Goals

Whiteboard is an app which aims to increase the effectiveness of office-wide standups, and increase communication with the technical community by sharing what we learn with the outside world. It does this by making two things easy - emailing a summary of the standup to everyone in the company and by creating a blog post of the items which are deemed of public interest.

Background

At Pivotal Labs we have an office-wide standup every morning at 9:06 (right after breakfast). The current format is new faces (who's new in the office), helps (things people are stuck on) and interestings (things that might be of interest to the office).

Before Whiteboard, one person madly scribbled notes, and one person ran standup using a physical whiteboard as a guide to things people wanted to remember to talk about. Whiteboard provides an easy interface for people to add items they want to talk about, and then a way to take those items and assemble them into a blog post and an email with as little effort as possible. The idea is to shift the writing to the person who knows about the item, and reduce the role of the person running standup to an editor.

Features

Add New Faces, Helps and Interesting
Summarize into posts
Two click email sending (the second click is for safety)
Two click Posts to Wordpress (untransformed markdown at the moment)
Allow authorized IP addresses to access the board without restriction
Allow users to sign in with Google Apps SSO if outside authorized IPs

Usage

Deploy to Cloud Foundry. Tell people in the office to use it. At standup, go over the board, then add a title and click 'create post'. The board is then cleared for the next day, and you can edit the post at your leisure and deliver it when ready.

Development

Whiteboard is a Rails 4 app. It uses rspec with capybara for request specs. Please add tests if you are adding code.

Whiteboard is on Pivotal Tracker.

The following environment variables are necessary for posting to a Wordpress blog.

export WORDPRESS_BLOG_HOST=<blog server>
export WORDPRESS_BASIC_AUTH_USER=<user> #optional
export WORDPRESS_BASIC_AUTH_PASSWORD=<password> #optional
export WORDPRESS_XMLRPC_ENDPOINT_PATH=/wordpress/xmlrpc.php
export WORDPRESS_USER=<username>
export WORDPRESS_PASSWORD=<password>

The following environment variables are necessary for posting to email via SendGrid.

export SENDGRID_USERNAME=<username>
export SENDGRID_PASSWORD=<password>

To use these environment variables in development mode:

$ foreman run -e .env-development [command] # example: rails s

Another option is to use the dotenv gem to setup your environment. Created a .env file in the root of your project. See the .env-example file for setup.

Testing

bundle exec rspec

How to Deploy to Cloud Foundry

##First Time Deployment Setup

See Kevin Olsen for credentials.

cf target --url https://api.run.pivotal.io
cf login
cf target -s whiteboard

cf push --no-start --reset
cf set-env whiteboard-production WORDPRESS_USER username
cf set-env whiteboard-production WORDPRESS_PASSWORD password
cf set-env whiteboard-production WORDPRESS_BLOG_HOST blogname.wordpress.com
cf set-env whiteboard-production WORDPRESS_XMLRPC_ENDPOINT_PATH /wordpress/xmlrpc.php
cf set-env whiteboard-production EXCEPTIONAL_API_KEY <you exceptional API key>
cf set-env whiteboard-acceptance WORDPRESS_USER username
cf set-env whiteboard-acceptance WORDPRESS_PASSWORD password
cf set-env whiteboard-acceptance WORDPRESS_BLOG_HOST blogname.wordpress.com
cf set-env whiteboard-acceptance WORDPRESS_BASIC_AUTH_USER <user>
cf set-env whiteboard-acceptance WORDPRESS_BASIC_AUTH_PASSWORD <password>
cf set-env whiteboard-acceptance WORDPRESS_XMLRPC_ENDPOINT_PATH /wordpress/xmlrpc.php
cf set-env whiteboard-acceptance EXCEPTIONAL_API_KEY <you exceptional API key>
cf env   # check all settings
# migrate data
cf push --reset  # push env settings and start app
cf start

##Deployment After ENV Vars Set

First, log into Cloud Foundry:

cf target --url https://api.run.pivotal.io
cf login

Then run:

rake acceptance deploy

rake production deploy

The rake task copies the code to be deployed into a /tmp directory, so you can continue working while deploying.

Author

Whiteboard was written by Matthew Kocher.

License

Whiteboard is MIT Licensed. See MIT-LICENSE for details.

thecadams/whiteboard