ImpressPages is an open source content management system which lets you build functional and effective websites in quick time. It’s interface is user friendly and can be adapted to your needs. It’s multilingual, absolutely free and open source.

If you spend lot of time on editing font type, re-sizing pictures, regulating spaces between elements etc., then ImpressPages could be a real time saver for you. It is based on the idea that most functions of CMS could be performed automatically. With ImpressPages, all the information could be administered directly in the website without the need to perform sequential tasks.

System Requirements

To run ImpressPages Content Management System, you need:

• Apache server
• Apache ”mod_rewrite” extension
• PHP 5.3 and higher
• PHP GD library
• MySql 5 and higher
• 30+ Mb free disk space

ImpressPages is SEO friendly and it caters to your SEO needs.

Specific SEO features of ImpressPages:

• Automatic generation of SEO friendly URLs.
• Setting of title, keywords, description and URL values for each page.
• Automatic sitemap generations.

Built-in Features

It has built-in features like sitemap, RSS, smart search, newsletter etc., ImpressPages automatically creates sitemaps for you and provides you with custom templates for newsletters so that you can collect and manage your subscriber details.

Administrator Interface

ImpressPages has an easy-to-use back-end interface. It lets you quickly make changes to your site. Each block on the site is provided with options to move it up or down, edit, delete or hide it. This allows you to quickly change the appearance and position of the blocks and elements on your site.

Menu Management

The order of pages and sub pages can be changed quickly. They are made available as a tree structure. So, you can drag and drop the pages and sub-pages to change their order. It also provides you with options to set ‘page properties’ which include meta keywords, description, URL, visibility, date modified etc.,

Configuration

The built-in features like sitemap, RSS, search and newsletter can be configured with just a few clicks from the admin interface. It’s currently available in English and Latin languages.

Conclusion

ImpressPages is an open source, fully  functional and light weight content management system. Without much technical skills like CSS or HTML you can quickly get started with it and create your site in no time. It’s back-end is easy to use and gives you full control to make changes to the site. It loads with built-in features like sitemap, newsletters, search etc., which can be used without having to install any further plugins.

It’s new, but seems to be  a promising web software to create fantastic websites in short time.

You might want to check out a quick demo of ImpressPages CMS here.

Download ImpressPages CMS

©2010 MyTestBox.com :: web software reviews, news, tips and tricks. All Rights Reserved.

OpenGoo, a prolific web office software, which we have reviewd here is now Feng Office. In brief, OpenGoo is a web office software that allows a group of people to collaborate by sharing information over the Internet. It is a complete solution for every organization to create, collaborate, share and publish all its internal and external documents. You can plan and manage all your projects, easily following the status of every task, set milestones, pending tasks, personal notes etc.,

Following is the press release,

The company decided to unify under one brand all versions of its web office to provide greater value to their users. The open source version becomes Feng Office Collaboration Platform.

Feng Office, a company expert in developing IT solutions under the SaaS mode, announced the addition of the open source version of its web office to its principal brand. Thus, the well-known OpenGoo was renamed as Feng Office Collaboration Platform – The announcement was made in the corporate blog.

Under the Feng Office’s umbrella brand, this change allows to give greater unity to the set of solutions offered by the company. It also seeks to provide increased value to users. In this way, the company has three different versions of its web office, which are adapted to different user   profiles that require this type of application:

• Feng Sky: it’s the most used version of Feng Office; since no requires specialized IT staff for its installation or maintenance. This version is accessed through any computer with Internet conexion – is hosted on Feng Office servers.

• Feng On Site: is designed for companies that require the full installation of the solution on their own servers. In this case, it need trained personnel for installation and maintenance of infrastructure.

• Feng Office Collaboration Platform: is the open source version that has a community of more than 2,000 developers.

Also, the company continues to announce enhancements to its product. Recently, it has released version 1.6.1, which includes new features, mainly, in the e-mail module and in the word processor.

Finally, Marcos Saiz, Director of Marketing, announced the addition of new means of payment for SMEs and those users who do not use PayPal to facilitate access to the platform . In this sense, the company will add other media such as credit cards and bank drafts.

©2010 MyTestBox.com :: web software reviews, news, tips and tricks. All Rights Reserved.

Flynax Classifieds, a web software maker specialized in classifieds web software, is presenting a new and long-awaited script – Flynax Real Estate Classifieds.
Flynax Real Estate Classifieds is a powerful software makes it possible to run your own free or commercial Real Estate classified ads online agency.

They have tried to include all customers’ wishes and request in new Flynax script.

SEO friendly optimizing system of Flynax Real Estate Classifieds Script allows you  to make your site more adapted for search engine systems.
The multi-functional Administrator Panel and additional Plugins will give you unlimited possibilities of script customizing. Friendly templates will amaze your client by useful functionality and modern style.

Flynax Real Estate Classifieds Script adapted for USA region by default. There are map, states list, zip codes database, address view related to United States only.

In order if you wish to use this software for your country, you should contact them and request Real Estate script adapted especial for your region.

Try the online demo before buy!

©2010 MyTestBox.com :: web software reviews, news, tips and tricks. All Rights Reserved.

Melody is a new open source content management system for bloggers and publishers. It is a project initiated and governed by many of the members of the Movable Type(which we reviewed here) community who have a shared desire to help in building a better blogging product that benefits Movable Type and Melody users alike.

The promise of Melody is to serve its community by working to build a product according to the principles and philosophies that have helped make WordPress, Apache, Linux, Firefox and other open source applications so successful. Those principles include creating and fostering open communication channels with its user base, by building transparency into its roadmap, and by permitting users to more freely contribute back to the core product.

Why Melody?

• Secure, scalable and rock solid platform.
• Community supported.
• 100% Open Source. Forever.
• Proven content management system.
• Highly extensible and customizable.

Melody is at its very beginning, you might want to go through the  goals, upcoming features and other information about the project here.

©2010 MyTestBox.com :: web software reviews, news, tips and tricks. All Rights Reserved.

WordPress.com, one of the popular web hosts, which recently added the Post by Email feature has now introduced VideoPress to its users.

VideoPress is a one-click WordPress.com upgrade that allows you to create streaming high definition videos on your blog or anywhere on the web. You can even create an instant video podcast right from your blog feed.

[ Source: WordPress.TV ]

©2010 MyTestBox.com :: web software reviews, news, tips and tricks. All Rights Reserved.

I’m sure that many early technology adopters already found out about FriendFeed, the lifestream aggregator. What this does it merges your RSS feeds into one feed. And I’m giving you an example: let’s say you have an account on Facebook, StumbleUpon, Flickr, Twitter, LinkedIn, Amazon Whislits or even your personal blog…you can aggregate all the RSS of all these services into one and then share with people. There are other services like that but FriendFeed is the most known. All these services are hosted services which means you don’t 100% own it (you have to open an account and add the stuff).

Now you can have your very own personal service like that (well, almost – exception: merging the feeds)! This was made possible by Sweetcron, a self-hosted lifestream aggregator which now is in public beta. The developer is YongFook, a web producer from Tokyo, Japan (his website is an example of a Sweetcron installation).

I registered to their site in order to download the software (you will be confused a bit because you don’t get to download the software right away, they will send it by email the link to download).

I’ll spare you of registering your email with them so you can start experimenting right away.
Here is the direct link to the download site: http://code.google.com/p/sweetcron/downloads/list
And here is the direct link to their documentation: http://code.google.com/p/sweetcron/wiki/Installation

Requirements
* A web server with at least PHP5 and MySQL4.1
* A web server with mod_rewrite installed
* Some rss feeds of your activity across the web

Installation (administration video below)
Download the ZIP file and unzip it. Now you have the root and two directories: “public” and “system” (and “index.php“, “.htaccess“, “favicon.ico” and “license.txt“).

To configure Sweetcron lifestream aggregator before uploading do this:

1. In “system/application/config/” rename “config-sample.php” to “config.php”
2. Open “config.php” in a text editor (Notepad, Editplus, Notepad++, Ultraedit would do it) and replace “http://www.your-site.com/” with your full site URL, including trailing slash.
3. In “system/application/config/” rename “database-sample.php” to “database.php“.
4. Open “database.php” in a text editor and fill in the username, password and database.

Upload the files by FTP to your web server account (you have two choices: to install it on your account’s root or in a sub-folder).
For an easy upload I recommend to use Filezilla FTP program.

You have to create a database to hold your data. Many hosting companies offers this options from their control panel (usually named “MySQL Databases“. Go there and create a new database. Then create a new user (don’t forget the username and the password). Then attach that user the the newly created database. That’s it…with this part.

An important step is not to miss the “.htaccess” file! It contains the code for the “mod_rewrite” engine used by the software in creating search engine friendly URLs.
If you don’t see that file in the root of Sweetcron then you need to create it (some operating system hides this type of file – the file doesn’t have any extension).

This is how it looks:

——————–
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine OnRewriteBase /RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php?/$1 [L]
——————–

I chose to install it in a sub-folder called “/sweetcron” (like “http://www.your-site.com/sweetcron/“)

For this you need to have two modifications in two files:

– in “config.php” make sure the “base_url” variable is the full URL path to your Sweetcron install, i.e. including subfolder (like “http://www.your-site.com/sweetcron/” – don’t forget the trailing slash!)
- in “.htaccess” file found in the root of Sweetcron and change “RewriteBase /” to “RewriteBase /your_subfolder” (like “RewriteBase /sweetcron” in my case)

Re-upload these files again and replace those from your server.

Note: if you uploaded Sweetcron in your website’s root then you don’t need to do the modifications above
The real installation now begins. Go to “http://www.your-site.com/sweetcron/” (or “http://www.your-site.com/” if you uploaded in the root) and you will see the message: “Whoo Hoo! Almost there – now just run the install script.”
Click on the link.

You have a form where you have to enter your details: Lifestream Title, Login Username and Email Address

Hit Install button (don’t pray …it will be all right). You will get the success message and you will have your username and the automatically generated password.
Log in. Now you see the first page called the Dashboard and you have a very friendly message “You have no items :/“…so it’s time to add some feeds here.

Go to Feeds tab from the top menu and then click Add Feed.

Now we have some feeds here…

Go to “http://www.your-site.com/sweetcron” (or “http://www.your-site.com/“) and see the result.

Note: by default, the updating is done once at 30 minutes (called “pseudo-cron” – no configuration needed). The software has the posibility also to configure manually the updating (called “true-cron” – you may need to talk to your hosting company about this). You can see those options if you click on the Options tab.

See the description below:

————————-
What is the difference between Pseudo Cron and True Cron?




A cron job is simply a computer task that is fired off at a set interval. In the world of Sweetcron this refers to your item imports – and this can either happen through Pseudo Cron or True Cron. The options panel provides a switch between both. Here is a brief description:Pseudo Cron – zero configuration. The only disadvantage is that once every 30 minutes, one visitor to your website may experience a slow load time as they will have triggered the automatic import. True Cron – you will need to set up a manual cron job.




The advantage is that updates happen without any user ever knowing (i.e. no slowdowns). The other advantage is that you can control how frequently Sweetcron imports new items (Pseudo Cron only imports once every 30 mins). To set up a true cron you can either do it through your web host control panel or through a 3rd party service such as http://www.webcron.org
————————-

If you don’t want to let certain items to be shown on your page you can go to Items tab and Unpublish or Delete from there (you can also Edit if you want to).
Sweetcron has a rudimentary blog function and you can access it on Write tab. What you write there will show up in the stream on your site.

People have the possibility to leave comments on your stream but you have to install a third-party service like Disqus. If you want a contact page then you need to install again a third-party service: Wufoo

If you can hack code then you can program these yourself.

Sweetcron comes with two default themes
- Boxy but good (I prefer it)
- Sandbox

In the future more themes might be designed and built by enthusiasts.
Note: Sweetcron doesn’t actually combine the feeds it brings in (like FriendFeed does). The feeds just follows one after another.

See a video showing how to work with the administration panel (explained by the developer himself)

[There is a video that cannot be displayed in this feed. Visit the blog entry to see the video.]

Competition
SweetCron isn’t alone in this field. Has some good competition from standalone lifestreaming software or web services.

Here are some of the competitors (a better list is here).

Scripts:
- Amplifeeder
- Wodpress RSS stream
- Lifestream Plugin for Wordpress
- SimpleLife
- Movable Type Action Streams
- Actionstream
- PHP Script
- Noserub

Services:
- FriendFeed
- 30 Boxes
- Jaiku
- Socialthing!
- Tumblr
- Mugshot
- Iminta

Conclusion
Sweetcron does its job. No fancy things, not to hard to install and configurate. Simple and effective.
Now, maybe in the future it will become more complicated because the developer might add new options. That depends on the feedback he gets.
But for now this is enough to just build a basic personal lifestream blog.

Centralize all your online activity on your personal website and give the URL to your friends. They might be glad no to go to 10,000 places to see what are your doing and not to have to register to Friendfeed to see the same thing.

————————————————————————-
Mircea Goia was born in Romania and immigrated to US in 2005.
He lives in Phoenix, AZ and works as web developer. Aside, he works also on several entrepreneurial Web projects and he shows a keen interest in commercial Web development such as social networks, viral marketing and online video.
His artistic hobby is filmmaking with special interest in directing.
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©2010 MyTestBox.com :: web software reviews, news, tips and tricks. All Rights Reserved.

Magento is a feature-rich, professional open source e-commerce solution that offers merchants complete flexibility and control over the look, content, and functionality of their online store.

Magento’s powerful marketing search engine optimization and catalog management tools give merchants the power to create ecommerce sites that are tailored to their unique business needs. Magento is distributed free under the GNU General Public License OSL license.

Magento is a registered trademark of Irubin Consulting Inc. DBA Varien. It is currently listed as in a preview release mode and not recommended for use in production environments. There are articles written by community members who have tried this new program and available for your benefit at http://www.magentocommerce.com/wiki/

Update

Magento is actually ready for the prime time! The version 1.1.1 was just launched and it won The Best New Project at 2008 SourceForge.net Community Choice Awards.

Is this software compatible with your server?
Megento can be used on any server that is Linux or UNIX based. It can be run on a Windows based platform but at the moment there are some known issues that are being worked on and it may cause some conflicts, although, there are some documents on the main site to help. You can find some guidelines here

One of the known issues is the image uploads do not work in Windows.

This system is a Linux based software program and was designed with ease of install on a Linux based platform that has PHP 5 installed. This software is a PHP 5 only application and may cause issues if your system only supports PHP 4, although there is a work around solution found here

If you do not have any programming knowledge or skills, this system may not be suitable for you unless you have a technical support team who can assist you.

The server requirements for this software are:
- Linux or another UNIX-compatible operating system
- Apache web server (1x or 2x)
- PHP 5.2
- MySQL 4.1
- A sendmail- compatible Mail Transfer Agent (MTA)- if not Megento connects to SMTP server.

Also recommended is the use of APC as a bytecode cache for performance improvements. You can find it in the PECL archives here: http://pecl.php.net/package/APC

Other bytecode cache systems are not supported at this time.

Getting Your Store Installed and Online
You will need to manually install this software on your server by the use of an FTP client such as Filezilla or SmartFTP. You can download the Magento ecommerce software from here http://www.magentocommerce.com/download

You will need to unzip the folder. If you are using Windows XP you can just right click on the folder and choose the unzip option. Often times if you just double click the folder it will unzip as well. If you are not using Windows XP you can find a zip utility for free such as Winzip.

You will want to transfer/upload your extracted Magento folder from your desktop to your hosting account. An FTP client enables you to transfer large amounts of files quickly and directly into where you would like it to be on your hosting server without any long time manual hassles of uploading each file alone. I find Filezilla www.filezilla-project.org is quite an easy to use FTP client.

Once you have entered you host address, username, and password (all things that should have been in your welcome email when you signed up with your hosting account), the FTP client connects your computer directly to your server.

Depending on what hosting company you are with, your files might be listed under www. or public-html. Drag the Magento folder with your mouse to the left hand side and drop it in the proper folder on your right where you would need it to be .

Since this is a rather large program, I highly recommend, if you find that you are having any difficulties transferring the complete files and folders, you may want to see if you can transfer the zipped program and extract the files once they are on your server.

Once you have the extracted files on your server, you will need to create a MySQL database. You can find the icon in your cPanel control panel such as the following picture shows.

In order to create a new database all you need to do is enter the desired name for the database in the New Database field, then click the [Create Database] button.

You will also have to create a username; this is so you will have access to the database. You should see the option underneath for name and password:

Then go to the next option and make sure you add the username to your database, and checking to make sure all privileges are given.

You will need to set permission (CHMOD settings), for the following files to 777:
- magento/var/.htaccess
- magento/app/
- magento/var
- and all directories under magento/media

Once you have set your permissions you will want to open a new browser window and type in the address for the Magento Installation Wizard.

Example: If you installed into http://www.yoursite.com/magento then the wizard would be located at http://www.yoursite.com/magento/install/

Most configurations in the setup wizard will be automatically guessed for you, you may need to change things as needed (country, currency, etc.)You do need to change the database parameters in the first box “Database Connection” to match those of the database you set up earlier.

Installation Troubleshooting
There are a lot of errors associated with this setup. I was receiving error such as SQLSTATE[28000] [1045] Access denied for user ‘o0o0o0o0o’@'localhost’ (using password: YES) Database connection error

After checking to see what could be wrong with the username, I created another one to see if that would help. That was a solution on the Magento forum. It did not help. So, I created another database and username for magento to try again.

This install wizard may not have the correct settings for your local host. Always make sure to contact your hosting administrator if you do not know exactly what the host name may be.

If you encounter any other errors you can review the answers on the forum here http://www.magentocommerce.com/boards/viewforum/9/

Or you can review the topics listed in the knowledge base http://www.magentocommerce.com/knowledge-base

This software is still in it’s early stages, so if you encounter an error you do not find an answer for, the Magento team would really appreciate your posting the question to aid in their research and testing to come out with a newer and more improved version with less installation bugs.

Using Your Magento Control Panel to setup your Store Properties
When you have successfully installed your software you will be able to access the admin section and setup your product list and set all attributes as needed.

When setting up your products, you will see a screen shot such as the one below.

You will be able to enter the name, description, assign an SKU, price, weight, manufacturer, page title, and meta keywords so you can optimize for search engine crawls.

When your products have all been added you can see them in the admin catalog section such as the picture below.

This will be able to inform you of what products are selling as well as any other stats you would like to track.

Another feature that is very nice due to the extra income that can be generated is the cross sell feature. This is a feature that posts other related products you have on a page to entice a buyer to buy the extra product to go with the one they have already chosen. A lot of people are willing to buy additional items if they are right there in front of them instead of having to think and go searching for something related.

Here is a screenshot of what the cross-sell feature set up looks like:

The Magento software has few templates available right now since they are only in the beginning stages of development. If you are PHP knowledgeable, you may be able to change the configurations or add new images to the existing templates as they are given.

The following is a picture of the main home page of a demo store developed.

Notice how clear the graphics are. I have found with some ecommerce software I have used one of the disadvantages were the inability to maintain a fresh clear graphic overlay to compete with the bigger companies such as Walmart, Zellers, or any other big company you may have in your own country.

The products page when displayed to the customer is a condensed yet fully detailed layout of the product with a simple description box and even a rating system to inform the customer on other buyer’s opinion of the product.

The following is a screenshot of an average product for sale.

Comparisons with other Ecommerce software
This software has many features to boast over other software such as single page checkout, ability to ship to multiple addresses from one order, advanced marketing tools with search engine optimization features. With the ability to control multiple sites and stores from one control panel, one click upgrades, ability to take orders over the phone, the ability for a customer to place an order without creating a customer account if they do not want to, and many more marketing and promotional tools such as search engine friendly urls, upsells, cross-sells, RSS feeds for new products, and auto-generated sitemaps.

This software does not have the ability for digital downloads, as other ecommerce sites do such as osCommerce, Cube Cart, and Zencart. The Magento software is for physical products.

This software program is hard to install and many may have problems with the configurations. Other programs such as Cube Cart and Zencart are installed with a few easy configurations.

I have not been able to locate any plugins or extensions for the Magento software as it is meant for an enterprise level ecommerce solution and therefore incorporates everything with the ease of an update feature.

For a list of templates or add-ons you can incorporate you can visit the following site. This directory contains links to websites that are currently working with the Magento team to add an even more advanced opportunity for the user www.mgosites.com

Conclusion
I find that for the small business owner who would like to do most of the work himself with a limited background in programming, this software is not suitable for them. This software is meant for a larger based organization who may have multiple stores and need an easy to use system to incorporate all of the combined stores attributes.

This software is still in its growing stages, and there needs to be more upgrades before all the bugs will be worked out.

I would recommend that any individual or small business owner who would like to be able to install and configure settings for a store for digital or physical products, would best be more comfortable using a software program such as osCommerce, Cube Cart or Zencart.
———————————–
Melanie Bremner has been running an online business teaching software programs to new beginners for the last 6 years. She creates lesson plans with easy to follow instructions in which she teaches to her students in an online classroom for which anyone globally can participate. She is presently living in Toronto, Canada.
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©2010 MyTestBox.com :: web software reviews, news, tips and tricks. All Rights Reserved.