Hippo CTO blog - Arjé Cahn

News from the Dutch open source camp:

"On March 31, 2010, the first version of www.rijksoverheid.nl went live. This common website for all government ministries will make the central government more recognizable and accessible." (source: http://www.rijksoverheid.nl)

"Starting in 2010, the Dutch national government will communicate via a single website: www.rijksoverheid.nl. The various ministries will be added to the website in stages. As of its launch on 31 March, 5 ministries are currently active on this website. During the course of the year, the other ministries will be added." (source: http://www.rijksoverheid.nl)

I have to admit: our government has been very ambitious right from the start of this humongous project. The goal they set for themselves is not an easy one: to open up all information, in every possible way, using "Open Content, Open Data, Open Standards and Open Source".

It's no secret that this new grand website is based on a large set of open source components, among which many Apache projects, and of course my personal pride Hippo CMS. Hats off to Apache for being such a great open source community, and for being the foundation and source of inspiration for everything we do at Hippo!

"The government doesn't want to be tied to certain suppliers and licenses and therefore chooses for open standards and open source. [..] Using open standards will make it easier to exchange information with other government websites"

Congratulations to everyone who worked on this mega project, in particular everyone at ONS, Gerrit, Jettro, Michael, Gemma, all the JTeam guys, and of course the people here at Hippo: Bart, Berry, Frank, Ard, Stephan, Dennis, and the man who should receive an award for being the hardest working man in CMS business: Jeroen Reijn (maybe one day, he will :) ).

Posted by Arjé Cahn at 10:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

This is work in progress - but I got so excited when I saw it working that I couldn't resist turning it into a quick Friday afternoon demo video. This functionality will be released in Hippo CMS 7.4 which is scheduled for June, so I'm afraid I'm going to have to ask you for a bit of patience - but at least you'll have something to look out for :)

Suppose Joe is our author and he's working on a new article that he wants to push live. He requests publication, and sends the article off to his editor, Jane, for review.

I'm logging in as Jane now, and I can see the request that she got. Jane is fine with the article, so she pushes it live.

A couple of days later, Joe the author comes in again, and he changes some of that content he wrote before. And he requests publication again.

Jane logs in, sees the requests and wonders: What's new?

Hold it here - I need to explain some background. Of course we have versioning and history and all that. Every CMS does. But how easy is it to get to that comparison view? How many clicks do you have to perform to compare the current version of the document with the one that's online right now? And what kind of a view does it give you? How often do you do this? And if it would be *super* easy, wouldn't you just want to see that comparison view all the time? All in all, you're working with a team of editors in the same content pool and you need that contextual information about what's going on in the system, and who did what, where.

So that's what we did. We made it uber-super easy!

Click it - and there you go! That's what's new. Hippo CMS shows you the comparison view right there when you view the article. That is, when something has changed. It simply shows you the difference between the current version of the document and the one live on the website. How useful is that? If you need more information - you can of course dive into the version history, but this simple comparison view is probably all you need.

Again - we hope to be releasing this with Hippo CMS 7.4 in June, so hold tight.

In the meantime, let me know what you think - feedback is very much appreciated.

Posted by Arjé Cahn at 5:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

This post clearly describes the problem that I see with all current portal implementations: they treat content as “just another application running inside a portlet”. When we stick to this paradigm, it will kill Portal. Content behaves very different from legacy apps, and simply offering a contextually disconnected content management portlet is not enough. Content deals with semantics and relationships: users expect a portal to be smart enough to render content that is related to the apps they see right there on their screen, and they expect content to be reused across different sections in a portal, wherever that makes sense. Not to mention user-generated content.

Wikis gave users the possibility to quickly create and collaborate on content, but they don't come with the visual application integration that Portals offer. And they lacked the degree of control of a decent content management system. Integrating Portal and CMS is more than just adding a 'content portlet'. Adding an in-context application to a Wiki page would be more in line with how users think. They navigate your online consumer portal, find a page that answers their question and then they want to act on it directly. The FAQ page on “How to request a new password” should render the “New password” portlet in-line with the article. This is just an example - but this is clearly the direction Wikis are heading as they're maturing towards something that resembles an integration of Portal and CMS, and they're leaving traditional Portals way behind.

Portal vendors need to move towards the Content Driven Portal. At least, this is direction we've chosen to go with Hippo Portal. Users want URLs that make sense, that say something about the information that can be found on a page. They want to pop the URL of a portal page into an email and send it to someone else and it should just work - within the appropriate security constraints of course. What applications are shown on the portal page should follow the context, not the other way around. People got used to this concept during the Wiki revolution, and they'll never want to go back.

Posted by Arjé Cahn at 9:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Flipping through my usability notes, I noticed one of our Hippo CMS users mentioned the following about proof-reading:

“There is no printing facility for content in Hippo CMS so everything has to be done on screen. Even if we could print, we can only see a single field, not the whole article, so it's a bit pointless trying to proofread this way. This leads to long periods of time staring at a screen. It's also very difficult to spot typos on screen, leading to potential loss of quality in copy.”

Exactly. Often enough, also I spot typing errors only after having printed out my text (like this blog post), and walking through it again while commuting on the train. The letters start to dance before my eyes when I’m behind a monitor for too long. Sometimes it helps a lot to just put your text aside, do something else for a while, and then return to it on a quiet moment to walk through what you’ve written. So, why not implement a printing functionality in Hippo CMS, to allow authors to take their text with them? Everybody got so used to printing out Word documents anyway, that it baffles me that this idea had never appeared to me before.

So I put the print function on our roadmap.

But somehow, it feels wrong. What happened to the paperless office? It’s almost 2010 (it’s the 31st of December, 11:45 in the morning, as I write this), Kopenhagen happened only a few weeks ago, I’ve been driving the most economical car on earth for years, and I use the printer as little as possible. I don’t want to have a tree cut down for me to be able to proof-read my blog post!

Enter the e-reader. 2009 was the year of the e-reader. A number of those devices already boost a keyboard and the possibility to add annotations to texts, to store them and synchronize them with your PC. And every modern writer nowadays carries an e-reader to read their books anyway, right?

So here’s the thought: let’s make a tool that allows you, after a long day of writing, to take all the texts you’ve worked on with you on your e-reader. You grab your reader again when you sit on the train, where you walk through all passages for typos and make annotations. The following day, you import all those changes back into Hippo, or maybe you’ve already sent them to the content repository over wireless email.

I don’t know whether the latest generation of e-readers are already open enough to share annotations with a content management system. Maybe we’ll have to wait for that to happen in 2010. But at least I found a very good excuse to rush downtown and treat myself with another gadget to go try it out!

Posted by Arjé Cahn at 12:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Posted via web from Arje's posterous

Posted by Arjé Cahn at 10:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Posted via web from Arje's posterous

Posted by Arjé Cahn at 2:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

via machak.com

Posted via web from Arje's posterous

Posted by Arjé Cahn at 1:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)