Art Therapy

The Technology Behind the Site

by Kerry Vineberg (sternklar) and Honore Louie (Honore)

  Photo source: Flickr / ralphbijker

As the WiserEarth community evolves, so does the look and feel of the site and tools. Honore Louie, WiserEarth Product Manager, sits down to talk with us about how WiserEarth works, some of the most exciting new features, and what’s cooking for the future.

Are there any new developments in the works that you would like to announce to WiserEarth members?

Louie: Yes, this is the year WiserEarth works on internationalization! One of the founding principles we’ve always had was to make this site more usable for international visitors. English may very well be the most common language around the world, but having a site in only one language presents a rather large barrier to foreign language speakers. We’re drafting up concepts for how we will translate the site, and how we might be able to “crowd-source” some of the translation work by setting up a system for members to help out with all translation efforts! Already we have people helping out in French, Spanish, and Portuguese. Given the immense scope of this project, this particular feature will probably not be ready until at least late fall of this year, but we’ll post updates as we progress.

Could you give some general background on what WiserEarth runs on, types of server, number of members involved in the running, the code, and how these tools were chosen?

Louie: WiserEarth runs off Symfony, which is a web application framework that uses PHP as its programming language. Because WiserEarth is built to be a dynamic site, it helps to have a framework like Symfony that handles a lot of the interactions in the background between the server and the database (as well as the user’s computer). Our very first technical director, Oz Basarir, chose Symfony for its powerful features and proven track record, and it’s worked out well for us.

Currently, our technical team consists of our technical manager, Rehan [Ifthikar], and myself. We occasionally outsource some development to a part-time developer, but it’s been Rehan lately who makes sure the lights stays on for the most part. We run WiserEarth on three servers, though we’re looking heavily into using cloud computing to scale our processing demands. As the site has grown, we’re starting to see greater increases in traffic and server usage, and while that’s a great thing, it’ll also mean we’ll have to start adding a few more CPUs under the roof to keep up with our users!

What have been your favorite additions to the site, and why?

Louie: I think my favorite feature so far has been the “People you may know” section on the dashboard.  It’s been amazing how I’ve not had some of my closest colleagues added to my network in all this time! It’s interesting to see how quickly you can build a network, and how by just connecting yourself to one person or one piece of information, how that opens up a whole new world of possibilities. That’s really what we wanted to promote on WiserEarth - that to connect you to a community, you have to take a few initial steps, but once you start connecting, the possibilities that come up are far-reaching.

Another thing I really am fond of is our groups re-design. Shawn [Collins] did an excellent job changing up the look of the groups to make it more inviting, and it’s a dramatic improvement over the previous look.  To date, we’ve not had ANY complaints from our users about wanting to switch back, and that is very telling in the web 2.0 world!