Today we followed up our recent aquisition of alfresco.com with the quiet deployment of our two newly re-designed web sites.

We’ve made a big effort to cater to two distinct audiences (call them markets, if you like) with the new sites. Our company site at www.alfresco.com (although the www.alfrescosoftware.com also still works for backwards compatibility) has been overhauled to make it much easier to get at information about the Alfresco platform and the services we offer around it.

Some of the bigger changes we’ve made here are as follows:

• The creation of a five-step introduction to Alfresco, designed to help people get to know the product and featured prominently on the front page of the site
• An overhaul of the news feeds featured on the front page – we’ve added separate feeds for news stories, events and product updates so you can just get the news you want
• A complete re-design of the registration form for our basic online demo, and the addition of two new forms that allow you to register for our extended 30 day demo or our enterprise download trial
• Our training information (a key part of our strategy to introduce more people to Alfresco) has been brought up to date
• We’ve improved the general usability of the site by increasing font sizes and making links clearer
• Many other bug fixes and cosmetic changes…

Our community site at www.alfresco.org will become the focus for community activity around Alfresco. This has been through some even more radical changes, having been re-implemented from the ground up to give it a better fit with the look and feel of the company site.

• We’ve added a brand new downloads page that we hope will make it easier to get at the open source download you want faster
• We’ve started linking through to content that we already had in our wiki and other developer resources but hadn’t really publicised before – this marks the start of our pulling together of the developer/community content that we have scattered across various systems
• We’ve added a new community page where we’ll be providing a bit more information about how to get involved with Alfresco

The key thing is that this only marks the start of our efforts to improve our web infrastructure and we’ll be debuting a number of other changes in this area over the next few months. Stay tuned! 🙂

ZDNet have a story today about a pretty big deployment of Zope that’s going to be happenning at RBS. The article discusses how open source is slowly moving up into the application layer, previously a place filled with mostly proprietary apps.

I’ve personally tried to use Zope before, but only the once. Maybe I was looking for the wrong thing, but I ended up disappointed and didn’t use it again. Obviously there’s a few people out there who have different views.

What Zope does seem to have is a large base of developers and contributors around it, which has given RBS somewhere to recruit a number of specialists from (I can personally testify that most recruitment agents don’t know a lot about the open source industry). So could the characteristics of the group of developers around a product actually be a factor for an organisation looking to deploy an open source platform?

I never liked that block of flats by the river, but somehow they almost seem to fit in with the rest of the picture.

I’m still pretty tired from my trip up to Leam at the weekend but I’m glad I decided to go. Hope the phone’s OK, Matt! 🙁

Consider this a “I’ve just set up my blog!” token post, that however old and experienced I get I can never resist writing, despite the fact that these kind of entries rarely contain any useful information at all.

Setting up WordPress was less straightforward than I’d imaged (or hoped), although I suspect this was mainly due to MySQL not liking two character user names. Shame it didn’t tell me that.

Other random installation notes:

• WordPress doesn’t let you specify your name during the install, so unless you want all your subsequent blog posts to be posted by ‘admin’ then you have to create a new user straight away. This takes more clicks than necessary.
• Version 2.0 is still a bit buggy, it seems. As it suggested, I deleted the existing ‘Hello World’ post that had been created as part of the installation without any problems. Then I came to delete the orphaned comment that seemed to have left behind, but it seemed it just hadn’t bothered updating the screen. I got a really nasty error about there not being a post with that ID and had to click the back button. Gah.

Wrapping WordPress in a PHP container that can automatically create new blogs and populate them with sensibly-named users, etc. is definitely something that needs doing. That should make the installation process at least less painful. Or we can wait for version three :-).

Today I officially entered week two of the flat hunt, with a second Saturday spent tramping round Ealing looking for somewhere to live. The more time I spend wandering around the area, the more I [heart] Ealing, although that doesn’t necessarily help me find somewhere to live there.

So nowhere concrete yet, but there’s a couple of promising places, and more leads to follow up on next week.

The Park was nice, even if today in general was disgustingly wet and miserable. Enough to dent the enthusiam of even the most determined of flathunters. But not too much.

The photos are uploaded. And now I’m going to bed. Work tomorrow, doh!

Good things about Christmas this year include sherry trifle, walks with the dog and generally having family around. It’s all been a nice change from last year.

Today we took Casper down to Dulas Beach, where he got very, very wet. We had my mum round to the house again for a few hours in the afternoon as well as a few lovely guests. Boxing Day is all about the company, but less about the gross over-consumption of food.

I’m here in Wales until the end of the week, before heading down to London for New Year In The Bush! Getting more back to normality tomorrow though, with the car to wash and a kitchen floor to take up.

But before then, there’s more alcohol to drink. Mmm, Tia Maria.