Geneone is what I’m currently calling the software running this blog
and on neonDragon.net. I guess the name stems from ‘gene’ because of
the componentized structure of the source code and the ‘one’ referring
to one application being your site, wiki, forum and blog. The software
has really been in development for a couple of
months, but if you include planning and brainstorming you could say
over a year.

As well as running this blog, it’s also running the backend of the rest of
neonDragon.net and Evolution 5. Currently handling over 8,000 members and 650 sessions
I’m currently working towards making a technology preview available for
people who are interested. Before I release an pre-alpha version, there
are still a couple of things which need to be done. This will include
cleanup and bug fixes. I made quite a big update today.

WYSIWYG Editor

I
thought quite hard about whether to switch to using markup languages to
a WYSIWYG editor. The end user of this community management system is
going to be end users. Normal people who probably aren’t computer
geeks. We want to provide them with a way which is as intuitive as
possible to create forum posts and blog comments. Markdown is great,
but it’s not as good as a decent WYSIWYG editor. Markdown does have
it’s own problems – quite a lot of people have been confused about
having to make 2 linebreaks for a new paragraph whilst 1 linebreak does
nothing.

For this reason, I decided to make the switch to using a WYSIWYG editor for those browsers which support it. I started from the open source widgEditor. widgEditor is small, simple and mainly standards compliant. It’s probably as close to Bulletproof XHTML
as you’ll get from a web browser based WYSIWYG. I’ve made some
adjustments to the editor to make it fit our purposes better – for
example having less headings and separators between toolbar buttons.
I’m sure there will be more little tweaks and adjustments as we move to
improve and integrate the editor further.

For
those who don’t have Internet Explorer or Mozilla, or have Javascript
disabled, they can still use Markdown. I’m planning to remove support
for all other markup languages – BBCode, Textile, etc. Multiple markup
languages were always hackish and unelegant – if you were a moderator
you’d need to know several markup languages. It also makes
collaboration much harder. With HTML, we’ve got a standardized language
we can agree on.

I must admit I was never a big fan of WYSIWYG but it’s grown on me
and widgEditor is a different animal. Hopefully standardizing on this
WYSIWYG will simplify the system and provide some big benefits in
usability.

IntelliAnswer

There have been several improvements to the “IntelliAnswer” system. Give it a go – search for “what is khlo’s website?” or “cow’s gender“.

Other

I’ve removed support of hCard from the profile pages because it was
not providing much semantic value and it was impossible to conform to
the hCard specifications with the current framework. FOAF is doing the
job fine. It’d be nice to have a FOAF microformat though The footer
has also been fixed in Internet Explorer.