• iPhone / Android Developer
  • iPhone OS / Android SDK, Objective C, C++
• Web Designer
  • HTML, CSS and Web 2.0 Design
• Web Developer
  • PHP / SQL, Ajax, Jquery. E-Commerce & Multi-User application development experience is a must
• Online Marketing Specialist
  • SEO, PPC/SEM, Social Media, Web Analytics, Affiliate/Partner Programs, E-commerce
• Graphic Artist
  • Online design & Adobe Creative suite (Photoshop, Illustrator) experience necessary
• English Copy Writer
  • Product Catalogs / Commercial Blogging experience required
• TeleMarketing Executive
  • Direct Sales experience and Fluent English communication skills required
• Call Center / Telephone Support Executive
  • Customer support and Fluent English communication skills are a must
• Accountant / Operations Manager
  • Book keeping, operations team management
• Office Manager / Receptionist

For more information on our Kochi Office or to apply,  please visit Farscan’s Career page.

Jobberbase’s main features are:

• Allows job posts with a simple one time e-mail verification
• Allows applying to jobs without requiring an account
• Browse / Search based on type (Full-time / part-time), category (E.g: Programmer) and locations of jobs
• RSS feeds of latest jobs
• Counter indicating # of applicants for each posted job
• Clean and crisp UI
• Admin control panel for maintaining jobs & stats

Requirements for jobberbase:

• PHP 5+ and MySQL 4.1+ installed with the Apache module mod_rewrite enabled.
• Privileged access to set/reset directory permissions
• MySQL Database creation privileges.

Installation instructions that come with the package are rather sketchy. However, the jobberbase community has more detailed installation guides that should enable someone with basic SQL & PHP understanding and admin skills to install the package without much issue.

Once installed, the package can be customized by editing the various templates included in the ‘css’ and ‘_templates’ directories. Note that these directories also exist separately for the admin user. So, you have to make the edits twice if you want them to change the admin as well. The smarty templates allow separating the presentation layer from the application layer. More information on smart can be found at http://www.smarty.net/

While using the package is pretty intuitive, setting up / modifying it to suit individual needs could take a bit of work. For example, while allowing any one to post a job might be a desirable feature for a community job board, it may not be so if you wanted to use jobberbase as a job board for your business.

We found that it took modification in several files just to remove the prompt for posting a new job. We ended up modifying the home.tpl, no-job.tpl, header.tpl, index.php, posts-loop.tpl and footer.tpl just for this task. However, it looks like most basic modifications can be made by editing the header.tpl and footer.tpl.

Jobberbase has a very active and often highly helpful community that’s constantly improving and extending its feature set. There are already commercial plugins that extends jobberbase support for supporting ‘pay for post’ type of applications.

All-in all, we were able to download, install and run a brand new job board with out of the box features in under an hour. Basic customization took several hours even with a PHP expert on hand for customization. It would have taken far less, if we didn’t have to look all over the jobberbase forums for even the most basic information.

As long as your needs don’t go beyond what jobberbase offers out of the box, this is a great package that requires very little technical skills to deploy and administer. If you need anything beyond customizing the prompts, color schemes and what’s available through the admin panel (Job Categories etc), you will probably be best of hiring a jobberbase expert. The jobberbase forums are a great place to find them.

Have a question about jobberbase that you can’t find an answer on the jobberbase board? Ask away – we can try to help

Part 1 – Developer tools
#	Type of APP	Open Source Solution	Comments
1	IDE	Eclipse http://www.eclipse.org/	To quote from the eclipse wiki – “Eclipse means a lot of different things to different people. To some Eclipse is a free, state-of-the-art Java development environment. To others, Eclipse is a flexible environment to experiment with new computer languages or extensions to existing languages.” Written in Java, and available for Mac OS, Windows in addition to many others, this is the most popular multi-language IDE with extensive community support. Truly amazing!
2	Web Dev Editor / IDE	Bluefish http://bluefish.openoffice.nl	A lightweight editor/IDE for Linux that supports multiple documents, tons of wizards and allows creation of dynamic web sites.
3	C/C++ IDE	Anjuta http://anjuta.sourceforge.net	A full featured User Friendly C++ oriented IDE for GNU/Linux. Works great with GLADE
4	UI Designer	Glade http://glade.gnome.org	A a RAD (rapid application development) tool used to create GTK+/GNOME WYSIWYG graphical user interfaces. Can work with / even be embedded into Anjuta.

In the next part, we’ll look at one of my favorite topics for leveraging Open Source – Content Management. Stay tuned.