Web App: Juvely

Well you have all had a chance to play around with Juvely and test most of its features, but we assume that most people don’t really want clients to access our not-really-yet-whitelabel client centre. The main way that people will want to allow clients to get support is via email. Well guess what - we can do that already!

All accounts already have an email address setup which can be used for this purposes. This is support@[your-account].juvely.com. If you send an email to this address a new ticket will be opened - go on, try it! If a member of staff replies to the ticket an email will be sent to the client. The client can then add a new message to the client by replying to this email!

Another thing we guessed people wouldn’t want is to tell people to email support@[your-account].juvely.com, something like support@[your-company].com would be better right? Well guess what - we can do that too!

To set this up first enter the address into the Account Settings page in the Manage section. Once this is done all emails send by the system will have this address as the from address. To get emails from support@[your-company].com into the system just setup your email server to redirect them to support@[your-account].juvely.com! Sorted! Forwarding will probably work as well as long as the original from address (of the client) is kept in place! You may also want to disable the client centre otherwise URLs to it will appear in the emails sent to users.

We have decided to do this for our support address, now when you email that all your messages will be handled via Juvely!

We have just rolled out version 495! The major changes in this are we have had a minor redesign and added a sidebar to all the pages. We have also added a more secure login system, if you are having problems please reset your password by clicking on the “I have forgotten my password” link! In the next version we are planning to finish off the ticket functionality so it may be a bit longer before the next release.

Bug Fixes

• Search box size was too big and some title text wrapped
• AJAX updating of the recent activity list was broken
• Internet Explorer CSS fixes
• Username field of staff member and client was unique to the whole system rather than specific account
• Various fixes on staff settings page

New Features

• Ticket list is kept the same size even when there are less than 7 tickets
• Automagical updating of distance times (i.e. 32 minutes ago)
• More secure login for staff centre (password is hashed with a salt before transmission; client centre will be done later after testing)

Version 501 is a hotfix which fixes a number of issues related to the email system.

Over the past few weeks we have been busy working but we haven’t really said much about what we have been doing. Hopefully this post will clear things up a bit.

The (dv) server

The main thing we did before releasing the beta was moving from the unsuitable (gs) Grid Server to a (dv) Dedicated Virtual Server. After about a day waiting for MediaTemple’s customer support to give us root access, and another day for them to install the developers package we were free to do whatever we wanted with it! (Their responses were only a few hours but due to timezone differences and other commitments it took us two days to get it sorted).

After that we started to move everything over to there. Rather than using the default Apache we decided to roll our own version of Lighttpd (I couldn’t find the package manager). We then setup Fastcgi and PHP 5.1 to work together nicely and then after that Juvely flew along as you see today (before it was normal to wait over 10 seconds for a page to load!).

The next thing we did was move a few bits around within the Subversion repository then create some working copies on the server. After adding some stuff to hooks/post-commit all we have to do now is commit a new revision and our working copies automatically update! This saved tonnes of time as before this we were using a script we had to run manually to update it which took ages (note: we could have done this before, but I only learned howto while setting up the (dv)). We then setup the production copy of Juvely to use branches so we didn’t accidentally break anything.

Backups

A few days later I thought “Hmm, we had better have some sort of backup system”. I saw the MediaTemple offered a live snapshot system for the whole (dv) but this was another $20 a month, a bit too much as we aren’t making anything yet. So I did a bit of research and a couple of hours later we had an nightly offsite backup system that stores everything on Amazon S3. Backups are fully automated but every few days I still check it to delete the old backups, we could write a script for this but this adds some piece of mind. Anyway, the bill should be through next week (Im shaking in my boots!) so I’ll see how it compares to MediaTemple’s offerings on cost.

Communication

One thing that we wanted people to be able to do when we launched into the beta was to easily contact us. We setup forums, contact forms and email addresses but so far they have hardly been used. The forums are currently just holding our (rather poor) documentation and the contact forms and email addresses are just as bad. The contact us form on the site sends as email to support@juvely.com as does the one within Juvely. This email address is an alias to James’ and I email addresses. So hopefully you can see the problem: how do we know whether the other person has replied? Well, we don’t - so if you report something and get an email back from both James and myself, sorry! Anyway, we should be sorting something out in the next few days so I’ll post again then with what we did.

Righty, I think that is all I planned to explain today. I don’t think I missed anything, but if you know something I did miss or want to know more then leave a comment below! We should have a rollout later today or tomorrow with some new features, so keep an eye open!

Update:

We had an email from one of the MediaTemple Customer Support blokes saying they are glad to hear that that (dv) server is suitable for our needs! He said that he has passed on our suggestion about integrating root access and the developer tools into an option in the (mt) account centre! He also pointed out that the Plesk interface has a similar backup system included (at no extra cost) similar to what we are already doing. Details of the (dv) backup options can be found here.