Interested in helping the BSA test society software and web sites? Doing so means that you will have input and influence over our systems, early acess to software and will help improve the quality of the systems we make available to our users.

• What is beta testing?
• What is the purpose of beta testing?
• Who does beta testing? Why not the developer?
• What sort of problems should be expected?
• How do I report a problem?
• What do I get out of being a beta tester?

What's News has been established as a project in the PostNuke Network Operations Center.  See the project here.

All avenues of support are there.  Forum, bug report, docs (when I get the time), etc. 

What's News is a newsletter writing module for PostNuke with a long past.  Originaly written by LadyOfDragons (who has since moved on to Xaraya), it was adopted by Oliver Gading around 2002.  After a period of intense development activity, development ceased.  I don't know why.  I was one of those beta testers, and the module was nearly fully functional with only a few minor glitches to resolve.  Oliver's web site is still up, but obviously unmaintained.  I have tried to contact him from time to time about an update with no response.

I now have need of this module in a production environment, so I have taken it upon myself to clean it up and release it.

I have this discussion often with the various groups of people that I work with, and usually they don't believe me, and I come off as an old tech fogey, resistant to "modern technology". That's OK, because I know that one day they'll have a bad experience and realize that I'm right :). And I've given up trying to change how people use email anyway; that horse has left the barn, and it's too late to close the doors. So now I'm just going to refer people to this briefing and let it go at that; they'll be duly warned, and will at least be able to anticipate the problems they may encounter. Here's an Executive Summary if you're not interested in the details:

• You can't assume that viewing incoming html email won't infect your computer with a virus;
• You can't assume that a sender of an html email isn't tracking whether you are looking at the email - or even previewing it;
• You can't assume that your formatted message will look good to your recipients;
• You can't assume that your recipients will even be able to read your formatted message;
• You can't assume that the automatically created plain text version of your message will look good, or even work at all.

If you are interested in the details, read on by clicking the title of this article...

Welcome to the new Support Site for the Botanical Society of America.

I will be using this site to manage various projects underway for the BSA and it's clients and affiliated organizations, and to "blog" information useful to others. This site will also be used as a test-bed for PostNuke v0.80, which is what you are looking at now. So, it may be unavailable from time to time. I apologize in advance...