MyTestBox.com - web software reviews

MyTestBox.com widget launches! Get our web software reviews on your website or blog!

Mircea Goia — Thu, 08 May 2008 07:42:48 +0000

After a couple of weeks of development we launched MytestBox.com widget!

You can see it in action here www.mytestbox.com/get-widget . Now you can have our reviews on your site or blog, free without any registration required!

The websites or blogs where you will use our widget should be in the technology related field (download sites, software reviews sites, forums, gadgets, tech blogs, software tutorials sites, tech news, social media sites and so on). It should complement your website/blog by offering more value to your visitors.

Soon, we will offer news from the software industry and will have a widget for that too.

If you think you can contribute with reviews (and get paid eventually) please contact us using the Contact page. You can have a look at our review requirements here.

If you are a company and you want your web software to be reviewed please contact us too at the same Contact page.

In the future we want to compile a list of the websites/blogs which uses our widget and publish it here.

Those websites/blogs will get a free link (not nofollow) to them so it may help them in Google ranking.

——— For websites

As you will see the widget is highly configurable from a control panel (Widget Configuration) without reloading the page.

You can play as long as you want and when you are content with the result you can copy the Javascript code from below the configuration panel and paste it on your website (Copy and paste the following code in your page).

If you copy the Javascript code as it is without any configuration then the default widget will be presented. And you see already how it looks on Get our Widget page.

This Javascript code is designed to work for regular websites which are not blogs (usually blogs don’t allow Javascript code to be embedded in post or page. You have to hack the core pages of the blog or blog theme).

——- For WordPress blogging software platform

We have also developed a plugin for Wordpress blogging software platform. Checkout Wordpress here (it’s free to use) and our review about this blogging software platform (video-tutorials included)

It easy to install and use and you can download it from our widget page or download it directly from here. Download the Wordpress plugin now!

These are the steps to make this widget work (after un-zipping):

Copy the folder “mytestbox_widget” in your “wp-content/plugins/” directory (”mytestbox_widget” has two files: mytestbox_widget.php and conf.js (which is a Javascript file)

Activate the widget on your “Administration->Plugins” page

Go to “Options” page and click on “MytestBox.com Widget Configuration” and then configure the widget using the form provided there and then click “Update Options” (save it)

Go to “Presentation” page and then “Widgets” page (in the sub-menu under the Presentation) and drag AND drop the box named “MyTestBox.com Widget” to your sidebar

Save Changes and that’s it! You can see now the widget on your website. Enjoy!

== Configuration of the widget ==
Go to “Options” page and click on “MytestBox.com Widget Configuration” and then configure the widget using the form provided there and then click “Update Options” (save it).
You can see the configuration in real time.
For more instructions please read README.txt file included in the download.

If you find this widget (and plugin) useful please help us make it popular! Send it to your friends or to people you think may benefit from it.

You can also share this post using Share This feature we have at the bottom of it (Digg it, Stumble it, Bookmark it or send it by email).

Thank you!

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AbleSpace and AbleDating - combining social networking and video with dating in one package

Veiko Herne — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 03:39:51 +0000

AbleSpace and AbleDating (social network & dating software) has all the professional features that will be enough for you to create sites like YouTube, MySpace or Date.com in one package. I’ll review them a little bit below.

It has been developed by Abk-Soft, US Company with Russian roots and employing dynamic staff of over 30 freelance programmers from Russia managed from US.

Their main product contains lot of interesting modules, like 3D virtual city, Flash technology based profile editor to replace HTML, CSS profile customization, Video Chat, Video Sharing, Friends, Groups, Flash postcards, VoiIP technology based telephone, Flash based chat rooms, Flash games, Romantic virtual 3D chat rooms, Greeting recordings, Classifieds, Photo Gallery, Personal Blogs, Biorhythms, Love Match calculator, Instant Messenger, Mailbox, MP3 Player, favourites, forums, etc.

The administration allows setup the site for various community purposes, allowing three level memberships, affiliate programs, banner rotations, free trial memberships, newsletters, auto approvals, unlimited number of languages, e-mail and phone number automatic filtering, etc. Currently it supports PayPal, WorldPay, GoldPay, 2CO, NetBilling and PaySystems gateways but can be configured to any payment gateway for small fee.

Their templates based architecture allows changing site look and feel instantly using growing number of ready-made templates.

The installation service is free or if you want to do it yourself, its five simple steps following the screen and can be completed in minutes.

The product comes from two versions:

AbleSpace as social networking community platform ($597 for single domain license/ $897 for multiple domains)

AbleDating as dating software platform ($597 for single domain license/$897 for multiple domains)

or a mixer having both of functionalities included ($997 for single domain license)

Existing site owners can also buy their 3D city module to any of site for $400.

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osTube - a new social networking media platform

Veiko Herne — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 10:55:07 +0000

osTube www.ostube.de is a social networking media platform allowing the sharing of music, video, pictures and documents. It has been developed by AUVICA GmbH in Munich, Germany. Their other product lines are MyRadio, Reisepanne, and VIMP.

osTube is available by three product editions: Community, Professional and Enterprise. Community edition is free but you can’t run any ads and social networking communities with it. The Professional edition allows banner and video (priced differently) ads as Enterprise edition is a not priced solution for commercial projects which can include Live Streaming, Mobile payments, etc.

Professional edition costs $149 to manage Google AdSense ads with some extra templates and you should spend $299 when you want to run video ads and have more templates included.

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osTicket - a PHP/MySQL customer support ticket system

Vaibhav Gadodia — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 06:44:52 +0000

osTicket www.osticket.com is a popular open source customer support ticket system based on PHP and MySQL. It supports both web-based and email based ticket systems. So your customers can either log on to your website to raise a support ticket or they can simply send an email to support. osTicket integrates both channels into a simple web-interface which lets your support staff manage the tickets and provide support to your customers.

There are commercial systems out there which have a whole lot of features that most support staff seldom uses. osTicket is a good way to start your support operations and then (maybe) if your needs are not being met, you might think about changing it. Notice since it is open source you might easily be able to customize it to meet your needs.

Of course, being open source, it is also complete free.

This open source project was recently revived by its authors after a lull of over a year. They started releasing a new version of the product in January this year with the latest release a few days ago. They have a very active forum community of over 700 members with over 1300 posts catering to various topics around osTicket.

Technical Specifications
osTicket requires a web server that can run:

PHP 4.3 or better
MySQL 4.1 or better

That’s it. Being PHP and MySQL driven, you can be sure that it will run on your hosting provider’s space. If you host it on IIS on a Windows box, then also you are safe because Windows version of both PHP and MySQL are available.

In terms of hardware, there are no specific requirements. Most shared webhosting hardware is good enough to run this. The users only need to interact with this using a browser.

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PHPMotion - free open source social networking media platform

Veiko Herne — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 04:51:18 +0000

PHPMotion is a truly free open source media social networking platform supporting video and audio social networking.
It’s downloadable from www.phpmotion.com website after you had registered to the software support forum.

Latest stable version was 1.2 but I tested and evaluated version 2 beta which worked without any crashes and with only small inconveniences.

The product installation was quick however you must have lot of open source modules pre-installed to your server, including LAME MP encoder, Libbogg and Libvorbis, Mencoder and MPlayer, FFMpeg-PHP, GD Library 2, etc. which was taking a week of my time to get those running afterwards to find out that my service provider does not support background processes and MP3, MPEG files download.

So you should consider the hosting service where those modules are already installed. PhpMotion website lists four of hosting ready service providers, where the starting price $2.99 was per month.

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Introducing GeoClassifieds - Build Your Own Online Classifieds Website

Heather Williamson — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 07:29:47 +0000

Have you ever dreamed of owning your own online classified ads website? Using GeoClassifieds, the online classifieds software solution, you can get yourself started for no money out of your pocket, and easily continue to add useful features as your business does.

GeoClassifieds was developed by Geodesic Solutions as part of their core product line. The business and IP professionals of Geodesic Software opened their doors in Dallas, Texas in 2001 and been delivering a variety of classified and auction software to a wide variety of international clients.

What does my server require?

GeoDesic Solutions creates 4 versions of their GeoClassifieds software. They have a Lite (free), Basic, Professional, and Enterprise version. No matter which version of GeoClassifeds you chose to install, you must have the following basic services on your Web host:

Unix/ Linux/ or Windows based host

PHP 4.3+

MySQL

GD Libraries

IonCube or Zend Optimizer (for license key for commercial versions)

GeoClassifieds is compatible with any popular browser from Internet Explorer to Safari. Users may want to have a high speed Internet connection, simply because the nature of classified ad software implies the use of a lot of small and large images associated with selling individual items.

Can My Server Install GeoClassifieds For Me?

Many web hosting providers use control panel software to allow the automatic installation of a preset list of programs. GeoDesic is not currently announcing an affiliation with any of these control panel developers, so you may not find it listed in your control panel. Because of the time involved in installing and configuring a PHP application on a Linux server, you may want to check your hosts control panel first. Most of them can be accessed through a Web Applications or Add New Application link on your control panel’s home page.

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Nucleus - review of a new open source blogging platform

Melanie Bremner — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 02:35:54 +0000

Nucleus CMS www.nucleuscms.org is an open source content management blogging platform with many features and plug-ins available to grow your business online.

Nucleus CMS is available for free under the GNU General Public License. NucleusCMS was created by the Nucleus Group in 2002. It was later developed and expanded to be the extensive version that exists today, by the international community called the CMS Team. Nucleus CMS was developed to have multiple weblog content visible on one page. It is designed with the ability to have multiple authors and administrators logging in to post or change configurations as necessary.

You can set up several categories to have a commenting and a voting system provided to enable your readers to share their thoughts and opinions of your posts. All of your urls are optimized for both reader and search engines. You can set the system up to automatically display your posts for future dates. This comes in handy for times when you will be going on vacation or will find yourself unable to post on a regular basis.

There are many changes you can make to create your own unique look through skins, templates, and CSS files.

Many plugins are available to add to the features of your site such as NP_Newsletter, NP_blogstats, calendar, chat, weather forecasts, amazon search, and so many more. Plugins are designed by members of the community and are added daily to the growing database.

This system is simple enough for anyone to learn and expandable enough to allow you to build almost any website you imagine.

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WordPress - the most used open source blog software

Thursday Bram — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 10:02:53 +0000

Wordpress blog software has its origin in Michel Valdrighi’s b2 software. In 2003 b2 became the genesis of WordPress www.wordpress.org, a fork project using the b2 source code, which simply had fallen behind web standards and on which no further development was planned. Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little, two bloggers, began developing WordPress and were soon joined by Valdrighi. It took a year, but WordPress’ versatility and open source nature, combined with a decision by the developers of Movable Type to radically raise prices for their software, led WordPress to be one of the frontrunners in blogging software.WordPress’ value lies in its easy customization. It seems like there is a plugin for everything: Akismet (akismet.com) catches spam, podPress (podpress.org) turns a WordPress installation into a podcasting platform, etc. And it only takes a little knowledge of PHP to write your own plugin. WordPress is routinely used as a content management system for websites not meant to act as blogs - it can be used to create a directory just as easily as it can be used to post updates to a blog.

There are some video-tutorials for WordPress 2.3 and 2.5 at the end of the full article. Check them out!

Just What WordPress Needs

To run WordPress, all you need is a server that supports PHP and MySQL. While the WordPress developers recommend Apache or Litespeed web servers for users who plan to subject their WordPress installation to more than typical abuse, it’s not necessary. If you’re planning to install WordPress, you don’t even need the most recent versions of either PHP or MySQL: PHP 4.2 or greater and MySQL 4.0 or greater will work just fine.

Getting WordPress Running

For those individuals without much technical savvy, WordPress can be an ideal CMS for a single simple reason: one-click install. Many web hosts have begun offering accounts with what is essentially an automatic installation process: users simply select WordPress as their CMS of choice and the host takes care of setting it up.

If you’re interested in handling the installation procedure yourself, it’s still not overly complicated - as long as you know a few basics about setting up a website: to start, download the installation package from WordPress (wordpress.org/download/) and unzip it. From there, you’ll need to create a database for WordPress on your web, along with a MySQL user with all privileges (for both accessing and modifying the database). Rename the file “wp-config-sample.php” to “wp-config.php” and open it in the text editor of your choice. Fill in your database details.

At this point, you’ll need to decide if you’d rather have WordPress on the root of your domain or on a subdirectory. To integrate WordPress into the root, move all the files contained in your unzipped installation package (excluding the directory itself) into the root directory of your web server. If you’d rather have your WordPress installation on a subdirectory, move the entire directory into the root directory of your web server (including the directory itself). You can rename the directory if you wish.

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Mambo - the thoroughly simple content management system (CMS)

Heather Williamson — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 10:01:20 +0000

Mambo is an open source content management system which is currently being managed by an Australian non-profit corporation founded in 2005. Although the Mambo Foundation http://mambo-foundation.org didn’t begin the development of Mambo, it has made the support and development of Mambo its primary objective.

Mambo is free software, using PHP and MySQL to create a dynamic web site which supports the organization and creation of documents and other content interesting to your site visitors. Because of the extensibility of Mambo, it can be used to create portals, as well as complex corporate intranets and applications.

Software and Server Requirements

Mambo is quite easy to install, and has simple server requirements. Like most PHP based GNU/GPL open source programs, you simply need a server running Windows, BSD, or Linux with the following options.

Apache 1.3, IIS, or Zeus

MySQL 3.23

PHP 4.3 with safe mode disabled

It is recommended that you have the GD, Zlib, FTP, XML, IconV, GetText, and MBString extensions as part of your PHP installation.Mambo has been designed to work with any web browser software on any operating system. You will need to test it thoroughly if you make any changes to the base software, and after you have installed any Mambot extensions.

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TikiWiki - a powerful wiki / groupware system

Melanie Bremner — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 14:00:18 +0000

TikiWiki (Tiki) CMS/Groupware is an open source web-based application that you can use to build a website for working collaboratively with others. The content management system at the heart of TikiWiki powers wikis, forums, blogs, map servers, and more. You can configure the various tools and customize the appearance of the website from Admin Pages that are also web-based.

There are some video-tutorials at the end of the review. Check them out!

Wikipedia definition of a Wiki:

A wiki is a software that allows users to easily edit and link pages together. Wikis are often used to create collaborative websites and to power community websites. Wikipedia is one of the best known wikis.

Wikis are used in many businesses to provide affordable and effective Intranets and for knowledge management. Ward Cunningham, developer of the first wiki, WikiWikiWeb, originally described it as “the simplest online database that could possibly work.”

WikiWiki is a re-duplication of “wiki“, a Hawaiian word for “fast“. Some suggest that wiki means “What I know Is”. However this is a backronym(a phrase that is constructed “after the fact” from a previously existing word).

TikiWiki CMS/Groupware www.tikiwiki.org was created by the Tiki Wiki Community, and is available for free under the LGPL General Public License. The last release was February 23^rd, 2008. Tiki Wiki is a dynamic application and not a static.

You can customize some of the links and URLs that Tiki produces in order to create “search engine friendly” links. Tiki includes a “_htaccess” file that takes advantage of the web-servers re-write rules. If you would like to enable this feature, you simply rename the _htaccess file to .htaccess

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