Marco Steinhäuser

Whenever you can reach your community over a social network service, you as the responsible person for community building in your company may consider to enter it. The outcome might become really promising but you have to do certain researches before. In this blog post, I would like to share my experience and the bumps connected to entering Facebook for the OXID community.

Analyzing the status quo, I found three different account formats for OXID eSales that have been created some-when by somebody:

• The OXID ESales account,
• an OXID eSales group
• and an OXID eSales page.

The Facebook Account already had friends, the Group had members and the Page had so called fans.

Accounts and Friends

Using an account for your company or brand seems to be a bad idea, especially when the correct writing of your brand is important. As you can see, it was impossible to write “eSales” as Facebook assumes a natural person with a first and a last name and camel-cases the words. The content was filled up with automated twitter feeds. And although it was shown on your friends walls, it had very low activity that could not even be measured. If you wanted to post using your brand, you had to be logged in as “OXID ESales”. As e-mail address, a collective e-mail account was chosen that nobody felt responsible for.

We decided to ditch this account completely. Thus, I informed all friends of the OXID ESales account via the Facebook message service which doesn’t allow more than 20 addressees at once. It had to be done tick-wise…

Groups and Members

Let us have a look at the Facebook group OXID eSales. What apparently catches our eyes is that the writing of the name is correct in this case. The followers of a group are called “members”. Posts do not appear at your members’ walls automatically, they have to visit the group site to gather the news you want to spread. Due to this, the non-measurable activity was pretty low as well. Also, posts are shown from the person who entered it, branding is not possible (except you are logged in as OXID ESales). Bad premises for our mission and inappropriate. Obviously, a group has to be treated similar to a forum which doesn’t make sense because we have our own

We decided to ditch this site as well by July 1st. The members were informed by a message of the group administrator (me) that unfortunately took nearly 20 hours for delivery.

Pages and Fans

A page seems to be the ultimate solution. As a page administrator, you must have your personal account but writing to the page, your entry is branded! I.e., if I write to the OXID_eSales page, I can use my personal account marco.steinhaeuser and the entry appears as written by OXID_eSales without any hassle logging out and in again. The posts appear on the time line of your “fans” so they can interact immediately. This interaction is measurable: Especially interesting is a graph that also can display who hided your posts.

While investigating, I found an OXID eSales page in the wrong category “local business” that I really wanted to change into “product/service”. Unfortunately, on Facebook it is not possible to change the category after the page was generated. So I had to install a complete new page and to inform the fans of the old page about it. As features for the new page, I just left the “wall”, the information page, fotos (still to equip) and the event application.

Content

Most of the content of the new OXID_eSales page is parsed automatically via the Twitterfeed service, as is:

• shops on OXID
  every shop owner or developer can post his new shop to the Mister Wong or to delicious.com bookmark service with the tag oxid-shop where a RSS feed is generated and posted to twitter and Facebook
• new extensions for OXID eShop
  new extensions and modules on OXID eXchange are parsed to a RSS feed and will be twittered and facebooked
• news on OXID projects
  front page news a project responsible person published on OXID projects
• new or updated feature requests for OXID eShop
• new entries of OXID planet
  blog posts about and around OXID that are implemented in OXID planet
  (You are welcome to join, feel free to contact me!)
• new blog entries on oxid-esales.com

Facebook User Names

A very interesting feature on Facebook is the so called “user name” for your page which actually means a shortened URL. Every Facebook user can fire up http://www.facebook.com/username/ to get his own shortened URL like http://www.facebook.com/marco.steinhaeuser. If you are a page administrator, you will find a field for your page name there in case you have more than 25 fans. We really wanted to give the OXID page the same format as it is on twitter, (with an underscore) but unfortunately, on Facebook it isn’t allowed as well as a hyphon in your name. Another idea was to name it simply http://www.facebook.com/OXID but the appendix at least have to have five or more characters. At the end of the day, we will call it http://www.facebook.com/OXID.eSales but this name is still occupied by the OXID ESales account and will be cancelled by July 1st.

Market your Page

There are several ways to make your page visible to others. The aim is to gather as many fans as possible to spread your news to many people.
Facebook offers a planty of scripts that you can implement into your website. In our case, we will use a simple “like” button to be implemented into oxid-esales.com as well as on OXID forge. When a Facebook user visits our official sites and presses this button, he will immediately become a fan with a simple click and our news will appear on his timeline from now on.
Every fan has the possibility to recommend this page to his (assorted) friends which gives your marketing a highly viral touch.
Further, Facebook offers plans for payed ads that I didn’t give a deeper look yet.

Appearance and Usability

A very interesting effect on Facebook seems to be the low barrier for interaction of your fans with your page. Although our visitors saw and knew that the content is generated automatically, they immediately started commenting on the posts, e.g. about a new store online. Of course you have to be present and react on their comments and discuss with them.
In my opinion, the reason for this low barrier can be found in the web techniques: The extensive use of AJAX makes it possible to get statuses changed immediately without the need of reloading the complete page. I.e., for the users it is pretty easy, quickly done and fun to press a “like” button or to leave a shorter or longer comment without any restrictions. For you, as the page owner it is perfect seeing any interaction publically. If somebody pressed the “like” button, he feels comfortable with the content and actually recognized it!

Conclusion

Although Facebook is on the headlines and has to be seen highly critical in a manner of privacy, it seems to be a perfect addition to your existing community tools. For OXID eSales, of course it will not replace other community tools like the forum or OXID forge but it is a nice way to spread our news, to keep people informed and to gather the reactions.

If you want to stay informed about all the OXID news and you have a Facebook account yourself, feel free to like our page:

More or less spontaneously, I decided to go to “Chemnitzer Linux-Tage” for the first time, the probably second biggest Linux event in Germany, and was really surprised: Not only Linux geeks but a very mixed up audience of Germans and Non-Germans, developers, administrators and interested people in any kind of open source software found together in a very familiar and comfortable atmosphere.

In my role as OXID Community Guide I usually go to such events to talk to owners of interesting projects and maybe find synergies and a surplus for the OXID community. The entry fee at € 5.- was more than reasonable and to be honest: I found more valuable contacts there than on my CeBIT visit a couple of days before.

Of course, I visited the booth of my favorite Linux distribution run by the guys of Ubuntu Deutschland e.V. and furthermore, the Communtu project. Communtu is a Ubuntu based Linux distribution that lets you choose which application projects to install but most interesting is the backup feature: When you have to refresh your installation (what may happen from time to time), you are able to store your complete configuration to the Communtu server and moreover, download a CD or DVD for your new installation without loosing any application.

Also the PIM and CRM project tine 2.0 is absolutely worth mentioning. Tine is based on the Zend Framework and makes extensive use of the JavaScript library jQuery. The project is still young, doesn’t provide that many features that you would expect and really took me some time to install it today. But from it’s approach, it is very promising and the code looks clear on a first glance.

YaCy is a Java based search engine software that I hope to get evaluated for use on oxid-esales.com as well as on OXIDforge as a replacement for the Google search service we implemented presently.

After listening to two talks about IT management and OTRS (Open Ticket Request System) I hooked up with the OTRS guys Shawn and Martin and apparently it turned really, really, really interesting. We use this Perl-based software very successfully in our support department and our installation needs to be adapted for our needs. Shawn is the new OTRS Community Manager and Martin actually the inventor of the OTRS system. Hope to collaborate very tightly with this guys in the future.

For the next year, I personally would really like to have an OXID booth at the “Chemitzer Linux-Tage”. Let’s see whether we can sort it out.

I will personally visit this year’s CeBIT in Hannover on March 04th and hope to make some interesting contacts for the OXID Community. Drop me a line if you want to see me there.

Thanks Erik for the lift!

Some days ago, I accidentally found the Russian search engine Yandex and encountered some online stores based on OXID eShop Community Edition in Russian language while exploring it. I contacted three store owners in Russian (yep, I did learn Russian, but didn’t use it for a long time) and asked if they would like to contribute their language files for community use. I got immediate answers from two of them

Konstantin and Vadim gladly sent to me the Russian translation for the OXID eShop front end as well as for the administration area. Both files have been published on the language site of OXIDforge. Feel free to use them in your own online shop instance.

To be honest, I am pretty glad we have Russian now for several reasons. Firstly, I believe Russia (and former member states of the Soviet Republic) are a huge and growing business region in ecommerce. Hence it would be great to grow an even larger Russian OXID eShop community and attract more developers. Last not least, it’s a great opportunity for me to practice my rusty Russian in the forums

Константин и Вадим – спосибо большое, вы молодцы!

If you are using Zend Guard to encrypt your PHP applications you probably don’t want to update your server environment to PHP 5.3.0: Zend Guard (for encoding your PHP files) and Zend Optimizer (for decoding your PHP files) are not available yet for this PHP version and so upgrading should break your application. A discussion about this subject is going on in this forum thread:
http://forums.zend.com/viewtopic.php?f=57&t=1365

Zend announced that new versions of Zend Guard and Zend Guard Loader (which will replace Zend Optimizer) will be released in the first quarter of 2010. Until then, please avoid upgrading PHP to 5.3 on machines where Zend Guard encoded applications are running.

The OXID eShop’s Enterprise Edition and Professional Edition are effected. We believe that the upcoming version 4.3.0 of OXID eShop Community Edition is not effected.

The past few days, dev.oxidforge.org thingy was launched. We are still looking for a proper name for it (vote at http://www.oxid-esales.com/forum/showthread.php?t=3401, need to be logged in as a community member!).

Now “OXID developer network – ODN” is about to win that race and I personally like it very much. I already requested an additional subdomain like odn.oxidforge.org for it.

Like Ralf posted today to our corporate blog, a separate user was introduced for that kind of stuff called OXIDlab “… where we publish prototypes or test implementations, which are prepared by our teams. These results of our daily work are very often the first steps to new features for our products … ” like he says. He already uploaded the first finished extension, “SuperClix Export“, to OXID eXchange – the module market place.

Well, and I am still hassling around with that bl**dy SVN+SSH write access to the projects SCM sites on http://dev.oxidforge.org. Reading SVN works properly as committing is followed by an error message like “Authorization refused”. Will get it fixed by the next week, promised!

Tomorrow morning I will officially and proudly announce our collaboration and development platform available at http://dev.oxidforge.org. The software basis is FusionForge, a GForge fork. This platform seems to be ideal for team-work on committing code, language extensions, localizations, themes and much more.

There is just one thing we are still suffering from: How the heck shall we call that baby?
Of course, “collaboration and development platform” or even the URL name is much too long while “dev” is too short and not very meaningful. How about something like “developer zone” or “com-zone”? The word “forge” is already occupied by the whole OXIDforge thing including download pages and so on.

Let me know about your ideas.

musicgate, another forum mate, had an awesome idea collecting all OXID shops running opening up an appropriate group at the social bookmark platform http://www.mister-wong.de. This idea went on like giving discounts and / or coupons to all of you brothers in arms. For a first, just let’s collect. Feel free to register yourself and to present your OXID shop in this group!

Unfortunately, Mister Wong doesn’t speak “Globish”, everything you will find on the .de site would be in German. If you are not a German native speaker you might don’t understand the handling there. In this case you are welcome to open up another – your – OXID eShop – group at the .com site of Mister Wong.

Very good news if you want to run a modern, free and open source e-commerce plattform from Portugal:
Thanks our Portuguese community member, monteiro, Portuguese translation is now available for OXID eShop. In a first step, I put the complete file to the language section of OXIDforge. This file for displaying the front end in the correct translation, is available under GNU GPL.

Of course, you may use Portuguese lang.php as an additional language if you run your shop somewhere else then Portugal. Just make sure you translated your products and categories as well.

Also, an Italian fellow, tassoman, found his way back to the forums and promised an Italian translation to come up soon. His request for implementing gettext is interesting enough: AFAIK the PHP library “gettext” has got a lot of clients that would make both, front and back end translations pretty easy. I handed that proposal over to OXID’s shop product management.

For future, maybe we could use the new collaboration plattform on OXIDforge that we are working on for translation stuff as well as for new themes, templates or modules. It will open up the next few days.

Awesome, awesome, awesome

I never expected 35 (!) people bringing together after this very short-term announcement, I was really surprised! Obviously, most attendees did not even see the direct announcement but heard it somehow as a rumor from their friends: “Did you hear about that Open Source Meeting? I cannot go but you ought to… “. And this is how it actually shall work. Hey, Leipzig was over the Munich line of “Attendees of the first OSS meeting”!

Although the aim of this kind of meetings is to bring users together with the “makers” of open source, of course, mostly the enthusiasts took part this (first) time. Another aim is the comprehensive exchange of experiences over the different projects. Interestingly, there was no convention like this before. However, we happily welcomed Linux users, system administrators, guys attending the Open Street Map (OSM) project, a hand full of freelancers and developers of the zope project.

The talks were pretty interesting and full of requests: Carsten spoke about the Mozilla project, Kai about working with DTP applications on Linux, Florian about OpenOffice.org (told us some secrets ) and Volkmar about the OSM project. Of course, in conventions like that the requests go like: What is your business model?, Where do you get your salary from?, What does the project do with your committed data? Interesting enough, isn’t it? The atmosphere thankfully was very laid back.

We thank Jan from GET AG for attending and sponsoring the rides of the long-distance attendees, also MaFi for the canvas an Henrik (yasni.com) for the projector. Not to forget Karsten (SPIZZ) for the location, the Internet connection and the nearby bar.

As we agreed, the next Open Source Meeting Leipzig will take place in about quarter a year (Feb?). And yes, you are allowed to bring your proprietary friends then

See more pictures of the event here:
http://picasaweb.google.de/floeff/OpenSourceTreffenAm23November2009InLeipzig
http://picasaweb.google.com/carstenbook/OpensourcetreffenLeipzig231109?feat=directlink#