New Year (2024), New Challenges

Brand Management

2023 was the year of redundancies & scaling back in the tech world, & like many others, I was one of the 20% who were “let go” early that year. I don’t think I’d experienced such a tough job market in the tech sector & I can remember the .com bubble bursting in the early 2000s, & the carnage of the GFC post 2008.

That said, the year ended nicely as I was appointed as Customer Insights Manager for the Austrian scale up, Jenis. Jentis have developed an innovative, GDPR compliant Server Side Tag Manager, which provides quality first party data to marketing teams. Jentis is well placed to be a major player in the digital analytics space in the “cookieless” future (“cookieless” is a meaningless, misleading & even deceptive phrase – all tracking/analytics tools drop a “first-party” cookie if you provide consent, & as HTML is stateless, “strictly necessary” session cookies will also be used even without consent, otherwise the website won’t function) .

As part of the product team, my job is to connect with customers, partners and the digital analytics community and provide insights and analysis to help define the product roadmap. This is a role I’m really excited about!

(Not) All Quite on the Western Front

Open Source

It’s been over two years since I last wrote here but that’s not because I’ve not been busy. In fact, I’ve never been busier! Professionally a lot has changed since July 2019. The most important change was my decision to close Fresh Web Services and start work as Community Manager at Alfresco.

Alfresco is an open source document management system, with a free Community Edition and a paid Enterprise edition. I started working there at the back end of 2019, tasked with rejuvenating their community. It was difficult but also great fun, and I found myself working with some exceptionally bright people during some incredibly turbulent times – what with the pandemic and then the purchase of Alfresco by the much larger Hyland Software.

After almost two years as Alfresco Community Manager, I left to become Head of Community at Snowplow Analytics. This again has been an exciting challenge, as I look to build out a team and strategy to grow our community and to consolidate our open source offering. Once again I’m surrounded by brilliant people and a really supportive leadership team.

So, as we approach the end of 2021, I’m looking forward to the challenges of the coming year and hoping that 2022 is better for all of us.

Season’s Greetings to you all.

Magento 2 – AND | OR Search Operators

magento, Open Source
Seek & ye Shall Find – or not

In Magento 1 (M1), it was possible to change the search operands from with the admin UI. Within System > Configuration > Catalog > Catalog Search was a Search Type setting with the options of Like, Fulltext and Combine (Like and Fulltext). In this simple way you had control over the way the default Magento search engine worked.

Continue reading Magento 2 – AND | OR Search Operators →
July Day UK 2017

Joomla Day UK 2017

joomla, Open Source

This year’s UK Joomla Day is on 8th July at the Ilec Conference Centre, in west London.

There’s a varied programme of talks on topics such as the new custom fields in Joomla, Joomla & SEO, and a chance to sit the new Joomla! administrator certification exam.

So, if you’re a Joomla! designer or developer, a Joomla! webmaster or own a Joomla! website, there’s plenty of good stuff on offer. These days are also a great opportunity to meet other Joomlers and take part in the wider Joomla! community.

Perhaps we can meet up if you’re going?

Magento Custom Options

Using Magento’s Custom Options

magento, Open Source

While delivering some Magento training, I was demonstrating how to create Configurable Products and one of the trainees visibly wilted at the thought of creating hundreds of child products to meet her multi-variant product catalogue. However, as she didn’t need to manage stock (as her products were unique, one-offs), I reassured her that she could use Custom Options on a simple product to represent the multi-variants.

So, let’s see how this might work in Magento.

Continue reading Using Magento’s Custom Options →