I invite everyone to visit the community forum. It’s still pretty empty, but we’ll start adding content.

The forum has 3 main purposes:

1. Bug tracking.
2. Allow feature requests from users.
3. List projects that use jobberBase.

Have a great day, everyone!

It’s been a great first week and I’m really happy to announce that jobberBase was already downloaded over 500 times. I would have been happy even with 30 downloads, so 500 is simply amazing!

I’m also very grateful to all the people who talked on their blogs about jobberBase. Some of my friends, especially, have been very supportive of this project and I’m thankful for that!

Next steps

During the next few days, I have the following priorities:

• Get jobberBase on a Subversion repository and grant some people (who have already contributed to the project) write access.
• Install Vanilla as a means of communication and bug-tracking. I chose Vanilla for its simplicity… in the current stage of the project, the simplest solution is the best .

P.S. I promise to keep adding stuff to the Knowledge Base!

Would you like to contribute to jobberBase and have your improvements included with the original distribution? Here are a few items that could be improved (list under-construction):

1. Create an admin panel to manage all job posts.
2. Rewrite the classes that generate RSS feeds. Current implementation is an old legacy and it looks terrible (start from class.Feed.php).
3. Fix IE bugs (JavaScript, mostly).
4. Implement a multi-language system, with all the strings in language files.
5. Other?

Some people reported they missed the .htaccess file from the downloaded distribution.
If this is you, here are the contents of a .htaccess file you should place in jobberBase root dir (together with index.php and config.php):

RewriteEngine on
Options +FollowSymlinks

ErrorDocument 404 /page-unavailable/

Additionally, I’ve added a htaccess.txt file in the distribution, so you can rename it into .htaccess.

1. Download the latest version from jobberBase.com and decompress it.
2. Make sure you have PHP 5+ (with mysqli extension enabled) and MySQL 4.1+ installed on your server. Also, Apache module mod_rewrite has to be enabled and overriding default settings with .htaccess need to be allowed.
3. Can you see the .htaccess file in your downloaded files? Make sure it’s there.
4. Create a new database and import __db/jobberbase.sql into it.
5. Following directories need write permissions:
   • /uploads (uploaded resumes are temporary stored here)
   • /_templates/_cache (smarty cache)
6. Open config.php and update the following constants so they suit your environment:
   • DB_HOST
   • DB_USER
   • DB_PASS
   • DB_NAME
   • JOBBER_URL
   • _APP_MAIN_DIR
   • NOTIFY_EMAIL
   • ADMIN_EMAIL
   • SITE_NAME
7. If you can’t see the .htaccess file or actually don’t have it, rename htaccess.txt into .htaccess.
8. If your host doesn’t offer the mysqli PHP extension (find out from phpinfo()), you can use a mysql wrapper instead.
   Open config.php and just replace require_once '_includes/class.Db.php' with require_once '_includes/class.Db.MySql.php' (thanks to Emil Sirbu for this).
9. That’s it, open up a browser and type in the URL (e.g. http://localhost/jobberbase/)!

Does this work for you?
Do you have a special environment that needed extra tweaking? Would you like to share?

Assuming you’ve installed jobberBase and you’re ready to start hacking and adjusting it to your needs, you’ll soon find out the posting a job ad might not work as you first expect it to work.

So let me draw it for you:

And this is what it means:

1. You post a job ad.
2. The system checks if there are any other ads you’ve previously posted with the same e-mail address.
3. If there aren’t any, your ad goes into “pending” mode and the administrator receives an e-mail with this new ad. He has to manually activate it, in order for the ad to be published.
4. If, however, your address is found in the database, this new ad will be published instantly.

I chose this solution because it was very fast to implement and it still is very efficient. Most database administration operations are done directly in phpmyadmin, but others (activate/edit/deactivate) from the e-mails jobberBase sends to the admin.

However, the system is pretty flexible once you get the hang of it.

Have fun!

It’s been almost 9 hours since I published the jobberBase site, and there are already over 30 downloads (and counting). Google Analytics is also in place.

To dos

There are still some stuff to do before I’m absolutely happy with jobberBase, but the #1 priority is writing some short documentation. jobberBase is very flexible, but it may have a bit of a steep learning curve, as it’s built on a home-baked “framework”. The internal processes also need some explanations.

I know what doesn’t work or what portions of the code are a mess, therefore please be kind in giving feedback . There’s place for A LOT of improvements, so if you fancy to contribute (how British is that!?), please do so.

Anyway… I’m also considering a more detailed tracking of the downloaders, mainly because I’d like to keep in touch with them and maybe open some opportunities for them. We’ll see…

Well, have an excellent and productive week!

Welcome to the jobberBase development blog!
More to come… later.