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Joomla! 1.5.12 Released (Codename: Wojmamni Ama Woi)

Srikanth AD — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 08:39:11 +0000

The Joomla Project, which recently celebrated 10 million downloads has announced the immediate availability of Joomla 1.5.12, code named ‘Wojmamni Ama Woi’. This release contains a number of bug fixes and three moderate-level security fixes.

This release marks an important milestone for the Joomla Project due to the upgrade of the PEAR library to the new BSD licensed version, which brings the code base into full compliance with the GPL.

In addition, this release contains an important upgrade to TinyMCE v 3.2.4.1. The Production Working Group’s goal is to continue to provide regular, frequent updates to the Joomla community.

Here are some of the fixes and improvements the community has made to this current release:

Components

Category List Layout sorts correctly.
Category List Layout HTML error resolved.
Minimum User Level for Media Manager works correctly for Editors submitting Articles.
Article Manager shows non-duplicated Page Titles with Page Breaks.
Section Filter for Content Component correctly lists only Article Categories.
Reverted escaping of miscellaneous information field in com_contact.

Plugins

Update to TinyMCE 3.2.4.1.
Updated installer SQL to correspond with TinyMCE upgrade.
Added missing language strings for TinyMCE after initial upgrade.

Administrator

CSS files save correctly when edited using Template Manager.

System

Upgraded PEAR with a newer version that has BSD licensing.
PHPMailer allows secure connections to SMTP Servers.
File::upload() uses chmod 644 in FTP mode.
Tooltips correctly encoded.
Reverted detailed module caching fix.

If you haven’t tried Joomla! yet, you can check out the online demo.

Source: Joomla Announcements

TangoCMS 2.3.0 “Dolphin” launched – another open source PHP/MYSQL content management system competing with the sharks

Mircea Goia — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 22:10:09 +0000

That’s not an easy task going out there, in the wild, and challenge the big white shark (Drupal), the tiger shark (Joomla), the blue shark (Wordpress) and the plethora of other sharks (try some demos here).

But the team at TangoCMS is trying to beat the odds by launching a new version of their PHP/MySQL content management system dubbed “Dolphin” (version 2.3.0).

They added improvments to the WYSIWYG editor, page loading time, security and some more general features (see the roadmap here).

If you feel like tasting this kind of dolphin meat then head on the download page and get it from there (already prepared for you): http://tangocms.org/download
Don’t be a savage and please use some ustensils for eating this: PHP 5.2.0 or greater, MySQL 4.1 or greater and Apache/Lighttpd are required.

Bon appetit!

Melody: Community Powered Publishing Platform

Srikanth AD — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 16:17:38 +0000

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.

CS-Cart released the version 2.0 of their e-commerce shopping cart solution

Mircea Goia — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 23:21:00 +0000

The team behind it just released the version 2.0 of this shopping cart software I never heard of until now. But that’s no wonder because there are way too many shopping cart solutions out there (free or paid).
CS-Cart is just one of those e-commerce solutions and it’s not free, will cost you $265 to get a license (they offer a free trial though so I might try it and see how it looks/works – they offer an online demo as well).

The technology behind it is a classic open source PHP/MySQL stack, like many other solutions and the target of this software seem to be geared towards small shops (which don’t have too much technology knowledge – that’s why this solution it’s called “out of the box”). If that is so then they have to compete with Zencart, Cubecart, osCommerce which are more established e-commerce shopping cart solutions and are free.

In this new version they seem to have improved their product by adding new designs and skins, layout block manager, design mode, web-based upgrade center, product filters and others (see the complete list here). Also, now it is possible to customize the software without any (or with minimum) modification in the source code which is always a good thing if you don’t want to spend money on the programmers.

One thing they should put on their website though is their contact details (and I don’t mean just the contact form but their location, maybe a phone number). This can boost the customers confidence.

Pligg CMS, the PHP/MySQL Digg clone, finally at the version 1.0.0 (the official one)

Mircea Goia — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 07:43:54 +0000

After years in the making, Pligg, the PHP/MySQL open source social networking content management system, reached the official version 1.0.0.
It took small baby steps to reach this version and probably it will the same baby steps to reach the version 2.0.
But we can’t complain: the software is free and open source (still).

Pligg combines social bookmarking, blogging, and syndication and a democratic editorial system which enables users to collaboratively submit and vote articles.

Sounds like Digg? Well, it is a Digg clone.

Pligg was founded by Yankidank (this is a nickname) and is headed by the lead developer AshDigg (another nickname). It was originally an English translation of Menéame’s source code when it was released in early December 2005 (Menéame being a Spanish CMS created by Ricardo Galli and was inspired by Digg). In December 2005, the name Pligg was added to differentiate from the Spanish version. Since then Pligg has now expanded from just a translation of that Spanish CMS to a very popular CMS system.

This new version is more secure and stable than the previous (obviously) but also packs more features:

- groups feature
- re-vamped admin panel
- new languages: English, German and Thai (more languages to be added by volunteers)
- more database optimization making it more scalable
- pages feature
- upload module
- SEO updates
- many new modules included…

To see the full features list go to their forum and to download it please go to their download page.

Tu run this software you need to have at least PHP 4 (version 5 recommended) and MySQL database (both open source).
Pligg website also offers the possibility to customize more the software by buying templates and modules developed by Pligg developers themselves.

Interesting is that Pligg generated a fork named SocialWebCMS, pretty much like Mambo CMS generated a very succesful fork named Joomla! . Since then Joomla! surpassed Mambo in popularity shortly after launching. Will SocialWebCMS do the same to Pligg? Remains to be seen…

Form Tools: Form Processing, Storage and Access Script (Review)

Srikanth AD — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 15:56:02 +0000

Introduction

There are many web services for easy form building like jotform, Wufoo etc. Most of them can serve handy for creating forms. But, if you are looking for a perfect solution for form processing, entries storage, management and access, then Form Tools is at your rescue.

Form Tools is designed for people who work on online registration sites and require any mode of information gathering from their online visitors. In short, its a form processor, storage and data access script written in PHP and MySQL.

It’s designed to work with any existing web forms. It allows you to store form submissions in a database, provides your clients with a user-friendly interface to manage their form submissions. It includes options such as mass data export via excel, printer-friendly pages, data sorting, form submission editing and optional email notifications.

You might want to check out a demo of Form Tools here.

Key Features

It’s freely available for anyone to download and modify under the GNU General Public License.
It’s Re-usable, you can use Form Tools to handle multiple forms – even from different websites. Multiple user accounts can be setup with edit / view permissions based on your requirement.
Form Tools is Multi-lingual. It provides full internationalization and localization support. Click here for a list of currently available translations.
Its user interface is simple and easy to get started. Every aspect of the user interface including color, fonts and the logo can be customized.

System Requirements

PHP 4.3+
MySQL 4+
PHP Sessions.
PHP mail() function is required for auto-notification of form submissions.
Any web browser with JavaScript-enabled.

You will need a MySQL user account which has permissions to create new tables within a database.

Step-by-Step Installation Guide

Here, I’m test installing Form Tools on localhost using XAMPP (an easy to install Apache distribution containing MySQL, PHP and Perl. XAMPP is really very easy to install and to use – just download, extract and start). Before proceeding, you need to create a new MySQL database for Form Tools using your preferred database administration tool like phpMyAdmin.

Step1

Download the Form Tools zip file from the downloads page and unzip the files into a folder on your computer.

Step2

With an FTP client, upload the files to your web server. This folder must be accessible via a URL on your website, For instance, http://www.yoursite.com/formtools/

Step3

Open the installation script in your browser. This is found in the /install subfolder the location where you installed it, e.g.http://www.yoursite.com/formtools/install/. If all went good, you should see a page similar to the following screenshot. Just select your language and click on ‘Continue’.

System Check

This page runs a few tests on your system to ensure it’s able to run Form Tools. If everything is fine, you should see PASS next to every variable. To proceed further click on ‘Continue’.

Step4

Creating Database Tables

Here we need to create the Form Tools database tables. You should have already created your database as mentioned above.

Creating config.php file

Form Tools stores your server and database settings in this file. Click the “Create File” button to automatically generate the file on your server. You might want to read more about the config.php file here.

Step5

Creating Admin Account

Here, you are going to create an administrator account. This account is used for managing all aspects of Form Tools, such as adding forms and creating client accounts etc.

Note: Before you log in, you must delete the /install/ folder on your server. You will not be allowed to log in until it has been removed.

Dashboard

Once you login as administrator, you can create multiple accounts for your clients. Permissions for each client, either view / edit can be set according to your needs.

Form Tools provides extensive control for form management. Each form can be on different websites and can be controlled by multiple users. You can change the field sizes and data types of variables in the forms as per your requirement.

Apart from the above, you can download the submissions or entries of each form as HTML, CSV, MS Ecel or XML format. The entries can be printed in a friendly manner, either one-by-one or one submission per page. It also allows you to configure emails to be sent whenever a form is submitted.

Conclusion

Form Tools is a prolific script for form processing, storage and data access. Its key features include form management by multiple users, data export and printer friendly pages. Its free, easy to install and use.

They’ve just launched the Form Tools v.2. Give it a try!

LiteCommerce – an online e-commerce software solution for small businesses (review)

Veiko Herne — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 08:17:50 +0000

LiteCommerce is a compact e-commerce and shopping cart commercial software developed by Qualiteam Software. Their other product lines are X-cart shopping cart software for more comprehensive e-commerce needs, Sales’n Stats and Hacker Proof/Hacker Guardian.

LiteCommerce license for one store costs $109 and there are several optional add-on modules available like Wish List, Affiliate Management, E-Commerce reports, Gift Certificates, Wholesale Trading, Multi Currency, etc for $13-$17 each for your particular store needs.

The difference between LiteCommerce and X-cart is that LiteCommerce have modular design. When purchasing X-cart you will have all the functions included to one license as in LiteCommerce, you will purchase the basic core license, and then will specify your shop needs by purchasing those extra modules for $13 each or download some of those free of charge.

If you want to become an e-commerce application service provider Qualiteam has another package for you: LiteCommerce ASPE

With LiteCommerce ASPE you can take full advantage of Application Service Provider business model. LiteCommerce ASPE is specially designed for:
* Hosting service providers (HSP)
* Companies running multiple shops powered by LiteCommerce
* Companies that provide ecommerce application services
* Companies who need the ability of rapid shops deployment (e.g. shops dedicated to special events to catch up market opportunities)

A complete list of features can be found here (a feature tour is included).

Installation

By registering to the 30 day evaluation version, I got email containing several download links for different operating systems.
As my hosting runs with Debian GNU/Linux, I decided to download the Linux version.

Other Options where Windows 98/NT/2000&2003, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, BSDi, Solaris and Mac OS X.

LiteCommerce is built using the open source PHP/MySQL technology which can run on operating systems above.

As my hosting service does not provide me the Unix Command Shell access, I usually Unzip program files to my computer and upload those with ftp.
This was a way I tried to install it this time but none of those php modules worked when in server, including install.php. They just showed up as empty pages showing only HTML header for each page.
The manual was showing some kind of windows installation screens but only thing I had was compressed file which contained another tar file.
So when I finally installed this file to the server and decompressed it directly in the server something started to happen.
To get it finally work I deleted all my previous files and decompressed all again in the server again as some of the modules where still showing as corrupted or not working.
Lucky me that I’m using net2ftp browser interface which offers me such kind of activity instead of my hosting provider default control panel.

The second problem was some directory rights. So you need to assign several CHMOD’s after the uncompress procedure is complete like even providing 777 (full access) to the main directory and later change them back when the installation is complete.

You can order the professional installation service together with your license for extra $57.

Setup

Site setup allows defining some look and feel of the site, like does catalogs listings show up as Icons or Listings, will there be thumbnails shown on product listings, how many products are listed per page, the measurement unit, currency and time settings, also row limits per page using administration module.

The company setup asks Company Name, website and year business started, physical address, and email addresses to website administrator, customer relations, sales and support.

Email section allows to setup will the order to be emailed to customer, sales department and will administrator email contain also credit card information or not. I assume that administrator will get emails from each order. To prevent spam, the valid domain names must be listed.

The security section allows defining where the system will use secure (HTTPS) connection. Like in customer zone (login, shopping cart, etc) and in administration zone and will the shopping cart to be cleared after customer had logged off or not.

The modules section allows to define integration with payment, shipping and other third party e-commerce service providers and the list is impressive having 33 payment processors listed.

The payment methods section allows defining seven payment methods like credit card, phone order, fax order, cod, etc.

In credit card types you can list the entire card list accepted in your store.

Shipping methods will allow to define shipping and shipping zones can be countries or states. For each method and zone you can define different shipping cost for weight/items/order total range which can be either flat, per item, % of subtotal or per lbs.

The tax schemes seem to be built in but you can upload your country specific tax schemes as .tax files. Hopefully there has been lot of third party developers to produce those or you need to figure out the format yourself.
Administrators can define new countries and their states, set them active and specify will the VAT calculated to particular country.
The product comes with two skins: modern and classic, both available as two or three column version but the look and feel are fully customizable.
With HTML and CSS knowledge, administrator is able to write new templates or modify existing .tpl files.
Products belong to categories which are customizable. When adding a new product, administrator will define the price, weight, tax class, is product taxable, available for sale, thumbnail and full size images, page title, brief and full description, Meta keywords and description for search engines and sort order.

You can add new fields for product category, import and export product catalogs as CSV files.
User management allows creating new users, modifying existing ones and importing them from CSV files.
Order management allows searching orders by time frame, status, e-mail or ordering id and exporting those to MS Excel (XML file).
From the maintenance part, administrators are able to restore/backup database, manage images between files and database, view sales statistics, clean cache and purchase new modules.

Usability

Site design is very clean from the first page you have tabs for catalog, my cart, my account and contact us. Having additional modules like Wish List installed, some of those will appear as tabs. The catalog page shows product categories and featured products together with news box. Featured products had even Buy Now bottom in first page. From the product page, I can email it to friend, buy now or put to my wish list if such kind of module is installed.

When pressing Buy Now, I was redirected to shopping cart page where I was able to clear cart, go to checkout, delete items or continue my shopping session.
When you go to checkout, the system will ask you to create an account with your billing and shipping (can be copied from billing) details or to login as returning customer. You can also login by clicking My Account tab and see your purchases. Pretty standard ecommerce stuff.

The Contact Us tab opens a contact form with mandatory physical address to fill which will be emailed to particular department mailbox defined from administration module.

Conclusion

The product was very easy to use with nice user interface and besides hassles with installation (which is not that of a big deal), I didn’t encountered any other problems or bugs. User interface was so clear so I would do shopping from any sites running Litecommerce. The modular design allows you to grow your business or purchase additional modules for your particular needs. I was playing little bit with affiliate module which worked well and had similar user friendly interface however little bit different from main module. It contained all the functionality to run your affiliate network, including support to multi tier affiliate programs.

The company has prepared an online demo of this software so if you are eager and don’t want to install it yourself just go to this page.
Do you want to see how others have implemented this e-commerce solution? Just check out this page and you willl see live e-shops around the world built in LiteCommerce.

LiteCommerce is perfect to run a small business e-commerce store but let’s not forget the competition which is quite strong, especially that there are some free e-commerce software solutions like Zencart, Cubecart, osCommerce, Magento and others.

WordPress 2.8 “Baker” is Now Available as a Full Release

Srikanth AD — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 07:11:29 +0000

WordPress 2.8 ‘Baker‘ is now available as a full release. It has a whole bunch of new features and improvements to themes, widgets, taxonomies, and overall speed. And over 790 bugs have been fixed. Now you can now browse the entire theme directory and install a theme with one click right from your WordPress dashboard.

It also features the new CodePress editor which gives syntax highlighting, allowing you to make minor edits to themes or plugins from your dashboard. With the redesigned widgets interface, you can edit widgets easily, have multiple copies of the same widget, drag and drop widgets between sidebars, and save inactive widgets so you don’t lose all their settings.

The highlights of WordPress 2.8 include,

New drag-and-drop widgets admin interface and new widgets API.
Syntax highlighting and function lookup built into plugin and theme editors.
Browse the theme directory and install themes from the admin with one click.
Allow the dashboard widgets to be arranged in up to four columns.
Allow configuring the number of items to show on management pages with an option in Screen Options.
Support timezones and automatic daylight savings time adjustment.
Faster loading of admin pages via script compression and concatenation.

You might want to go through the full list of over 180 new features, changes, upgrades, and improvements on the WordPress Codex.

Our upgrade went well, without a hitch (using the automatic update). But DO backup your database and files before upgrading, just in case.

Source: WordPress Development Blog

Joomla, Open Source Content Management System Celebrates 10 Million Downloads

Srikanth AD — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 08:57:07 +0000

Joomla, one of the popular Open Source content management systems, which we have mentioned here, celebrates a remarkable accomplishment in the Open Source world today – 10 millionth download.

Since it’s first release in 2005, Joomla has grown exponentially as one of the most powerful publishing platforms.

With Joomla 1.6 yet to be released, the Joomla team states that,

Development is underway on the next generation content management system, which will enable you, our faithful users, to achieve new heights and hopefully accomplish another 10 million downloads.

Source: Joomla Annoncements

OpenGoo, an easy to use Open Source Web Office Software (Review)

Srikanth AD — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 18:52:32 +0000

OpenGoo is an Open Source 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 (kind of Microsoft Office but on the web).

Members of an organization can create and collaborate on:

Text documents
Presentations
Task Lists
E-mails
Calendars
Web Links and
Contacts

OpenGoo provides you with all the tools to manage the work of all the divisions of your company. You can plan and manage all your projects, easily following the status of every task, set milestones, pending tasks, personal notes etc.

OpenGoo can run on XAMPP installations. It can be installed, configured and used with Firefox 2+ and Internet Explorer 7+. It currently requires:

You might want to check out a demo of Opengoo here.

Step by Step Installation Guide

Here, I’m test installing Opengoo on localhost using XAMPP (an easy to install Apache distribution containing MySQL, PHP and Perl. XAMPP is really very easy to install and to use – just download, extract and start.).

Before installing OpenGoo make sure that your server matches these requirements:

OpenGoo needs PHP5, not PHP4. If your server is running PHP4 you will get an error message during the installation process saying: Installation error: in order to run OpenGoo you need PHP5. Your current PHP version is: 4.x.x.

OpenGoo consumes about 10 MB of memory. If your server is set to the standard memory limit of 8 MB you may get an error message during the installation process saying: Allowed memory size of 8388608 bytes exhausted. This can be solved by setting memory_limit=32 in php.ini.

OpenGoo nees a MySQL database server with InnoDB support.

Installation

Download OpenGoo from Opengoo.org.
Unpack the downloaded archive on your local harddrive and upload the files to your web server using an FTP client like FileZilla.
Create a new MySQL database for OpenGoo using your preferred database administration tool like phpMyAdmin.
Direct your browser to http://www.yourdomain.com/some_directory/opengoo/public/install and follow the installation procedure.

Step1

The installation wizard should look as follows,

To proceed, click the “Next” button.

Step 2

Now the installer checks your web server environment for,

The PHP version installed (must be version 5.x)
Some necessary PHP extensions and the access rights (writable) of some directories within the OpenGoo installation folder

If you get green messages as shown in the screenshot above then everything should be fine. Click the “Next” button to proceed.

Step 3

Here you enter the parameters of the MySQL database where OpenGoo will store its data.

Step 4

This step is to tell you what happened during the installation process and that Opengoo has been installed successfully.

Click the “Finish” button to quit the installer.

Creating an admin user

Right after the installer quits you are prompted to create a user account with administration privileges for your new OpenGoo installation.

Note: Please note down the username and the password of this account. Without this information you won’t be able to log into your OpenGoo installation.

To create more user accounts, you can use the administration panel within OpenGoo.

The company name you enter here is the owner company of your OpenGoo installation. This can be an organization or a group of people as well. You can change this fields later if necessary.

Dashboard

The dashboard would be your one stop place to manage your personal notes, tasks, documents and workspaces. You can share events, links, documents etc. with other people and assign specific tasks to team members. Opengoo in short, is a perfect solution for every organization to create, collaborate, share and publish all its internal and external documents.

OpenGoo has plenty of competition in this field among the most powerful being Google Docs, Zoho, WebEx WebOffice, ThinkFree, Microsoft Ofifce Live Workspace (not to mention the omni-present Microsoft Office, desktop version and OpenOffice, the open-source desktop application).

Download it here or try the demo here.