MATRIX developers participated for the second year this weekend at Lansing Give Camp, held at Impression 5 Science Center in Lansing, MI.  Give Camp is a great event put on to connect local web developers with non-profit groups who need assistance developing their websites and enhancing their ability to conduct various aspects of their daily operations.  In total over 100 developers participated with 13 non-profit groups.  A conservative estimate of over $100,000 of work was donated by the coders taking the time to give back.

The weekend was filled with coding with technologies for the MATRIX developers such as Ruby, HAML, CSS, and Sinatra, as well as development techniques such as test driven development and behavior driven development.  The developers were also exposed to GIT, a decentralized versioning control system that is very popular currently in the open source community.  Events such as this allow the developers at MATRIX to network with great people as well as learn new technologies that they can then apply in their daily work.  The group included Matt Geimer, CTO of MATRIX, and a special thanks goes out to the MATRIX developers who participated:

• Chelsea Carr
• Sarah Godoshian
• Lisa Kelly
• Cassi Miller
• Tim Miller
• Madalyn Parker

A very special thanks goes to the generous event sponsors and organizers as well – it wouldn’t be possible without them!  Thanks for the great swag and prizes that were offered up (and some wonderful dev tools were won by MATRIX folks)!

A new version of KORA has been released, version 2.1.1. It has been approximately one year since KORA 2.0 Beta was released and 2.1.1 builds upon it and the production version of 2.0 greatly. This version includes many new features such as public ingestion support, XML import/export, advance search, and some user interface tweaks. The full information is available at the KORA Sourceforge site. Developer and user documentation are included as always in the ‘docs’ folder. The next version (KORA 3.0) is currently under development and will include some performance gains as well as an improved version updater.

Much thanks to the entire MATRIX Programming team and the many users of KORA for giving lots of feedback and continually working to improve KORA!

KORA-2.0.0 is now available on the SourceForge website at https://sourceforge.net/projects/kora/files/KORA/.

The new version includes:

• PHP 5.3 (and PHP 6.0) compatibility
• Improvement of KORA_Search sorting – sorting by KID and date now work as expected
• Additional checks performed at install to ensure compatibility
• Fixed interaction between presets and the hidden timestamp control
• Closer compliance with XHTML standards

With the new features, enhancements, and fixes, it is recommended that all users update to this version as soon as possible. Details on this version are available in the full release notes at https://sourceforge.net/projects/kora/files/KORA/KORA-2.0.0/2.0_release_notes.txt/view.

KORA-2.0.0-beta is now available on Sourceforge at http://sourceforge.net/projects/kora/

From the release notes…

KORA-2.0.0-beta is the next major release of KORA. It includes multiple improvements and bug fixes, which are listed in the change log. Those upgrading from a previous version should make sure they read and follow the upgrade instructions. Those installing KORA for the first time can follow the standard install instructions. The README also contains the specific extra step(s) for updating.

New/Updated Features:

*A new geolocation control has been included. This allows a user to input a Google Maps API key into KORA and then choose controls from a scheme to use as query material to return the geographic location. This control is still in beta.

*koraSearch.php has been updated. The search functionality in this file used to retrieve data from KORA had major performance issues as logical operations in queries grew, specifically with AND operations. The updated search algorithm uses PHP for union and intersection operations instead of MySQL which has effectively fixed any performance issues. OR operations were not nearly as slow as the number of clauses were increased, but improvement was also seen in this category.

*An general purpose XML importer has been added, allowing users to upload XML files and then choose how the XML schema is translated into an existing KORA scheme. Files can also be uploaded using a zip file along with the XML file – the XML file must have a XML tag that relates to what file belongs with that record. More documentation on the XML importer will be available with the 2.0.0 production release.

*OAI-PMH framework added. KORA now has the beginning of an OAI-PHM data exchange interface implemented. Final touches need to be added, but programmers should be able to use the existing code for creating services for others to use at current time. More documentation will be available when the feature is fully implemented, planned for KORA-2.1.0.

*A timestamp has been added to each record. This was added for the OAI-PMH code specifically, but does allow the user to see the last time the record was updated. The timestamp is not editable by users.

Matthew Geimer, CTO at MATRIX, attended Google I/O 2009 at the Moscone Center in San Fransisco, CA.  The conference focused on many aspects of new technologies involving web development, as well as mobile application developlment and the Google APIs and toolkits available.  MATRIX is excited with the new features available in HTML 5 showcased at I/O 2009 as well as the many other products showcased.  The keynote speeches are available at the I/O 2009 website and many of the sessions are available on YouTube.