After months of hard work, head-scratching, frantic coding and copious tea-drinking by a number of the team here, I’m over the moon to tell you that we’ve just launched a brand new site (I could have had a baby by now. Well, I sort of have, with multiple parentage).

Virgin Media Pioneers is a social networking and video blogging platform, and is a partnership between Virgin Media and Enterprise UK – the charity that aims to increase entrepreneurial behaviour across Britain.

It’s the core of a programme that’s going to equip young, budding entrepreneurs – Pioneers – with the skills, confidence, experience and network of contacts to help them make it on their own.

Anyone who joins the site can easily connect with entrepreneurial people like them, as well as get support and advice from established business experts. Pioneers upload video blogs and responses to share their experiences, talk about their business ideas, ask for help or simply celebrate success.

The site’s been built on a set of open source platforms and plugins, most notably WordPress, VideoPress and BuddyPress, which gave us a foundation to combine social and video features without coding everything from the ground up.

From day one we’ve worked in really close collaboration with both Enterprise UK and Virgin Media, running an agile methodology that’s proved massively successful.

Without going into too much detail, the biggest feature of this is that we – all of us, clients included – have met up every two weeks for nearly the past nine months, and at every point there’s been an opportunity to change the shape of what we’ve been doing.

When we discovered a new requirement, decided we didn’t like the way something worked or had a brand new insight into our target audience, we simply changed the priority of what we were working on next. It was an eye-opener, working on a large-scale build in this way, but one that’s been pivotal to the success of the development.

NixonMcInnes provided the skills and experience in designing and building the site, including user experience design, working to create a brand identity and undertaking usability testing to make sure that this is something that fits with the immediate needs and expectations of our first Pioneers.

Usability testing with people who were actually going to be using the site was particularly interesting and vindicated our choice of agile as a methodology, as well as the other decisions we’d made along the way; all feedback we gathered was overwhelmingly positive and even after months of development, I only came away with a few minor changes to make.

This is only the start though – the first release of the site is going to build and evolve over time to include new features and functions, based on the needs of the people who use it, using feedback and research.

Why am I so excited? OK, there’s a degree of self-satisfaction and pride in what we’ve all produced, but it’s more than that – as other people have pointed out, in the recession young people were some of the hardest hit – and this is one opportunity for those people to move towards turning their own ideas into a career. As a result, it’s also supporting independent business in the UK, in which social enterprise is beginning to feature more (from my recent experience, anyway).

It’s been an amazing experience, working with some brilliant people (not just Steve, Josh, Matt, Jenni and Telmo) and I can’t wait to watch more people join the site, follow their journey and build on what we’ve all started.

For a few days before Christmas, deep within the NixonMcInnes Skunkworks, a band of elves were busy developing something special based upon some newly released Wordpress functionality. Behold, our new plugin, Sentimeter!

At the end of December Wordpress 2.9 was released with newly added support for comment metadata. We though it would be great to build a plugin that utilized this new feature and it also happened that a client of ours needed a plugin that that used comment meta data, everyone is a winner.

The resulting plugin is called Sentimeter. In the words of Steve the plugins main author (and lead developer here at Nizomk):

This plugin allows users to express sentiments (a la getsatisfaction.com, e.g. happy, neutral, outraged etc.) through the WordPress commenting system. Users can also associate their comment with a pre-defined ‘topic’. Overall sentiment, and comment topics, can be viewed as pie charts in the admin system, within a user-defined date range. Additionally, comments (along with their sentiment, and topic, if specified) can be exported as a CSV for further offline analysis.

You will need to update your templates a bit to utilize the plugin but it is written in the traditional Wordpress ‘loop’ style so it should slot in easily. Check out the plugin homepage for the detailed instructions. As the blurb says, the admin panel allows you to view how your users are feeling via a couple of pie charts, these are rendered in pure HTML using the fantastic gRaphaël javascript library.

We still have a bit of work to do to make the plugin easily customizable (which is still possible if you dont mind getting your hands a little dirty) so look out for updates in the near future. In the meantime, grab the code from here, follow these instructions to install the plugin and get Sentimetering!