocking who, so if someone is obviously annoying a lot of people we can deal with them appropriately.

I’ve also done a load of little changes, including adding a list of countries for you to choose for your personal profile. There’s also quite a bit of search engine optimisation work happened, particularly with regard to showrooms, which should help you get even more exposure online.

OK, loads of changes there, but hopefully you’re as excited as me about the next phase of myJournal.

So what are these changes? In a nutshell we’ve rewritten the very basis of the system to make it even easier for people to communicate with each other. And even *not* communicate as you can now block members who are pestering you.

As I said, there are quite a few kinks to iron out. But we feel these recent changes, about which there’ll soon be much more written, will give you lots more options with how to use myJournal your way.

Firstly, and you’ll have seen this as it’s actually been live for a little while, is the “Who’s online?” feature on the homepage which shows you which users have been active on the site recently. This is going to be used for a few other things in the future, such as telling you who is reading certain network discussions and who is looking at your showroom. We’re big believers in real-time statistics (we use Woopra) so things like “Who’s online?” will hopefully provide some live stats to help you see what’s going on with your myJournal sites, and also help you to discover new people.

The second thing is also on the homepage and shows the last few posts that have been made anywhere in myJournal. So it’s an easy way to discover companies, authors and subjects that you may not have been aware of. Again, we’ve got lots more things we’re planning on doing with this kind of information.

It goes without saying that we’re also hard at work both making some of the existing parts of myJournal even better, and also adding new and innovative features to help you get the best from the web. As ever, any suggestions you have will be carefully considered.

I’ll talk more about the features myJournal offers at a later date, my brain is hurting now!, but for the time being you may like to look at my photo gallery of Yorkshire.

I’d also like to thank Vinnie and David for the opportunity to work on the project. I can honestly say it’s been a fantastic enterprise to be involved in, and I’m proud of what we’ve achieved. Thanks also go to all our testers, especially Paul for his expertise, and to Andy for too many hours listening to my wacky ideas and rants about code!