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Welcome to the joberBase development blog!

Have you found the stats, yet?

Stats? What stats?

Well, I’ve created a page that displays some useful overall information about the site.
Assuming your URL is http://localhost/jobberbase/, the stats can be accessed at http://localhost/jobberbase/stats/.

You probably don’t want other people to see them, so you might want to protect the page somehow. On jobber.ro, I use an extra param (/stats/EXTRA_PARAM/) based on which I perform a basic authentication (if EXTRA_PARAM exists, display page). :p

What stats are available?

  • A list of the latest job applications + total no. of apps + maximum apps per day, in the past 30 days + average apps per day, in the past 30 days.
  • List of performed searches on the site + total no. of searches + max searches per day in the past 30 days + avg apps per day in the past 30 days.

On jobber.ro we also track the site widgets, like this:
Whenever someone clicks on a job ad she sees on a 3rd party site (that displays the jobber site widget), we save the referrer. This way, we know EXACTLY how many people actually used the site widget and how popular it is on their sites :).

Metrics is always good!
Enjoy! :)

January 29, 2008 | Filed Under Knowledge Base | 1 Comment 

Database maintenance

In the root directory of jobberBase, there’s a cron_maintenance.php script that you should run with cron (or Task Scheduler, on Windows). On jobber.ro, I have that script running every night.

Default maintenance

For now, what the maintenance script does is delete temporary and inactive job ads.

What else can you do

The standard job-board behavior is to allow an ad to be active for a number of days (30, for most of them). If you wish to implement this in your jobberBase-based site, you could use the cron_maintenance.php to deactivate older ads and/or notify publishers with 2-3 days before this deactivation…

I’m guessing that an OPTIMIZE TABLE jobs; would also be useful, from time to time :).

November 3, 2007 | Filed Under Knowledge Base | 1 Comment 

Missing .htaccess

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

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . index.php [L]

ErrorDocument 404 /page-unavailable/

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

October 24, 2007 | Filed Under Knowledge Base | 1 Comment 

jobberBase Installation Guide

  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?

October 23, 2007 | Filed Under Knowledge Base | 75 Comments 

Posting a job ad

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!

October 22, 2007 | Filed Under Knowledge Base | 13 Comments