We will be expanding soon to create a project room for P’unk Ave (war room, for you violent types). The expansion space is in the row home next door to the studio (in fact, it was the original studio space of P’unk Avenue.)

In preparation, I have been going through some boxes that were stored there.

In one of the boxes, I found some mix tapes. Over the years, I have been paring them down. (Maybe 4 years ago, I put more than a hundred on the steps of the studio with a free sign and they disappeared within a couple of hours.) For some reason, I have had trouble deaccessioning the ones that were made for me or ones I made together with a good friend.

For instance, the one pictured above was made with my friend Steve. He brought over his records and CDs and together we made this mix. As many of you remember, mix tapes were made in real time so this process took a couple of hours, a few beers were consumed and many things were discussed. I don’t recall what we talked about, but I have such a warm memory of that evening.

It has been hard to imagine parting with this tape, since one glance at it and I feel that all is right with the world for an instant. Taking this picture has been cathartic, though. This tape is in the box destined for Goodwill this week.

The Apostrophe Google Group has become pretty active lately. It has been so great to connect up with people around the world that are using Apostrophe to make sites for themselves or their clients. It feels great to be able to share something that we have labored long and hard on. It is especially exciting to know that we scratched our own itch and made something that works well for us and for our clients. It’s also exciting to see it helping with other peoples’ itches.

We love the passion that people have about Apostrophe. We have seen that in many forms including the suggestion of new features. What I want to make clear, though, is that Apostrophe does have a point of view embedded in all of the decisions that we make as we design and build it. If someone asks for a new feature, I always ask, “What problem are you trying to solve?” or “Can you describe a situation where the need for this feature came up?”

I think that surprises some people. They assume that our goal is to have the longest list of features of any web content management tool. In fact, that is not our goal. Our goal is to create a tool that is joyful to use while still being powerful.

The reason people fall in love with Apostrophe is because we have worked very hard to keep it simple and elegant. We are always going to ask the tough question of what problem does this solve. (Can it be solved with what is already built?)

We will never build a feature just because we wonder if it can be done. We are not in a feature race with anyone. We have found that sometimes people pick something based on a list of features, but our clients and users pick Apostrophe based on how they feel when they use it (think Tiffany’s, not Walmart). They feel empowered and excited. They have often mentioned the joyfulness of using Apostrophe. We have even heard people gasp and giggle when editing content for the first time.

All that said, we don’t want to be the solution for everyone, but we hope you enjoy using Apostrophe if it works for you.

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Note: I just finished reading Rework by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson of 37 Signals, and it reminded me that I should be putting down more of our thoughts on Apostrophe. These decisions have been embedded in Apostrophe from the beginning, but we have not always been good about communicating them.

Probably the easiest way to get a feel for Apostrophe is to go to our demo site and login. The user name is “admin” and the password is “demo”. Keep in mind that the content resets itself every hour on the hour.

If you want to get your bearings before you you do that, head over to the newly revamped Apostrophe site. For the very interested, you should consider checking out our extensive README which includes an Installation section, an Editor’s guide, a Designer’s guide and a Developer’s guide.

Now for some of the highlights.

Slots!

There are rich text, image, slideshow, video, button, PDF, Raw HTML, and other slots built in. If you have used Apostrophe before, you know that you can add a slot on a page, choose what you want to place and then reorder it. New custom slots can also be made for any project.

Slot Options

For some time we have wanted to be able to give you more fine control of a specific slot. For instance, what if you wanted to make the background color of a some text slots yellow, and some white? In the past that would have required two slots. Now, it can just be an option of the same text slot. In this screenshot, you can see that we allow you to switch between different types of slideshows. Make sure you try that out in the demo. It is probably our favorite new feature. We really sweated the details on making sure the option control was contextual. We hope you appreciate the effort.

There are many other new features and highlights, but for the moment I will leave you to find them in the demo (remember: user is “admin” and password is “demo”) or in the documentation. (We promise to highlight these in future posts.)

So, what does this mean to you?

Well, it depends. If you are a PHP developer with Symfony skills you can get started today. From our README:

Right now Apostrophe is best suited to PHP developers who want to make an intuitive content management system available to their clients. Apostrophe is very easy for your clients to edit, administer and maintain once it is set up. Right now, though, Apostrophe installations does call for some command line skills and a willingness to learn about Symfony. We are working to reduce the learning curve.

If you are a front-end developer and want to get started using Apostrophe, talk to us. We are in the process of working out a package where we set up a staging server with Symfony and Apostrophe running on it. We would train you on templating in Apostrophe and you should be up in running in a day or two.

If you don’t want to go that route, here is what we suggest:

Front-end developers who do not yet have PHP and Symfony skills but wish to set up an Apostrophe site by themselves should consider tackling the Symfony tutorial to get up to speed. It’s not necessary to complete the entire tutorial, but it helps to have at least a passing familiarity with Symfony.

If you just think Apostrophe is rad and you want one… like now, just drop us a line. We would be happy to design and implement an Apostrophe site for you. You would be joining some good company if you do.

Surprise!

We (more accurately Tom) decided to build an extra slot last night as a gift for making you wait an extra day. Isn’t that nice of us (him)?

If you are observant you may have noticed an extra slot in the screenshot above. So without further ado, we present the Feed Slot (commonly referred to as the RSS Feed slot, but it will take Atom feeds as well). Use this to bring in your Twitter updates or maybe our Apostrophe SVN code commit feed.

Feel free to thank us anytime. (We like expensive beer.)

This is really just the beginning. We hope you have an opportunity to check out Apostrophe. We would love to hear from you if you do. Comments below would be much appreciated (and read), as well.
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Don’t forget to follow us on Twitter for on-going updates: @apostrophenow

If you are a developer, the Apostrophe Trac is the home of the open source community. On that site you can open support tickets, browse and contribute to the Wiki, and access and potentially contribute to the source code via svn (you’ll need to contact us if you want write access).

Also, please join the Apostrophe Google Group if you want to tap into the community of people using Apostrophe to get support and help.

We have decided to push back the release of Apostrophe 1.0 until tomorrow.

We are truly in the home stretch. Just hitting a few bugs, finishing up documentation and adding some instructional content to the demo site. To tide you over, we are publishing this screencast of how you add video to a project by searching YouTube from within Apostrophe. Note how we bring in associated metadata (url, title, etc). For the record, you can add video by pasting in embed codes from countless other services like Viddler and Vimeo.

Please tune back in tomorrow.

P.S. We are not blaming the snow for the delay, but did want to note that we are certainly under a deep white blanket here in Philadelphia.

If you follow us carefully, you have probably already seen this screencast of Apostrophe, our open source content management system built in the Symfony PHP Web Framework. You also probably know that we have built many sites with it at Duke University (Trinity College, Theater Studies, Economics, Evolutionary Anthropology, etc) and others like the Kimberton Waldorf School, the Environmental Management Assistance Program, and Diversified Community Services. Since it is an open source project, other teams have used Apostrophe to power their sites to provide easy content management, as well.

You may be wondering why we haven’t made an official 1.0 release to date?

The answer is simply that every time we were going to do that, we decided that it could use one more cool feature or could be re-factored in this way or that. No regrets, though. For this first official 1.0 release, we have done so many under-the-hood changes and updates that we are glad we waited.

I wanted to post to let you know that we will be sharing screencasts and screenshots of features over the next few days leading up to the release (and beyond). Hold on to your hat and get ready for the ride.

Coincidently, we are timing this release so that it was ready for Symfony Live. Tom will be in attendance spreading the good word. If you are planning on being there, drop us a line so Tom can buy you a drink.

The Persepolis Junto
Thursday February 4, 2010

The discussion will begin at 7pm. Food and drink at 6pm.

Please join us this Thursday, February 4th at 6pm for the Junto. This month we will be discussing the book The Complete Persepolis to coordinate with One Book, One Philadelphia. We will start the evening off by watching a clip from the film version of Persepolis. We will follow that up with a discussion led by Siobhan Reardon, President & Director of the Free Library of Philadelphia.

As always, we provide the cold Newcastle Brown and Philadelphia’s best tomato pie. You bring something to share, if it is not too much trouble.

Hope to see you there!

When:
Thursday, February 4, 2010 at 6pm

The discussion which will begin at 7pm. Food and drink at 6pm.

Where:
P’unk Avenue
1168 E. Passyunk Avenue
Philadelphia, PA 19147

From the UX Show & Tell website:

UX Show and Tell is a casual workshop that’s all about the work, where you get feedback on your UX, IA and IxD deliverables from practitioners instead of stakeholders.

Because let’s face it: even the most involved practitioners of the UX community have few places to share work with other helpful colleagues in a face to face environment.

Even if you don’t have something to show, help your fellow IA’s, designers, and researchers by sharing solutions with those who are showing work.

We’ll supply the tomato pie if you bring the deliverables!

UX Show & Tell at P’unk Ave
Wednesday, November 18th @ 6:30pm
1168 E. Passyunk Ave [map]

In January of 2008, we organized a Junto on music distribution. Kristin Thomson of the Future of Music Coalition and Mike Kiley of The Mural and the Mint were on the panel. As a bit of a lapsed musician, I find a great deal of pleasure hanging out with people that love to make music. The passion for music is infectious and uplifting, however, the realities of having a career as a professional musician have become more uncertain in this transitional time.

At the Junto, we touched upon many of those issues and it got me thinking about the future of the music industry. About a year and a half later, I spoke on a panel at DIY Days and met two more people that are deeply invested in figuring out ways to enable musicians to make and distribute their music: Brian McTear of the Weathervane Music Project and Jesse von Doom of CASH Music. In the green room, Jesse, Brian and I had a free-ranging conversation about music, Philadelphia, our personal histories, Weathervane, and CASH Music. It was one of those conversations that gets you pumped up and makes you want to figure out ways to help.

Fortunately, both have ways to kick in a few bucks to help make things happen… but both campaigns end TODAY! Please consider contributing to Weathervane’s Kickstarter fundraiser or CASH Music’s Public Fundraiser.

Addendum: You can also help out by attending the First Annual Weathervane Music Year End Concert-Fundraiser on Thursday, Nov 12, 2009 at Johnny Brenda’s featuring {{{Sunset}}}, East Hundred, Danielson and BC Camplight.

P.S. The Danielson video above is a recently released Weathervane project that is part of one of those interesting loops in life. My wife and I went to Rutgers with Dan. Isn’t life magical?

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In Philadelphia, the cobblestone street and trolley tracks are only inches beneath the surface.

We have not yet hired for the project manager/information architect/content strategist position, but we have an immediate need to add another developer to our team…

P’unk Avenue is a web design and development team located in Philadelphia that creates websites and applications for higher education and business clients. We are also the creators of an open source CMS, Apostrophe, built on top of the Symfony framework.

We are five people looking for another Symfony developer to add to the team. Since we are a small team we all get involved in various aspects of each project. We believe that is a good thing and are looking for someone that enjoys being engaged in a project on many levels.

Our ideal candidate has the following experience/interests:

• At least 3 years working with PHP (including PHP 5 and object oriented programming), or 2 years experience with Ruby and at least one year with PHP 5
• 1+ year developing in the Symfony framework
• Using other frameworks such as Zend Framework, CakePHP, jQuery and Ruby on Rails
• Working knowledge of ORMs such as Doctrine and Propel
• Building and calling web services (REST & SOAP)
• Prototyping and releasing on a frequent iteration schedule
• Using or contributing to open source projects
• A passion for using Test Driven Development to write tight well tested code
• A love for collaborating with a small team to solve problems
• A great sense of humor and an ability to stay cool under pressure

This job does require you to work out of our Philadelphia studio. We have great flexibility in other areas, but we believe that having our team in the same location on a regular basis benefits the websites and products that we create.

Of note, we organize various community events like the Junto and Ignite Philly. We are very interested in engaging in and encouraging deeper conversations about stimulating ideas. The type of person that is also stimulated by thinking and acting on issues they care about would be a good fit on our team. It is not required, but the opportunity to help organize these events is a possibility for any member of our team.

If you feel that you are a good fit, please send resumes and whatever other documentation that you think best represents why we should consider you to: jobs@punkave.com.