BuddyPress – build a social network on top of Wordpress MU (Multi-User) blog installation
Apr 30, 2009 by Mircea Goia MyTestBox News
After months and months in development under Automattic umbrella (yes, the Wordpress guys) Buddypress is, finally and officially, at version 1.0.
What is Buddypress?
It’s a set of plugins and themes (each adding a distinct new feature) developed originally by Andy Peatling allowing a Wordpress MU (Multi-User) blog installation to become a social network also.
All of the plugins could be used to create a complete social network from scratch, or you could use specific plugins to add desirable features to your existing blog network.
Later on, Buddypress was acquired by Automattic, the makers of Wodpress MU and Wordpress blog software, and the author joined to their team.
The features Budypress has are:
* Extended Profiles
* Private Messaging
* Friends
* Groups
* The Wire
* Activity Streams
* Blog Tracking
* Forums
Some upcoming features in 2009 are:
* Status Updates (Mid 2009)
* Photo Albums (Late 2009)
To have Budypress running on your server you need to have the following:
* A working installation of WordPress MU, version 2.7.1 or greater
* PHP version 4.3 or greater
* MySQL 4.0 or greater
* The mod_rewrite Apache module enabled
Budypress might not be a contender now for Social Engine, DZOIC Handshakes, WebNetwork, Boonex Dolphin, Alstrasoft E-friends, Elgg, PHPfox, PHPizabi but in the near future it could be as new features will be added and, especially, because it can reach a good chunk of the market thanks to many Wordpress MU installations which are already there.
Download Buddypress here and don’t forget the installation instructions!
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Tags: auttomatic, blog software, buddypress, dolphin, dzoic, e-friends, elgg, multi-user, mysql, php, phpfox, phpizabi, plugins, social engine, social network, webnetwork, wordpress, wordpress MU
Movable Type gets in Motion, launching a social activity streams aggregator for your site
Mar 19, 2009 by Mircea Goia MyTestBox News
Movable Type, the well-known blog software company, just launched “Motion“, which integrates activity streams, microblogging, and portable identities into a software package that can be installed into the company’s hosted publishing platform, Movable Type Pro.
You can use it to create a public Twitter-like microblog for your existing community, or you can use it as an internal instrument to monitor and track activities in social networks from around the web.
To use this free piece of software you will need an appropriate Movable Type Pro license (see here). The team can help getting you started.
What this software does (according to Movable Type):
* Create a private, custom action aggregator to track sentiment and glean intelligence from conversations around the web through action streams.
* Provide a private microblog community for simple internal employee or team collaboration.
* Publish a public microblog to nurture and grow your community while increasing your page views.
* Create a public social network to connect to your community across the web instead of competing against other social networks.
These are the features of Motion:
* Action Streams
Collect and share actions from across the web, from dozens of supported services including Flickr, YouTube, Twitter, Delicious, Digg and more.* Rich Microblogging
It’s easy to post text, links, images, audio or embedded video with just a click.* Powerful Profiles
Motion profiles show their actions from across the web for all your registered users. Site members can follow each other, and easily upload profile pictures.* Sign in with any web account
Your community members can authenticate with their existing account from Google, Yahoo, Facebook, AOL, or any OpenID provider. Now half a billion web users can comment or vote on your content without hitting a registration barrier.
Watch a demo below or read their Frequently Asked Questions.
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Tags: activity, aggregator, blog software, community, conversations, microblog, motion, Movable Type, network, social, streams
New blogging and content management software from Microsoft: Oxite
Dec 9, 2008 by Mircea Goia MyTestBox News
Today Microsoft entered in competition with Wordpress (or, at least, that what it seems).
Wordpress is a blogging software and is considered also a content management system (especially with the help of various plugins). It is very used in the blogging world (another competitor is Movable Type) and not only.
Now Microsoft wants a piece of this market (is there a market Microsoft doesn’t want a piece? Rumours has it that it also wants a piece from the smart mobile terminals where the iPhone is king).Microsoft released today a blogging and content management software called Oxite. It is, yes, open source and in alpha version (according to ReadWriteWeb).
Oxite has some features other blogging software has:
- # RSS feeds
# Anonymous and authenticated commenting along with optional moderation
# Pingbacks, trackbacks
# Gravatar support (global avatars)
# Web Admin Panel
# Supports Open Search format
# Search friendly URLs
# Supports the MetaWebLog API
# Create any number of web pages for any purpose
# Create sub-pages off a main page
# Localization
Because it is still in alpha version it’s not for begginers but merely for developers who wants to mess with the code. The code is, of course, based on ASP.NET Model View Controller which could limit its spreading (many standard hosts are running Linux and ASP.NET is not running on it, unless a special software comes to help, like The Mono Project – which not many hosting companies are using on production servers).
Microsoft’s Channel 9 on MSDN has an interview with the developers where they describe some of Oxite features (you have to install Silverlight to watch the interview).
Let’s see how and where this goes.
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Tags: asp.net, blog software, cms, content management system, microsoft, Movable Type, oxite, wordpress
WordPress 2.7 Release Candidate 1 Roll Out
Dec 3, 2008 by Mircea Goia MyTestBox News
After numerous changesets since Beta 3, the development team of the hugely popular WordPress blog software announced on December 1 the release of WordPress 2.7 Release Candidate 1 or RC1.
WordPress fans and critics alike have avidly awaited the release, considering this as the close-to-final version of WordPress 2.7 before its final release, originally targeted last November 10. The 280 commits have polished the new admin UI and finally solved many blocker bug problems. The new UI now includes the menu icons created by Ben Dunkle and Verena Segert, the winners of Project Icon, WordPress’ icon-making contest.
The RC1 roll out is a significant milestone for the WordPress team because this means they have finally moved to the last leg of development before the final release of WordPress 2.7. This comes after a series of beta releases that attempted to solve a series of showstopper bugs.
RC1 is ready for use in production, and WordPress encourages users to help evaluate the said release with the end-goal of improving the final release version 2.7.
WordPress 2.7, by the way, is touted to be packed with better graphics and functionalities, taking the simple task of blogging into a higher level.
You can download the RC1 here.
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Tags: blog, blog software, new release, open-source, plugins, themes, wordpress
The new Wordpress blog software 2.7 Beta 1 is out for testing
Nov 4, 2008 by Mircea Goia MyTestBox News
Wordpress blog software evolves steadily and now it reached the version 2.7. This is the first beta 1 release to the public.What it brings new?
According to ther blog it brings a new visual design mainly.
But also it features new additions like:
- the posibility to respond to comments from the admin area,
- automatic upgrade,
- plugin/browser installer,
- drag and drop dashboard,
- navigation expand/colaps,
- comment threading and paging,
- quick inline editing,
- add media without creating post,
- XMLRPC comments API,
- HTTPOnly Cookies,
- upgrades and installs over secure FTP,
- bulk editing of posts
- others
The most popular changes seem to be the new design/layout (looks good indeed), the automatic upgrade (pretty handy feature) and the revised dashboard (according to their poll).
This Beta version works well with Firefox and Safari although it’s not yet finished but the team is working also on making IE and Opera compatible.
The final release was intended to be unleashed into the wild on 10th of November but it seems that is not possible so the team is pushing the date with two weeks.
In the meantime, they’ll release a RC candidate (release candidate) which will be pretty much good for production use.
Go and try out the new Wordpress blog software! Dowload Wordpress 2.7 Beta 1 here.
Another announcement the company did is the launch of Wordpress Showcase, a display of some of the best and brightest WordPress users, who are using it to do a whole lot more than blog.
You can make a suggestion and the team will check that out and put it on Showcase if they think the site deserves it.
We have reviewed Wordpress in the past. Take a look at it.
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Tags: beta, blog software, review, showcase, version, wordpress
Security update from Wordpress: version 2.6.2
Sep 9, 2008 by Mircea Goia MyTestBox News
If you have a blog and allow open registration, then you definitely need to upgrade to this version!
There’s a security hole in the actual version of Wordpress which allows an attacker to randomly change passwords of other registered users (done by crafting an username). The passwords won’t be revealed to the attacker himself, but it is annoying for users to have their passwords changed suddenly. This attack, coupled with a weakness in the random number seeding in mt_rand(), could be used to predict the randomly-generated password (which is not something you want).
Stefan Esser brought the attack to the attention of the Wordpress team, which also helped them fix another problem (SQL Column truncation danger and weakness of mt_rand() ).
The new version of Wordpress also has a handful of bug fixes (checkout the forum). See the full changeset and list of changed files.
To keep up with Wordpress development, checkout their blog.
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Tags: blog, blog software, open-source, security, version, wordpress
Movable Type Pro and 4.2 – blogs are leaning towards social networking side
Aug 14, 2008 by Mircea Goia MyTestBox News
On August 13 (hope it won’t be bad luck!) Six Apart released a new version of its world acclaimed blogging software: Movable Type 4.2.
This new release show, according to Six Apart, where the blogging is going. Being one of the leaders (along Wordpress) who are we to say otherwise 
? Actually, we DO have a saying: when MovableType wasn’t open source WordPress was (still is). And we, the users, embraced WordPress more than MovableType, forcing them to go open-source too .
So, what is new in this 4.2 release?
Many things, if we look at their blog announcement.
Let’s number some of them here (snippet from their blog):
- * 100% Free AntiSpam. TypePad AntiSpam is the best comment spam prevention service on the web. And it’s 100% free no matter how many comments you get, plus it’s open source and Akismet API compatible so it’s easy to hook up to your site. With MT 4.2, it’s also built right in to Movable Type.
* It’s fast. Movable Type’s smart caching only publishes the parts of the page that change, and the core engine’s been radically revamped to make it more efficient. The result? Using your current templates, publishing can be two to three times faster, right out of the box. Some testers have seen results with publishing up to ten times as fast or more.
* Better APIs. OpenID suppport, OAuth libraries, and the ability to add in plugins to connect with the iPhone, Action Streams and more are all built right in. And all of your Movable Type 4 plugins should keep working just fine with this update, or have been updated to work even better in 4.2.
* Templates are super simple. Movable Type has always been designed so you don’t need a ton of plugins to do fancy things with your site’s design. But with all that power, our community told us that we also needed to make sure templates were still easy to understand. So in Movable Type 4.2, templates are vastly simplified, and easier than ever to customize. And live template previews even let you see design changes before they’re published on your site.
* Plus all the power of Movable Type 4. A powerful built-in asset management system. Integrated widget management. The smartest template editor around. The ability, as always, to manage an unlimited number of blogs and authors all in one place. Industry-leading support for new technologies and features. And an absolutely unparalleled community of passionate developers, designers, bloggers, and experts.
On top of these new features of Movable Type version 4.2 the Pro version of Movable Type adds the following (from their blog also):
- * Membership. It’s easy to allow anyone on the web to register on your site, or to sign in with Movable Type’s industry-leading OpenID support. Once they’re in, your site’s members get full-fledged customizable profiles, personalized user pictures (avatars), and can follow their friends or other site members they’re interested in.
* Everyone’s invited. You can easily add full-featured forums, community blogs and group blogs to your site, and since Movable Type has always managed an unlimited number of blogs in one interface (like Wordpress MU), you can keep track of all those conversations using a single set of tools.
* Ratings and Recommendations. Any registered user on your site can vote for content they like, making it easy to create “most popular” or “most recommended” lists on your site. You can even create your own voting communities within your site — think “Digg in a box”.
* User-generated content. Any member of your community can, with appropriate permissions, submit content for publishing on your site. Administrators have full ability to review submissions, and submitted posts show up on user profiles right next to their comments and other activity.
Note that Movable Type Pro is free for personal use but it is NOT free for commercial use! Movable Type 4.2 is free for all.
Basically, step by step, this blogging software goes towards a social network software with blogging being on the center stage. You might say “Oh no! Not another social network!”. And you might be right. It adds to the noise which is already there considering that many white label social networking software already have blog option incorporated in their offer. We have to find a way to manage all that noise.
Now, with all these features I’m wondering if it’s a better platform than WordPress (which powers this site among hundreds of thousands other sites).
Probably not, because WordPress it’s not just sitting still. They are developing BuddyPress (BuddyPress was a set of plugins written for WordPress MU – multiuser by a third party and was acquired by WordPress later on).
The new BuddyPress is based on WordPress MU core and still will be a set of plugins (friends, extended user profiles, private messaging, groups, status updates, photo albums and a plugin for a feature which resembles Twitter).
In the end, social networks and blogging converged and will be merging soon like with other software happened. Social networking is everywhere these days.
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Tags: blog software, buddypress, Movable Type, Six Apart, social networking, version, wordpress
WordPress – the most used open source blog software
Mar 30, 2008 by Thursday Bram Blog Systems, Tips and Tricks
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, 2.5, 2.6 and 2.7 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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Tags: blog, blog software, open-source, plugins, themes, wordpress
Movable Type – Open-source Blog Software Review
Feb 13, 2008 by Mircea Goia Blog Systems
Movable Type blogging software is here (open-source this time). An interesting application for the weblogs and the blogging dummies! Six Apart Ltd., a 6 year old company from San Mateo, California, launched a well rounded package a few years ago for those who wanted to host their own blog. Its 4.01 version is still free for individuals and non-profit organizations. Therefore, this blog software is available with its source code. However, the company prohibits any redistribution or any commercial use of the same.
Its features are largely aimed at the beginners with little or no experience in programming. If you plan to install Movable Type on your website, it would be helpful if you have a little knowledge of Perl Scripts and Linux. (Well, I did not have almost ANY such background and I was able to do it) Basically, Movable Type is server side software made in Perl that can be customized as per user requirements. It can be best associated with MySQL on your server. If you plan to host it yourself, ask your hosting service to give you complete details about cgi folder and where the scripts are located.
Techno Savvy Gigs…
Movable Type is written in Perl and is essentially server side software. You need to install it on your server or the network, in order to test it or view its functionalities. Although once the files are uploaded in the correct folder, the script automatically generates the necessary database files. You can also easily set up number of blogs; however, you would need to access the file system on the server. You may need to access the file systems on the server and adjust the permission settings once again.
MT 4 is a lot easier to install than its predecessors but little bugs still remain that needs to be fixed. On the other hand, it has its own advantages as well. It uses the flat text file database that means it is useful even on systems that do not use SQL as database. It also has support from mail services like Sendmail.
Once the server side is set up, you can now configure the client side with “Blog Config”. The Core Setup allows you to create a new blog. You can set your preferences to allow anonymous comments, email new comments or allow comments by default. After logging in as Admin users you can add more users, set up templates, add blogs or edit the existing ones.
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Tags: blog software, Movable Type, open source blog, Perl, Six Apart, web software review
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