In our continuous effort to improve the platform one of our most valuable tools is feedback and ideas from you, our users. Over the years the majority of our best improvements have come directly from thePort's most creative and experienced collective brain - our customers.

As an example, several months ago we introduced the ability for administrators to create entirely new pages built around a library of draggable 'widgets' - removing the need for a skilled developer to hand-code new pages. After introducing our first drag and drop interface, we got a lot of positive feedback and suggestions for improving the tool to make it easier and more powerful.

This morning we pushed a hotfix that incorporates several improvements to the drag and drop functionality, most of which came from your feedback. One of the most difficult parts of the drag and drop concept is the need to satisfy two competing masters - the need to improve its power and flexibility while also keeping it simple and easy to use.

After listening it became clear to us that we needed to better communicate how it all worked so we've added a help feature to the drag and drop pages that provides some instructions. Admins see a more detailed version of these instructions than users do. Feel free to make suggestions about additions or clarifications to these instructions.

In addition we've provided more flexibility to the widgets themselves. Now the title bar on widgets can be hidden or shown to your end user, independent of if the widget is locked or not (previously, locked widgets never showed a title bar). The visibility of the title bar is indicated to you, the administrator, by a new icon in the upper left corner of the widget. You can also still customize the title's text and background color.

For consistency the widget titles themselves now automatically adopt the style of the rest of the titles on your site (previously they had their own style - now they use class=ContentTitle).

Also, the shape of the cursor will change when moving over an unlocked widget's title to indicate that the widget is draggable.

Being an interim release these are just a few of the ideas we got from you. Many of your ideas will come as improvements in future releases, but today's hotfix is an example of how important your feedback is to what we do here.

If you have ideas for product enhancements (or updates to existing features) check out our Feature Requests blog. You can vote on items you'd like to see or add your own.

ThePort is actively looking for a systems administrator.  If you're versatile (we're primarily a Microsoft shop but have MySQL, Java, and Apache to support as well), enjoy a good challenge (we handle 30 million page views a month and roughly 600 database transactions per second), and think you're good at foosball, you may be the perfect candidate. A little more about the job:

1. We're located in Atlanta
2. We have flex hours and a work from home policy
3. We want to do more with virtualizing our platform
4. We need a better staging environment
5. We have good monitoring but want someone to take ownership of it

More can be found in our job requirements here

Send all resumes to tj@theport.com

p.s. We have beer in the fridge most Fridays. What's not to like about this job?

Let me ask you a few questions...

* Are you new to Selenium and not sure how to get started?
* Have you recorded some scripts but don't know how to edit them?
* Having a tough time moving your scripts into tools such as Selenium RC, SVN or NUnit?
* Not sure how to cross-browser test when Selenium runs in Firefox only?
* Is there an error in your script and you have no idea why?
* Not sure what you should automate first?
* No 'go-to' resources in your organization so not sure how to automate on your own?

Believe me, these are all questions we have all had while using Selenium. Soon after using Selenium, you find out it is not as easy as 'record and playback'. To get the full benefits of Selenium, you will be required to dive deeper into the tools. I know, I know, how do you do that? Don't be scared... I have done all the work for you. I'm going to direct you to tools, websites, blogs and training that can help!

Selenium Website - Get started here!

IDE - http://seleniumhq.org/projects/ide/
RC - http://seleniumhq.org/projects/remote-control/
Grid - http://selenium-grid.seleniumhq.org/

Support Groups - If you don't do anything else, become a member of a Selenium User Group. Post your question and you will get the help you need from other Selenium users and Selenium developers/support staff. Its a must have people! Here are two that I recommend:

http://groups.google.com/group/selenium-users/topics
http://wiki.openqa.org/display/SIDE/Home

Documentation - user manuals and simple instructions on how to get started.

http://seleniumhq.org/docs/
http://www.codediesel.com/php/selenium-ide-tutorial-part-1/
http://www.codediesel.com/php/selenium-ide-tutorial-part-2/
http://www.jroller.com/selenium/
http://www.testinggeek.com/index.php/testing-tools/test-execution/99-selenium-remote-control-introduction

Video Tutorials

http://agilesoftwaredevelopment.com/videos/functional-testing-selenium-ide
http://vimeo.com/4671653
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JM4GldTw_Cw
http://www.testinggeek.com/index.php/testing-tools/test-execution/166-selenium-ide-rc-workshop-tutorial
http://www.mefeedia.com/watch/28363549

Add-ons and tools to use along with Selenium - you will need many of these tools so check them out!

http://agiletesting.blogspot.com/2006/01/useful-tools-for-writing-selenium.html
http://saucelabs.com/blog/index.php/tag/selenium-rc/
http://robfletcher.github.com/grails-selenium-rc/docs/manual/index.html
http://getfirebug.com/
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1095/
http://www.kavinschool.com/Courses/Selenium/Day1/Selenium%20Tutorial%20Day%201-3%20-%20Useful%20Tools.pdf (its says for Ruby however the tools mentioned are great for all languages used)

Blogs - very helpful information

http://googletesting.blogspot.com/2007/09/seleniums-inventor.html
http://blog.karit.geek.nz/2010/07/selenium-grid-part-1-getting-started.html

NUnit and Selenium RC

http://thetestingblog.com/2009/09/10/selenium-rc-in-c-using-nunit-an-end-to-end-example/
http://devio.wordpress.com/2008/09/30/automated-web-application-testing-using-selenium-and-nunit/
http://www.theautomatedtester.co.uk/tutorials/selenium/selenium_csharp_nunit.htm

Selenium Training - I found out the hard way that there is not much in the way of formal training for Selenium. But here are a few that I would recommend.

http://www.rttsweb.com/training/courses/selenium.jsp
http://marakana.com/training/testing/selenium.html
http://www.kavinschool.com/Courses/Selenium/Index.html (you can download all training material free in either PDF or PPT format)

Let me know how helpful this information is to you and rate my blog!