Since 4.0 development has been moving so quickly, we’ve just had everyone pulling the absolute latest source code from Subversion (technically called the “HEAD” revision). This was a good thing during early development because it kept us all on the same page.

However, with 4.0 no longer in beta, we really need to improve this process so people know they’re running the latest stable code and not something we worked on 5 minutes ago, or bleary-eyed at 3AM. Most of the time we’re pretty thorough with our local tests, but they’re no substitute for the acceptance tests and browser-compliance tests Joe@WGM runs in Q/A. You guys have access to our main repository, so there’s no guarantee the absolute latest code has gone through Q/A.

Our philosophy with 4.0 has been to *not* make a big deal about point releases in an attempt to discourage ourselves from batching up functionality and fixes to make a “marketable release”. We want to give you real-time access to the fixes and features that you care about. Those of you who need a specific feature (or want to help test) can upgrade 5 minutes after we commit changes. Everyone else can be confident we’ve fully tested the incremental upgrade they’re going through.

It’s not that we haven’t been testing things carefully all along, but we haven’t been very good about telling you after we run all our tests.

So here’s what we’re going to do:

• Every other Monday we’re going to make a new milestone build that will go through Joe@WGM’s entire acceptance and browser test suite. Anything that fails will go back to development as a top priority. This is pretty much how things work now anyway, but it leads into:
• Once the acceptance tests all pass, we’ll update the latest “stable” build on our on-line demos, instant evaluations, hosted helpdesks and the downloadable ZIP file.
• If you run Cerb4 on your own server, you can upgrade by simply issuing the command “svn -r nnn update” from your /cerb4 directory at the server console (where ‘nnn’ is the version number posted on the site). In Windows you can use TortoiseSVN to “Update to Revision” by right clicking the cerb4 folder in Explorer.

Thanks for being enthusiastic enough about the project that this is even an issue!

First off, thanks for supporting Cerberus Helpdesk development by previously purchasing a version 3.0 license! Contributions like yours have allowed us to push forward full-time for over six years.

Over those six years, the project has gone through some big changes while striving to stay agile for a growing community. The early community was mostly made up of techies; but over the past few years we’ve had increasing interest from people in all industries who are still taking the plunge to web-based e-mail from POP3/IMAP mailboxes and desktop e-mail clients.

We’ve never been the type of project to increase major versions for marketing reasons. We increment our major version when we feel the project and its concepts are going through a fundamental metamorphosis that, despite increasing version numbers, doesn’t require us to stay trapped by a compatibility with the inefficiencies and missteps of the past.

The latest metamorphosis has been version 4.0, which is our answer to the question “What would you do differently if you could start over with what you know today?”.

At first glance you’ll probably notice things are different (and slimmer). Please don’t let this deter you, as it’s part of the process. 4.0 places its major emphasis on customization, which means plug-ins can add or change functionality based on the needs of specific groups. It means you aren’t boxed in by a “one-size-fits-all” mentality. This clean slate allows you to add, build or share the pieces you need without having to deal with the bloat of the pieces you don’t.

For example, at WebGroup Media we’ve added custom tools to our helpdesk to manage our forums, CRM opportunities and product licensing. We’re able to quickly know more about our specific customers when looking at a ticket without cluttering the project for everyone else. A big part of 4.0 development is going to be building and fostering the development of similar tools for various groups. For this reason, we want to keep the core (shared) project as slim as possible.

If you feel your past investment in our project has been worthwhile, please consider upgrading to 4.0 and supporting this effort. As a 3.0 license owner you’ll receive a 50% discount. Don’t wait around for the perfect project to suddenly materialize without your input, stop by the forums and tell us what your ideal helpdesk should do.

We’ve been asking you guys what you feel about the new $50 per worker pricing ($25 per worker on upgrades) since we made the switch. The change to per worker pricing has freed us from having to hold functionality hostage, since we really feel every feature is helpful to organizations of all sizes (heck, I use most of them on my own webmail!) So far the reception has been positive, but with a few lingering issues to work out.

The main remaining contention is about where the cutoff should be for unlimited workers. Many people feel that the cutoff being 50 workers is too high. It’s true that the average number of workers on licenses since we’ve been asking has been quite a bit less than 50. We can also sympathize with organizations that have a lot of community volunteer or part-time workers.

Looking at the data from recent orders, we feel a better cutoff for an unlimited license is probably around 20 workers. That still gives a good discount to smaller teams while keeping the price reasonable for larger teams. Unlimited workers after 20, coupled with a small business or upgrade discount, reduces the unlimited worker license by up to 60%.

We’ve decided to trial offering the unlimited license at 20 workers through April 15^th 2008. The 50% discount for 2.0 and 3.0 license upgrades still applies as well. That’s $995 for unlimited workers on new purchases or $497 for an upgrade from 3.0. Both prices include all version 4.0 updates.

If you already purchased or upgraded to 4.0 and paid for more than 20 workers, contact us and we’ll upgrade you to an unlimited license at no cost. If you paid for less than 20 workers, we’d be happy to upgrade you to an unlimited license using your initial purchase price as a discount.

Thanks for the constant stream of candid feedback!

Here’s a quick progress report on the top three responses (by a huge margin) from the “Which 4.0 major feature do you want WGM to focus on next?” poll in the community voting booth.

• Time Tracking: I just finished a big Configuration area cleanup to allow plugins to contribute new tabs. Time Tracking needed its own little setup area. Beyond that, this is a really straight forward plugin/feature. In Devblocks-speak, we just need to create the DAO/Model/AbstractView for time slips and allow them to link to Organizations, Tickets or Calls like Tasks work.
• Support Center Revamp: The “Communities” area was finally moved into Configuration area since it’s an administrator feature. The Configuration area cleanup also made Community Tools a lot easier to configure and install than they were on the old communities page. The next steps here will be combining the Knowledgebase (KB) and Support Center (SC) plugins to reduce setup confusion, and to allow the SC to show KB articles. We’ll likely bring back KB categories, but unlike Cerb3 you’ll be able to have multiple KBs. Workers will be able to manage the KB from the worker GUI instead of having to create and use editor accounts on the KB community tools. We’ll also finish up the documentation for making new SC themes.
• Translations: We finally sorted out the Western Latin special character issues that have been plaguing Cerb4. This was a big step to getting translations going, since externalizing the strings would have been pointless if characters like umlauts wouldn’t display properly. Now we just need to move the rest of the strings (i.e. words, sentences) out of the templates and into the strings.xml files in each plugin.I’ve been thinking about creating a simple translation plugin that translators can use to edit the strings.xml files from the GUI with side-by-side comparison of English and the destination language. We’re using the TMX standard for localization, and Cerb can take care of formatting everything properly without translators having to edit XML across a dozen different plugins. A built-in TMX editor could also give translators a list of only new strings, which would be a big time saver versus scouring files.

It’s not too late to add your feedback to the poll. Stop by the Community Voting Booth in the forums.

We started Cerb4 with the idea of supporting MySQL, PostgreSQL, MSSQL, Oracle, etc. As development has progressed, we’ve hit several issues where our database functionality needs won’t abstract or overlap effectively.

The major benefits of Cerb4 standardizing on MySQL 4.1+:

• Fulltext searching: Right now we’re implementing database-driven functionality where our supported platforms (MySQL and PostgreSQL, at the moment) overlap. On text searching, this currently centers on basic SQL-92 “LIKE” syntax searches. The downsides here are pretty obvious; there’s no boolean support, wildcard searching is grossly inefficient when looking for multiple words and the order of keywords must be precise. The ideal situation is to have the full feature set of MySQL’s FULLTEXT index type, which, while not perfect, opens up a more Google-like syntax that’s much more useful than what we’re currently doing.
• Internationalization: It’s much faster and cleaner to be able to depend on MySQL’s encodings and multibyte behavior than to abstract how each platform approaches i18n. MySQL has its own tricks too, like “SET NAMES utf-8;” being issued per connection to ensure the client and server are handling multibyte encoding the same way.
• Sub-queries/Foreign Keys/Cascades/Joins: With day-to-day functionality we haven’t had much of a problem avoiding sub-queries or foreign keys for MySQL 3.23’s benefit. However, to support this rather old version of MySQL we lose the ability to be efficient in database patches and maintenance tasks. While not exclusive benefits of MySQL 4.1+, cascaded deletes on foreign keys, sub-queries and joins in UPDATE/DELETE would make patching and maintenance much more efficient. We end up with a lot of N+1 queries presently, where if ‘N’ is based on a table like ‘ticket’ it may end up around 1 million repeats of a query. This ends up clashing with the default PHP execution time of 30 seconds (which is fine for rendering a typical page, and an eternal pain for upgrading/maintenance tasks in PHP when the execution time can’t be overloaded at script level).
• Transactions: Another needless concession to MySQL 3.23, without transactions we have a much harder time making sure partial data isn’t written to the database — especially while parsing tickets. Transactions ensure everything is successful or none of the changes are applied. We’ve always needed this, and MySQL 3.23 support has always been in the way.

All of these issues contribute to the speed of development.

That’s the case to be made on our end. Making this change would unstick several big feature requests, that are far more important to us than the marketing bulletin of ‘database independence’. We’d really like to hear from you if this change would be a problem for you.

Please take a moment to vote on this issue in the forums.

I think we’ve solved most of the issues with special characters (such as umlauts) in Western, single-byte languages for Cerb4.

Cerb4 Build: 563

Due to a few lingering obstacles for full internationalization, we’re still using ISO-8859-1 encoding. That should completely cover English, German, Spanish, Italian, Norwegian, Icelandic, Swedish and others. It should mostly cover Dutch and French (with the exception of a few rare characters).

Warning! Dear Non-Techie friends, the rest of this post gets a bit nerdy.

The recent issues were caused by a couple things:

• META/Content-Type: We were a bit over-eager and had the browser using Unicode (UTF-8) encoding while the data was still Western Latin (ISO-8859-1). Display-wise this is entirely fine because of backwards compatibility — but when input, like forms, was sent from the browser to PHP, it could include multi-byte characters that the database would split up into seemingly random single byte characters. This affected things like umlauts and the British pound sign, not just fully multi-byte languages like Japanese, Chinese and Russian.
• Ajax/XHR: Modern browsers default their XHR requests (how Ajax happens) to UTF-8 encoding when no Content-Type header is provided. This is why even with ISO-8859-1 encoding, umlauts would break on dynamic functionality in the helpdesk (ticket peek, reply, templates).
• UTF-8 vs Unicode: Unicode is a variable byte encoding which overlaps with ISO-8859-1 completely on the first byte. UTF-8 overlaps with ISO-8859-1 over the first 7 bits (which is basically all the characters printed on the keys of a standard US Keyboard, including the SHIFT characters). Extended characters, such as umlauts, are expected in a second UTF-8 byte (0xC3BC vs 0xFC).

We’d love to switch over to UTF-8 immediately and support almost every language, but here’s what’s in the way:

• PHP6 is on the way with native Unicode support for all strings. This is much cleaner than anything we can do with the mbstring extension.
• mbstring function overloading (e.g. substr() -> mb_substr()) can simulate native UTF-8 strings with PHP5, but it requires php.ini changes. These changes will usually affect all PHP scripts on your webserver. Under ideal conditions we can control this with Cerb4 and only affect our script. However, real-world conditions are rarely ideal and this would make for a terrible minimum requirement.
• Our database abstraction (MySQL, PostgreSQL, etc.) makes UTF-8 support in the database layer more complicated. This would be much easier if we knew we were always dealing with MySQL 4.0+. We may need to make some tough decisions here (though they’d allow us a lot more efficiency on things like fulltext index searching versus our current watered-down alternatives).
• Converting existing databases to UTF-8 isn’t a one-click process. Ideally we’ll only have to help people convert their existing database if they need UTF-8 support. It can also be the new default. Our current goal is to make sure we can support UTF-8 optionally without breaking every existing Cerb4 helpdesk to get it. Data-wise we’re probably fine here, but we’d run into the same issues as described above until the database was converted to UTF-8. The MySQL default is ISO-8859-1 (which it dubs “latin1”).

UTF-8 hangups aside, this should fix the main issues with Cerberus Helpdesk for our friends in Germany, Austria, France, Belgium, Italy, Sweden, Norway, Spain and the Netherlands (who have been rightfully banging down our door about it!)