Yesterday I updated the tabs for MyWorks and MyRoles since Beta 5 had a change to their structure. I have also pretty much finished the display template for MyWorks and I will now just clean some things up in the listings template before it is time to add the content properly. I have made some changes to the connections to other databases and I will add another database later for Reviews. Changes to ipsTabsInvison Community Beta 5 introduced a change to the structure of ipsTabs and as such all my tabs stopped working. This is of course the problem with using the standards in Invision Community that if there are changes being released, then you might need to do some refactoring. This obviously happens a lot more when a new major version like V5 is in beta, so it is not a huge deal normally. In this case it was pretty quick to update and the code improved, so I have no complaints. For ipsTabs I have an article in the works describing how they work and how you can easily build with it in Pages templates. MyWorks is nearing completionMyWorks is almost done now, and I just need to change the listings a bit, so I will create a new template for that, or just add some conditional additions to the base templates. I am happy with the structure and I added back the People part from the People profile database. The database itself is hidden, and you can’t access the profiles themselves, but since even guests need permissions to see profiles in order for me to show them on the MyWorks section, I will have to make some adjustments to the People Profiles templates. I will just add a condition so only I can see the content when accessed directly, and then it should work just fine. After some annoying experimentation I figured out how to get the getReciprocalItems to output several times in different places, which allowed me to control where different fields were output. I am still struggling to get the Forms to work the way I want, but for now that is not a priority as this is not something I will work with every day and no one else will actually see the form anyway. Reviews are getting updatedI want to add the Reviews back again and include that on MyRoles especially. It is not a big task, but it will take some time so it will have to wait until after I come home from Dublin. I am basically just going to make a new design, and it is pending some information from the Invision Community team since I have an idea that may not be possible due to how the platform stores ratings. If what I have in mind is not possible, then I have some other ideas anyway, so it is all good. Reviews will probably be split into two as well. One will be for Recommendations and one will be for Product Reviews when I later start working on the Apps database. There is indeed no shortage of work to be done here, but I love it and enjoy every minute of it!

The My Roles section is now pretty much completed. I have a few blocks to create for the Swedish content, but other than that, I am pretty happy with it. I can now focus on the My Work, which is what will populate some of the content and since I now have the basics done already, it will just be a matter of refactoring the templates and set the attributes that I want to have there. Overall the My Roles section is now a great complement to my normal CV’s and I can start working on enhancing the roles with content. There are two major items I want to add there and the first is a Video presentation for each role. These will be short videos to complement the description, so the visitor get a more personal experience as well. I have not yet decided how to present these, but I have a few ideas. The second thing I will work on is a recommendation section. This will be a separate database where people can add recommendations on different roles or work items. I have several of these already on different places, like LinkedIn, and I will add them to my website and then connect them depending on what they are related to. This will be a quick project, but it is not a priority as I want to get the My Works section up first. Overall I am very happy with the progress on this site.

Hi! What an innovative and fun way of presenting your skills, previous assignments and professional career. Also great to have an updated profile for any one who is interested to read more about you than just a fast check on LinkedIn.

Yesterday I spent a few hours with the Stories Database, and it is turning out pretty good if I may say so myself. The layout for the featured stories front page is pretty much done, and now I have to recreate that for the listings and then clean things up a bit. I also need to set a bit of strategies and of course clean things up. For the strategies I will use Confluence for documenting, at least for now until I have a plan for how to move this to this site. For cleaning things up, well…that will just be a ton of work to go back and update everything, but that was always the way things had to be. Structure of StoriesThis is by far the biggest task right now as information structure must be simple, but still make it easy to find the information you are interested in. Right now there are a lot of categories, and I am going to work with that to see what the best solution is from a UX and SEO perspective. I will probably make a few tests to see if there is a way to improve on this as I get more people trying involved. The biggest work will also be to ensure that all products and companies have a Tag, so I can connect all Stories properly. Considering the amount of these that exists, this will be a continuous work as I can’t add the thousands of tags up front. Pictogram CSSI see that I will want to use pictograms for all the Atlassian products in various places, and I am going to create a new CSS for just that purpose. As I am using Font Awesome I have been playing around with the custom icons and I will update those with the official logos so it is easy to use. You can see that I have already added a few of these on the Stories listing, so I will just refactor this and create a new CSS file for this. One issue I have is that I have a bit of a problem with setting the class name based on the Category name as it contain spaces in some cases and the names are not the same across databases. If there was a way to add a custom field to the categories, this would not be an issue, but for now I have to map the category ID to each class, which is a time-consuming activity. I keep working on this, but I will begin with adding it to Stories first and it will be super simple. /*** Jira ***/ .jwsea_newsHeader_logo_703:after{ content: "\e010"; } Simplify and create a new formAdding stories should be super easy and to make it, so I will create a new Form for Stories. This form will work like the old ones where I use tabs and collapsible areas to make the initial form view super easy to use, but with options if needed. Currently, there are so many fields that I will go over and review. I want to make things as simple as possible and then extend when it is actually needed rather than bloat things and make things feel more complicated than it is. This will be the first form I recreate, and I will create a new CSS for Forms as well where I have the forms styles to be re-used for other Forms. I might also create a JS file or two as well if needed. Stories will be my focus for nowStories is the main focus at the moment, and it will be my focus for the next week or so. I am having a ton of fun building things again, but I also have a ton of clean up to do as well as saving the old code, so I can reuse some of it for future projects.

The upgrade to Version 5 of Invision Community has been done. It was a fairly painless process and while there are plenty of bugs still, I feel good about this upgrade. With the upgrade in place I can now start building new templates again for the databases. Yesterday I had some fun working with the Stories database, which is what I will focus on first. Once the Stories is done, I will focus on My Projects and then Awesome People I think. This is just my current plan, and it can change at any time depending on where I feel I want to put more effort in. Prominent bugs are that all images uploaded in the content is broken and there seem to be some issues with uploading images to the gallery. This does not affect uploading new images in the content, like into this post for example, but it will require quite a lot of work to fix if there is no good way to update it programmatically in a future release. It’s not that bad though as I have a plan to go over every bit of content anyway and change the graphics and perhaps the content a bit. The biggest work will probably be to change all the Videos as they now require an image. It used to be that I programmatically set those, but I am not sure if that is how I want to set that up again or not. There are advantages if there are static images, but then again that will cost a lot of storage as well… so I am not sure yet how to proceed. Overall though I now have a “blank” canvas again and I can start building things again. There is a lot of work to be done, but I am loving it!

Beta 1 had some bugs that prevented me from moving forward to upgrade this site. I will wait for Beta 2 to see how that feels. I am not overly concerned for having bugs as this site is not working very well as it is, but I need to be able to build content and with Pages being a bit messed up still in Beta 1, that is not possible. I have the beta site up, and I will probably wait for Beta 4 or Beta 5 before I feel comfortable doing the full upgrade on the live site. That is based on previous Beta cycles, and it can be different this time of course, but it has been fairly consistent over the last 20 years 🙂

Yesterday, Matt announced that Invision Community V5 is available in Beta. This is amazing as that means that we are now moving into the final bug crushing before a stable release. This also means I can now set up a test site and test the upgrade and start playing around with it to see how it will behave with an existing site rather than just an empty one. While I still expect a few months before a stable release, I feel that things are moving in the right direction and I can finally start building things here again! I will see if I can set up a test install here this weekend and do a test upgrade. This should tell me roughly what to expect for the live site. Once I have that, I can start playing around with the templates and things of that sort. While it is now almost impossible to work with database link designs as we can no longer access those templates, I think I can work around that since the new tag system will replace many of those areas anyway. Overall, I am excited to sink my teeth into testing Invision Community V5 in more depth using a self-hosted test site rather than a cloud hosted alpha site 🙂

It always is 🙂 The problem tend to be how to get to the know how part 🙂

I'll see that I write a general tutorial, of how to update fields per custom JS in Pages. It's pretty easy if you know how.

I would love to learn how to do that 🙂 That would make building a Digg-like site a lot easier than having to rely on ratings 🙂 But you are right, that is not the correct path forward. The standard function should work properly.

I can build around it. I can create a custom field for rating, that is filled on the fly via JS. Every time the user votes, the field is updated. Then sort by this default field. But that would be a crutch. And it's a shame to invest time in a crutch just because the standard function is buggy. 😉

If we nag enough, they will change it 🙂 Or we build around it...

I am not very optimistic whether they see it as a bug or “cosmetic”. If the latter, they will not change anything, I afraid.

As it is easy to get lost when building a website by taking on to much, this is a discussion thread on what to actually build and why. The focus on this site will be two-fold: Personal and Professional. The Personal This section will be pretty much the same with my personal blogs, my gallery and the about me section. Projects and my awesome people will be on the backburner is it is not a priority. About Me My Blog My Swedish Blog My Gallery Professional The professional aspect of the site is also divided into two sections: Information and community. The information aspect will be focused on three areas: News, Articles and Videos. The Community area will be focusing on the Forum and events with Clubs and Blogs as extras if anyone want to use them. Things like Companies, Products and apps will be in step two as they are not as important at the moment. I will just have them for connecting purposes with a standard setup. Information News Articles Videos Community Forum Events Clubs Blogs That is it for now.

I use the native function and I was not aware of the rating bug. I am just playing around at this time and the rating bug will be fixed eventually and probable before I will build this anyway 🙂

How to you make actual rating given? Do you use the native rating system of IPS? It has a bug right now preventing precise rating. I use it on the large live project, but the rating itself does not make sense with the bug. E.g. you can have 8 of 10 items that have exact the same rating in the IPS database even if they are really not. 😄

Concept...

One of the key features I want to build is a news site. This has always been a big focus for me, as I love to consume news. This site already have a News setup, but I never got the functionality working properly. Hopefully I can re-imagine this a bit once the Invision Community V5 is released. In short, I have been trying to adjust the SuperVote page template by OpenType, one of the best Pages developer there is. While partially successful, I never got it working 100% and that is probably because I broke everything while trying to adjust it to my liking. Instead of trying to hack the ratings update from the page listing, I will see if I can work with what already works. There are a few things that already work very well. For example, the actions taken are very nicely displayed based on the actual rating given. A little indicator show which news items you have rated, and the news itself is dimmed out if it has been given a low rating. These things are very nice, and I can work with this to show things nicely when I redesign this. If I can figure out how to update the ratings in the listing view, then that would be awesome, but I will not put too much effort into this to get started. Getting the news added in a news section will be the main focus. Automate News Automation of news will be important. Getting it done without ripping full articles is a bit trickier. While Invision Community comes with RSS import, it is crude and basically just show the RSS content. This will not work because that way I will basically be stealing articles from the Atlassian Community for example and that is not what I want. I can kind of mitigate this by truncating the content, but that is crude and not really a proper solution either. I can go with Zapier, of course, and I probably will do that in a limited way as it is quite expensive. The advantage with Zapier is that I have a lot more control, and I can for example truncate the content before it even comes to the site. Setting this up can be done using multiple Zapier accounts, where I set up one Zapier account for each RSS feed. Considering the number of RSS feeds, this is quite a lot of accounts to set up. Designing a new News setup I will spend some time to design a new News setup and try to figure out where to take this today and what the vision would be for the future. I am looking into the old Digg setup from the early 2000 as inspiration for what I would like to build eventually. For now, I am just brainstorming to try to figure out what functionality would make sense. I see some of these functions also being useful for other databases, so I will gather some functions together as a base for future database ideas as well. I will update with some designs once I have something to show.

With the base design for the page listings I can now easily change the style by just changing the CSS attached to the page. This is because the standard layout was built using flex so it can fit pretty much anyway I want them. So far I have added the following Layouts: Default view Big Image on Top 2 column listing 3 column listing 2 column with first entry big Image I also created a new Block template for page feeds based on that same layout. I added this to the custom CSS however, so I don't have to add CSS to pages and are free to use blocks on any page. This means that I now only need to create a new Page Display template and a Form template before I have a fully customized experience for Pages.

It is now live 🙂

I played around a bit with a new portfolio design this weekend. I kind of like it so far...

Here are some things I am tinkering with....still testing out new colours for security...