Before this past weekend, if you live in China or another time zone outside Central Standard Time, you'd have seen the dates for items created in your Qrimp app appear several hours off. This has become more of an issue over time, because we've acquited customers all over the world and users from different time zones using the same application.
Showing all times in the same time zone was inconvenient for scheduling applications. Everyone in the world would see an event start at the time the creator specified, even if they were in another time zone. If an event is scheduled to start at 7PM in Texas though, then it should say 5PM for someone viewing the event information from the Pacific Time Zone.
Now it does.
When you log into your Qrimp app the next time, you'll be prompted to set your Time Zone. Every time zone around the world is supported, including daylight saving time. With this new feature, all apps built on Qrimp are automatically time zone aware. You don't need to write any code to make this possible.
If you move your location to another time zone and would like to change it, use the Home > Settings menu.
The deployment manager allows you to manage multiple applications and then transfer system design information from one to another. For example, you may run a copy of your Qrimp app on your laptop and make changes to the system and then upload those changes to your production environment on the Internet, without over writing the information in the remote Qrimp App.
The goal of the deployment manager is to make it easy to make changes in one environment that you can apply to one or more remote environments very easily. For example, you may be running a task management application for several clients, but you only want to make changes to one application then push those changes out to your client sites on the Internet.
Using the full deployment option will transfer all data, including settings for your Qrimp app and data in the user tables. If want to leave the user table data untouched, that is, the data your users have entered into forms and such, then don't check the box. All user accounts, group assignments, attachments, etc will stay as they are in your client's applications or production applications.
Template Applications
Using the Full deployment checkbox will push out all your data, including user tables and data in them. This will allow you to very quickly create new instances of applications for your clients or various internal departments within the organization.
For example, many departments might want to use a group Wiki for collaboration. To keep things simple, all their data is in one Qrimp app and all your deparments get their own setup. Full deploy on your template wiki application is the fastest way to get new departments up and running on their own internal Wiki.
Security
Only users in the Administrator account are allowed to deploy an application. You must log in to an application as an admin to deploy it and the user/pass you enter in the form must be an admin in the app you are deploying to.
Backing Up the Remote System
It's always a good idea in any scenario to make a backup copy of an application before you overwrite it. To download a full MS SQL Server 2005 compatible database backup of your remote application, simply click the link that will appear as you type in the name of the remote application.
More help
If you need help, just click the link at the bottom of the page.
This is just a quick demonstration I put together that will show you how easy it is to share your data across the web. With this cool tool, you can allow anyone to access your content for syndication with your affiliates and partners or even just your blog posts like in this video.
Now Qrimp automatically builds XML site maps for your sites. To do this, we have added a few new items to your sites. Additionally, Qrimp will automatically display a robots.txt file to let crawlers know about your site map. If you would like to override this default robots.txt, add a url map to an attachment that contains your desired robots.txt settings.
What have we added?
First, we created a new query that returns the list of tables in your site that are visible to anonymous users. You can modify this query if you would like to share more of your site with the search bots. The Query is called "SiteMapIndex" and you can see it by visiting Develop > Query Designer, then selecting SiteMapIndex in the Query list.
Second, we added two new views, one for the SiteMapIndex and one for the SiteMap. Qrimp will build one sitemap index with individual sitemaps for each table in your system. This will allow for a more scalable sitemap system and ensure that more records in your tables are available for indexing. The current limit of urls per sitemap is 50,000, so that's the most we include.
You can modify either of these views. You may want to modify the SiteMap view to link directly to a particular view for the detail items. We have linked them to view 11, but you may have another standard view for your items. The system is customizable like other parts of Qrimp. You may want to tailor it to your specific needs.
You may want to use Google Webmaster Tools to verify that your sitemaps are working as planned. To do this, add a site to your dashboard and then verify it. To verify your site, you should choose the option to upload an html file. Google will give you the name of the file to upload. Copy the name and then create a Clean Url to this filename. Map it to the dirty url "portal.aspx" without the quotes. It doesn't really matter which file you map it to as long as Google doesn't get a 404 error when attempting to retrieve the page.
Once you have verified your site, you can use all the standard Google Webmaster Tools to control access to your site, set crawl rates, and more.
Benefits
Automatically generating sitemaps improves visibility for your sites by better instructing search engines and other web crawlers how to crawl your pages. Typically, entering your site from the default url will take the crawler to the portal. JavaScript and URLs with & and ? can confuse some crawlers. The Sitemaps feature alleviates many of these issues and your site's pages should appear more easily in the search engines.
The order of the /'s goes like this: http://yourservername/tablename/itemname/viewname
The itemname and viewname can be replaced with the ID for the entry as well.
Custom URL Mapper Module
To make it even better, we've added a new module called "Clean URL Mapper". If you add this module to your application, you will have a new system table that will allow you to map any "DirtyUrl" to any "CleanUrl." After you add the module, the Clean Url Mapper menu will appear below the Design menu.
Query Security In the last feature update we allowed you to create new queries. Well, now you can limit access to those queries by user group. This will allow you to create custom queries for your anonymous users even if you don't want to grant them access to the underlying tables.
Widgets Widgets are objects you can embed in your headers, footers, and views. They are snippets of text that you can add to different areas of the site. For example, you can create a widget that will allow you to add a 5-star rating to items in any table. You can add a comment form, a Web 2.0 map from Google, Yahoo, or Live Maps.
If you have a cool widget you'd like to share, let us know.
Movable Buttons By popular demand, you can now move the buttons around on your forms. By default, they will appear at the bottom of the form, instead of the right hand side of the page. We agree with those of you who said this is more intuitive. Thank you for the suggestion! We hope you like the change.
We've added a new feature to our new Qrimp apps that will make it easier to modify your applications. Under the Design menu you will see two new menus, Design Mode ON and Design Mode OFF. Turning on Design Mode will show a next to headers and footers in your app. Hover over the icon to highlight the content contained within the header or footer. Click on the icon and you'll be taken directly to the header/footer that is being displayed. Edit it and return to the page and you will see your changes.
For users who have already signed up and do not have the Design Mode menus, select Add a Module under the Admin menu and add the Design Mode Menus ON/OFF module. You will then have access to the menus.
I thought it would be interesting to see if Qrimp could integrate with anything and Facebook is the test. Turns out, Qrimp is the easiest way to build Facebook Apps.
Today I thought, "If Qrimp is such an awesome platform, surely it'll be able to integrate with Facebook." So I grabbed Tara, because she has a Facebook account and we set off to create a Facebook app with Qrimp. After wading through the documentation, here's Tara's Facebook Qrimp App, which took about 5 minutes to build after we found Jonathan's post on Facebook Application Basics.
First of all, how many people know what a Callback URL is? What percentage of those people are not programmers? Exactly. Building Facebook apps could be a whole lot easier. They need to make it easier. I suppose it's easy enough if thousands of apps have already been built for it, but as I've said before, Facebook is limiting its potential with such a difficult to use system. As Paul Graham says:
It's worth trying very, very hard to make technology easy to use. Hackers are so used to computers that they have no idea how horrifying software seems to normal people. ... When you work on making technology easier to use, you're riding that curve up instead of down. A 10% improvement in ease of use doesn't just increase your sales 10%. It's more likely to double your sales.
At the Web 2.0 Summit, Zuckerberg said, "We have 6,000 applications and 100,000 developers." That's over 16 developers on average, per application. With a ratio like that, the developer pool will be quickly exhausted. For web platforms to succeed, we'll need to see that ratio come down -- way down.
I don't mean to be overly critical of Facebook and other social applications. I just don't see the value in them. Perhaps it is my introverted nature. Perhaps it is my focus on earning time over wasting time, a topic I might get into more detail on later. Qrimp is a time earner, so it might not be a good idea to integrate it with a time waster like Facebook, but my goal was to test the integration of Qrimp with an arbitrary system over which I have no control -- Facebook fit the bill.
I also recognize that integrating applications with Facebook and other systems can be much deeper than our proof of concept, but doing this with Facebook is not a priority for the Qrimp team right now. Many of our users may want to go further down that road and I leave it to you or them to do it. If you do, I would be vainly interested in seeing what you've done, so let Tara know and she can log into Facebook and check it out.
In all fairness, I thought it would be more difficult than it was. I also learned more about Facebook in the process -- this is was the most I've ever used it. I see a lot of room for Facebook to improve their "platform." I actually don't think it is a platform at all. I see it as an API. A platform lets you build your own applications. Facebook lets you integrate your application with Facebook. Mark Andreessen says Facebook is a Level II Platform. Mr. Andreessen breaks the term down into multiple levels, but Wikipedia's definition of Platform wouldn't include Facebook. I think Mark was being kind to those who call themselves platforms, but really aren't. I might be in the minority on this, sure, but I sometimes think that marketing has more influence than sense. It might just be a lack of sense that gives marketing its power.
Modules are installable packages containing a data model (i.e. the Tables and Relationships) for your information, combined with the menus, views, templates and other objects needed to present the information and enable interaction with it.
We currently have modules for Messaging, Contact Management, Task and Project Management, Countries and more. We will be adding modules to the list. If you have an idea for a module you'd like, let us know in the Qrimp Developer Network.
Modules are Plug-n-Play. They integrate with your existing solutions and enhance the functionality of them. Modules allow you to piece together a custom solution for your particular business needs without bogging down your system with features and components you don't need. If you'd like to remove a module, simply delete the menu tab and the tables in it.
Installing Modules
To install additional modules into your Qrimp Application, you must be an administrator. You'll find the Add Module menu under the Admin tab. Click the Add Module menu and you'll be presented with a list of the currently available modules. Click the Add Module button by the module you want and it's added instantly! Begin using it right away. Modules are just like any other component of your Qrimp Application and you are free to customize them to suit your organization's needs. Change field names, redesign forms, create reports and modify security settings as you see fit.
Build Your Own Modules and Share them with the Community
Not only can you add modules to your system, but you can also create your own modules and share them with other Qrimp users. One of the available modules you'll see in the Modules list is the Module Builder. Add this module and you'll see the Build Module menu under the Admin tab. Select it and you'll be presented with a list of your tables and you can choose the ones you'd like to add to the module. When you build the module, you can save the resulting file and then upload it to the Qrimp Developer Network where we can add it to the list for others to install into their own systems.
Open Share Icon
next to headers and footers in your app. Hover over the icon to highlight the content contained within the header or footer. Click on the icon and you'll be taken directly to the header/footer that is being displayed. Edit it and return to the page and you will see your changes.
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