Pligg CMS, the PHP/MySQL Digg clone, finally at the version 1.0.0 (the official one)
Jun 17, 2009 by Mircea Goia MyTestBox News
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…
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Tags: blogging, cms, content management system, digg clone, joomla, mambo, mysql, open-source, php, pligg, social bookmarking, social networking, socialwebcms, software
WordPress 2.8 “Baker” is Now Available as a Full Release
Jun 11, 2009 by Srikanth AD MyTestBox News
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
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Tags: blog system, mysql, open-source, php, software, wordpress
OpenGoo, an easy to use Open Source Web Office Software (Review)
Jun 2, 2009 by Srikanth AD Miscellaneous
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.).
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Tags: collaboration, document sharing, information, management, mysql, open-source, opengoo, php, software, web office
WordPress.com, makes it even easier to publish onto your blog – Post by Email
May 12, 2009 by Srikanth AD MyTestBox News
WordPress.com, one of the most used blog host, now allows users to post text and images by email. If you are at work with Outlook or on the move with a BlackBerry and wanted to publish at quick post, this feature can be extremely useful.
Post by Email, is simple to use.
From the new ‘My Blogs’ menu you can generate special email addresses. You can create as many email addresses as you need, one for each blog you have access to.
You can send email from any email client, whether in a browser, on your desktop, or from your cell phone and as much formatting will be retained as possible.
Your images will be included and automatically converted into thumbnails. If you include multiple images, they’ll be converted into a gallery.
If you’ve purchased the Space Upgrade then MP3 attachments will be displayed using our audio player. If you’ve purchased the VideoPress upgrade then you can also include videos.
Post by Email Features:
- Transcoding of any video files supported by the WordPress video player (mp4, mov, wmv, avi, mpg, and m4v).
- Add your email addresses directly into your address book using downloadable vCards. (You don’t even need to remember the address)
- Automatic notification of a published email post.
- Automatic removal of standard signature blocks, with support for manual removal of other signatures.
- Conversion of YouTube URLs into embedded videos.
You might want to read more about it on ReadWriteWeb and WordPress.com News.
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Tags: blog, images, platform, post by email, software, video, wordpress
K2 for Joomla! – create custom content types (items) for your Joomla CMS websiteW
May 6, 2009 by Mircea Goia Tips and Tricks
Sometime ago we’ve introduced Seedling, a pre-configured Joomla package plus extensions and modules.
Now we have another tip for you: K2 (and that’s not the mountain).
What is K2 and for what can you use it?
K2 is a content construction component which lets you create custom content types (aka items) for your Joomla! website. Having this component installed on top of your Joomla! web software allows you to transform your website to a news site with author blogs, product catalogs, work portfolio, knowledge base, download/document manager, directory listing, event listing and more…all these packed together in one single component.
If you are familiar with Content Construction Kit (CCK) for Drupal content management system then you will become familiar very fast with K2 for Joomla!.
The component is very flexible, you can add as many content fields as you want and create category-specific content items, e.g. article, blog post, product page, directory listing.
The standard offer are nested-level categories, tags, comments, item image (useful for articles/catalogs), videos, galleries, user profiles, attachments, ajax-based frontend editing and more.
Here is a demo for you to try: http://k2.joomlaworks.gr/demo/
If you have already a Joomla! CMS website and want to use K2 you need to convert your content to K2. There’s no easy way to do it but Jeremy Wilken found a way and built a piece of software which does that. Checkout his K2 Converter.
K2 is a product of JoomlaWorks, a Greece-based web development company (since 2006) specialized in developoing Joomla and Mambo content management systems components.
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Tags: content construction kit, content management system, drupal, joomla, joomlaworks, k2, k2 converter, software, web development, website
Magento Enterprise Edition – the premium version of the open source Magento ecommerce software
Apr 17, 2009 by Mircea Goia MyTestBox News
Yesterday Varien, the makers of Magento, have released the premium version of this increasingly popular (over 750,000 downloads) open source ecommerce software: Magento Enterprise Edition .
The commercially licensed Magento Enterprise Edition it’s geared towards larger companies and includes additional features, including ROI specific features, not available in their open source, Community Edition product. In addition to features, the Enterprise Edition will include Service Level Ageements based support with guaranteed response times, warranties, indemnification and soon, PA-DSS certification.
This doesn’t mean the Magento team will abandon the open source commitments. It will still develop the Community Edition product (which we reviewed here – an early version).
The premium version is based on the core of the Community version so the upgrade is a relatively simple process. Extensions (local, community, commercial) and custom themes will continue to work as they do with a standard upgrade process.
The Enterprise features (not found in the Community Edition):
- * Advanced Administrator Roles and Permission Restriction per Site (Website and Store View)
* Logging of Administrator Actions
* Gift Certificates/Cards (Physical and Virtual)
* Customer Store Credits
* Content Staging and Merging. Support for both on-demand and scheduled merges and rollbacks of content
* Category View and Purchase permissions per on customer group (limited catalog access)
* Private (Club) Sales including Events, Invitations and Category access permissions
* Strong Data Encryption
The price of Magento Enterprise Edition is not pocket money but a larger company can afford $8,900 annually for a single server installation and support. After all, there is a economic nuclear winter out there and Varien needs to become more profitable so going enterprise surely will help.
Take a look and compare the features these two products have (and download the free Community Edition if you like).
Magento ecommerce software is a PHP/MYSQL based ecommerce solution and Varien is a Los Angeles based software company. Find out more about Magento Enterprise Edition on the team’s blog.
If you had experimented with their ecommerce software you are welcomed to tell us your opinion (in the comments).
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Tags: community edition, ecommerce, enterprise edition, magento, mysql, open-source, php, premium version, software, varien
Laconica, the Twitter clone open source microblogging software, is one step closer to the version 1.0
Apr 15, 2009 by Mircea Goia MyTestBox News
Twitter is all the rage these days (it reached even The Colbert Report – a well known US comedy show).
As almost all successful things, Twitter could not escape cloning. They are several services out there Twitter like Jaiku, Presently and Plurk being some of them ((see a longer list of clones here )
But those are web services and that means if you want to actually build one like that you would have to code it yourself.
Here comes Laconica to the rescue. Laconica is the open source microblogging web software which can help in build a web service Twitter like (it helps people in a community, company or group to exchange short – 140 character – messages over the web).
One of the biggest implementation of this software is seen at identi.ca (other implementations can be seen in this list).
Laconica is built on PHP/MySQL open source software.
Recently, Laconica team released the version 0.7.3 which bring new features to an already quite well built software (that besides fixing some bugs from previous versions).
Some of the new features are:
* A plugin to allow a templating language for customization
* A plugin for Piwik Analytics engine
* A bookmarklet for posting a notice about a Web page you’re reading
* A welcome notice (’welcomebot’) and default subscription for new users
* Correct and intelligent redirect HTTP status codes
* Support for SSL for some or all pages on the site
* Better handling of empty notice lists on many pages
* Major improvements to the Twitter friend-sync offline processing
* Ping, twitter and facebook queuehandlers working better
* Subscribers, subscriptions, groups are listed on the Personal page.
* “Invite” link restored to main menu
* Better memory handling in FOAF output
* Fix for SUP support (FriendFeed?)
More here …
Download the latest version of Laconica – the open source microblogging software.
Listen the podcast interview with Evan Prodromou for Laconica and Identi.ca
Laconica is not alone. It has competitors and two of them are Yonkly (built on ASP.NET) and Revou (built on PHP/MySQL but it is commercial – costs about $400). Check them out too.
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Tags: identica, jaiku, laconica, microblogging, mysql, open-source, php, plurk, presently, revou, software, twitter clone, yonkly
OpenX 2.8 – an even better version of this free ad server software
Apr 8, 2009 by Mircea Goia MyTestBox News
The advertising market might have taken a hit these months but that doesn’t stop developers improving the advertising software they built so far.
One of these developers is OpenX and they just launched a new version of their popular AND free ad server software: the version 2.8.
We have reviewed this open source ad server software some time ago (when it was at the version 2.4) and we found it pretty compelling and easy to use (the review is here).
Now, with this new release, OpenX is pushing forward to more features like the new plugin framework which allows you to customize OpenX in any way you want (built your own plugins, use third party plugins or have an OpenX consultant do it for you – just like Wordpress).
A new feature OpenX introduced was the OpenX Market Plugin which allows you to flow your inventory directly into OpenX Market to maximize your revenue. This Market is now integrated natively in the ad server software.
eCPM was optimized even more and now you can further maximize your advertising revenue by using an entirely new eCPM-based revenue optimization system for ad serving prioritization across your remnant CPM, CPC and CPA campaigns.
The scalability of the software wasn’t forgotten: raw data storage has been overhauled by a re-architected distributed statistics technology (bucket logging) to provide significantly improved scalability and reduced storage requirements.
The OpenX team didn’t forget also the user interface. They have tweaked again to make it even more easier to use.
To get started download OpenX ad server software or use their ad server free hosted solution (no download required).
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Tags: ad management, ad server, advertising, framework, free, manager, open-source, openads, openx, openx market, php, plugin, software
Boonex has launched the Dolphin 7 alpha community software
Mar 14, 2009 by Mircea Goia MyTestBox News
If you want to build an online community which would have the characteristics of YouTube (video sharing), MySpace (social networking), Facebook (social networking), Odeo (audio-video search engine), Flickr (online photo sharing) and Match (online dating) then you will need a web software like Boonex Dolphin.
Dolphin incorporates all the features which above sites have but at a fraction of the cost: free.
And now Boonex just launched an alpha version (public preview) of the latest Dolphin 7 – called also Hookie (the stable version is Dolphin 6.1). The version will be the last which supports their current engine. The next Dolphin, version 8 will be based on a new engine called Poseidon (which is BoonEx proprietary software engine and development framework).
In this new version Boonex re-worked the user-interface make it more user-friendly, easier to navigate, better layout and UI logic. On the back-end they moved all the major modules to separate folders and re-wrote the code to separate them.Caching was added to most of the “power hungry” pages, introduced standardized forms, integrated jQuery (Ajax Javascript library) and optimized database queries. It includes Ray Widgets and Orca Forum as native components now. You will need a single license for all of these.
More details about Dolphin 7a preview release you cand find on Boonex blog .
Dolphin 7 community software is (will be) 100% open-source (including Flash Apps, Adobe Air App, iPhone App and Android App).
You can test the preview here and participate in discussions on their Dolphin 7 dedicated forum.
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Tags: boonex, community, dolphin, open-source, social network, software
Platform virtualization – top 25 providers (software, hardware, combined)
Dec 29, 2008 by Mircea Goia Miscellaneous
In the article about cloud computing/utility computing/grid computing we’ve presented the most important companies which offers cloud computing hosting.In this article we will present the companies which offers means (mainly, the software and hardware) which powers most of the cloud computing hosting providers.
As Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platform_virtualization puts it:
——————–
In computing, platform virtualization is a term that refers to the abstraction of computer resources. Virtualization hides the physical characteristics of computing resources from their users, be they applications, or end users. The term has been widely used since the 1960s.
Platform virtualization is performed on a given hardware platform by host software (a control program), which creates a simulated computer environment, a virtual machine, for its guest software. The guest software, which is often itself a complete operating system, runs just as if it were installed on a stand-alone hardware platform. Typically, many such virtual machines are simulated on a single physical machine, their number limited only by the host’s hardware resources. Typically there is no requirement for a guest OS to be the same as the host one. The guest system often requires access to specific peripheral devices to function, so the simulation must support the guest’s interfaces to those devices. Trivial examples of such devices are hard disk drive or network interface card.
Virtual machines are used to consolidate many physical servers into fewer servers, which in turn host virtual machines. Each physical server is reflected as a virtual machine “guest” residing on a virtual machine host system. This is also known as Physical-to-Virtual or ‘P2V’ transformation.
Virtual machines can be used in disaster recovery as “hot standby” environments for physical production servers. This changes the classical “backup-and-restore” philosophy, by providing backup images that can “boot” into live virtual machines, capable of taking over workload for a production server experiencing an outage.
——————–
There are several methods of platform virtualization:
- full virtualization
- hardware assisted virtualization
- partial virtualization
- paravirtualization
- operating system-level virtualization
Below we’ll be trying to present most of these platform virtualization and software providers (next page).
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Tags: hardware, platform, providers, services, software, virtualization
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