As a business miggle.co.uk is fully committed to using and supporting open source software wherever it can.  We believe open source solutions, when implemented effectively, offer customers and users the best possible options in terms of balancing unique requirements, with leveraged R&D, in an environment where BCP (business continuity planning) issues are largely taken care of.  It would be counter to our believe in that approach to continue to keep our CMS, miggleCMS, as a proprietary tool.  Nor would doing so be in the best interests of the BCP requirements of our clients who use it.

The world does not need another content management system (CMS).  I truly believe that.  But, like many web businesses we found ourselves in a position three years ago where it made sense for us to have our own CMS to provide a solution to small businesses, which we didn’t feel we could easily or efficiently achieve with what was available at the time, to the flexibility we wanted.  Three years on, we’ve now used miggleCMS on over 30 sites, from simple brochure ware sites, to e-commerce solutions with stock control.

No single CMS will ever fulfil the needs of all web requirements.  It’s often a case, when choosing a potential CMS, of looking at product requirements, distinguishing between ‘must haves’ and ‘nice to haves’ and making the appropriate trade-offs if required.  Because of this, we don’t think there’s any more developments we need to make right now to miggleCMS, because to do so, in our opinion, would put us on a path where basically we would be starting to re-write Joomla.  Which is pointless.  At that point, we’d be better off just using Joomla.  But by opening miggleCMS up as an open source product, our opinion on that becomes just one opinion.  Others may look at our code and think there are areas in which it could be improved or developed on.  Maybe add an Ajax front end, maybe a deeper depth of categorisations, maybe the addition of payment provider support beyond Paypal?   Also, because pages can have modules attached to them, there’s scope for this to have additional functionality added without the need for a full re-write.  Modules could be written in the same sort of way plug-ins are for Wordpress.  By throwing this over the fence, we leave it to the open source development community to decide.

The final reason we’ve done it is because miggleCMS has been a useful tool in helping small businesses, with 5-10 pages, get decent looking sites online cost effectively.  Now that as a business we’re moving away from that market, beyond providing existing clients with better BCP options, this CMS, like so many others, acts as a code base to which you just need to BYOD – Bring your own designer!

So, if you’ve not clicked through already, take a look at miggleCMS.  We’ll do the best we can to support it and it’s development.  And we’ll always look to provide a paid for service for those who’d like help in running it or managing content within it.  We’ve taken some care and time over documenting what we’ve written, and we’ve built some tutorial videos too.  You can also take a look at the kind of sites we’ve built in it here, or on these showreels.

Based in Brighton and Hove, East Sussex, contact miggle.co.uk for website development, content management and online media services in the UK and worldwide.

Buddypress screengrab

>> What is BuddyPress? See Alick’s previous post.

Before starting to install BuddyPress you need to use WordPress MU. Once uploaded onto your server you will be guided through the installation. This includes the standard email and database details but you are also asked whether to use sub-domains or sub-directories for each user’s blogs, e.g. blog.example.com or example.com/blog.

On the first install I went for sub-domains, everything installed correctly. We could have multiple users and access each control panel but there was a problem trying to access everyone’s blogs. As I installed WordPress MU onto a shared server blog.example.com gave a ’shared ip’ error. You will only be able to use sub-domains on a dedicated server.

Once re-installing (you can just delete wp-config.php!) I chose sub-directories, wow! Huge breakdown. WordPress MU gave a redirect loop error, I couldn’t even access wp-login! After searching through a few forums I started to find this was a common error.

The solution:
Many forum users say to ‘clear your cookies’ which in a lot of cases seems to work. Other people suggest modifying the SECRET_SALT so WordPress generates a new code – SECRET_SALT is auto-generated by the install for wp-config.php.

But the one I found to work was by bradleyland.net. Basically just delete wp-config.php and do the setup again. From what I can tell this resolves both the solutions above so if you have tried one and it didn’t work, try the other too.

Installing BuddyPress
Once WordPress MU is up and running BuddyPress is fairly simple, I didn’t have any errors getting this to work first time. The read-me.txt file is useful but it doesn’t tell you every step, I would suggest following their online guide.

We get quite a few requests from prospective clients looking to build social networks. It often turns out that the plans are like a house of cards. Give them a prod while asking ‘What’s the business model / your budget / hook to get people to sign up?’ usually brings it all tumbling down. At the heart of a lot of these requests is the desire on the client’s part to either own a community or engage customers on their network. As such, ownership of the customer is key and that can potentially rule out using certain off the shelf social network content management systems (CMS) because there are always issues over who owns the user. So, to combat this, the route proposed is often to build it from scratch. This in itself is often impractical as what budget there is then goes into re-inventing wheels as we go about re-writing blogs/forums/groups/etc from scratch.

End result of all this is that everyone who’s come and asked us about building social networks has ended up re-thinking their ideas as a result of either a) not wanting to invest in building a plan up front or b) realising that the lack of robustness in their business plan means that the self build route will be a quick and effective way of losing a lot of money very quickly.

So, as a result of this, we’ve been quite excited by the idea of BuddyPress, and as such we’ve installed a version of it on our test server of which you’re free to sign up and have a play and see what you think. I don’t know how long we’ll keep this up for, so if this link here isn’t working, you’ll know we’ve taken it down.

So far, the biggest criticism of it is that it’s got no privacy settings and is without a lot of key social network features. But, it’s got a Facebook style wall (the wire) and Groups (which with no privacy, are really just a twist on profiles) and email based messaging. And, because it’s based on WordPress it’s got blog functionality which is something we know we can skin pretty easily.

I actually think the BuddyPress control panel is a bit confusing and we’re yet to dig into this enough to see how much we can change this. That I think will require more than skinning – it strikes me as there are some core IA issues that need to be resolved. But I guess for the WordPress team, this is work in progress and if BuddyPress is anywhere near as successful as WordPress it’ll surely be of great use to clients looking for a potential candidate for building social networks which are feature rich, give full ownership of the user and provide lots of opportunities for design customisation.

We’ve now deleted our test install of BuddyPress. If you want to learn more about what we can do for you with Social Media just get in touch.

Based in Brighton and Hove, East Sussex, contact miggle.co.uk for website development, content management and online media services in the UK and worldwide.

Web design and development for CHAIR: an effective business website with a minimum of fuss.

CHAIR founders Melissa and Sophie came to us with a plan for how they wanted their website to work. We created a simple yet elegant 5-page site, with email, hosting, contact form and an all-important photo gallery to show off their beautiful stock of chairs. Built in the miggleCMS content management system, their new site was up and running within a couple of days.

Sophie and Melissa were chuffed with the results: “We can’t thank miggle enough for their professionalism, creativity, dependability and quick turn-around. They are a cohesive, dynamic group that work together to create precisely what their client is after and we highly recommend them. When starting up a new company, it is important to make key choices financially and we feel that we invested wisely by choosing miggle and look forward to growing our online presence with them. Thanks to everyone on the miggle team!”

Based in the UK’s silicon city – Brighton and Hove, East Sussex, contact miggle.co.uk for website development, content management and online media services in the UK and worldwide.