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Winners of the Envato Marketplace Contest

Nov 3, 2009 by Srikanth ADcloseAuthor: Srikanth AD Name: Srikanth AD
Email: adsrikanth@gmail.com
Site: http://www.srikanth.techonaut.com/about
About: Srikanth is a web designer and a pro blogger. You can see his blog or contact him by email at adsrikanth[at]gmail[dot]com for more information.See Authors Posts (98) MyTestBox News

Recently we have reviewed some of cool stuff from Envato.  Some of the popular Envato marketplace sites are ActiveDen, ThemeForest, GraphicRiver, AudioJungle and VideoHive.

The Envato marketplaces are a family of niche web sites which allow professionals to buy and sell digital items such as Flash files, website templates, WordPress themes, videos, music, code and more. Envato marketplace now has over 240,000 members worldwide, and is a hub for tens of thousands of digital items available for purchase with hundreds of new items being added everyday.

Tags: contest, envato, themeforest, themes

BuddyPress Updated to Version 1.1.2

Oct 27, 2009 by Srikanth ADcloseAuthor: Srikanth AD Name: Srikanth AD
Email: adsrikanth@gmail.com
Site: http://www.srikanth.techonaut.com/about
About: Srikanth is a web designer and a pro blogger. You can see his blog or contact him by email at adsrikanth[at]gmail[dot]com for more information.See Authors Posts (98) MyTestBox News

BuddyPress has been recently updated to version 1.1.2. It’s now available via an automatic upgrade or as a manual download. This is an important security release and fixes two vulnerabilities found in version 1.1.1. To stay protected it is essential that you upgrade to this version of BuddyPress regardless of the version you are currently running.

Briefly, BuddyPress is a set of plugins and themes, which can be used to extend the functionality of  WordPress MU and bring social networking features to a new or existing installation. These suite of plugins can be used either independently or cumulatively to create a complete social network. Some specific plugins could also be used to add desirable features to your existing blog network.

Following issues have been fixed in this updated version,

• SQL and XSS security vulnerability.
• Certain situations where a site admin could not see invisible groups.
• Bug with user access level and navigation menu items.
• Double posting of new status updates to activity streams on first post.
• “Total posts” number inconsistencies on profile wires.
• Account deletion bug.
• Spammed user access.

Download BuddyPress here

Tags: buddypress, open-source, plugins, themes, wordpress MU

Grab Three 20$ Credits for Envato Marketplace [Contest]

Oct 14, 2009 by Srikanth ADcloseAuthor: Srikanth AD Name: Srikanth AD
Email: adsrikanth@gmail.com
Site: http://www.srikanth.techonaut.com/about
About: Srikanth is a web designer and a pro blogger. You can see his blog or contact him by email at adsrikanth[at]gmail[dot]com for more information.See Authors Posts (98) Miscellaneous

Recently Envato has launched a new marketplace design with great new features. Some of the popular Envato marketplace sites (FlashDen, ThemeForest, GraphicRiver, AudioJungle and VideoHive) have been given a novel design makeover and a huge upgrade in features and functionality.

The Envato marketplaces are a family of niche web sites which allow professionals to buy and sell digital items such as Flash files, website templates, WordPress themes, videos, music, code and more. Envato marketplace now has over 240,000 members worldwide, and is a hub for tens of thousands of digital items available for purchase with hundreds of new items being added everyday.

We are pleased to inform you that Envato has given MyTestBox a privilege to give away three 20$ credits for the Envato Marketplace. Winners of this contest can use their money across all the Envato marketplace sites and buy any items of their choice.

We, MyTestBox team, take this as an opportunity to give something in return to our loyal visitors, who provided us with nice feedback, News tips and kept the blog alive.

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Tags: contest, digital media, envato marketplace, flash files, music, themes, themforest

BuddyPress Version 1.1.1 Released

Oct 6, 2009 by Srikanth ADcloseAuthor: Srikanth AD Name: Srikanth AD
Email: adsrikanth@gmail.com
Site: http://www.srikanth.techonaut.com/about
About: Srikanth is a web designer and a pro blogger. You can see his blog or contact him by email at adsrikanth[at]gmail[dot]com for more information.See Authors Posts (98) MyTestBox News

BuddyPress, is a set of plugins and themes, which can be used to extend the functionality of  WordPress MU and bring social networking features to a new or existing installation. These suite of plugins can be used either independently or cumulatively to create a complete social network. Some specific plugins could also be used to add desirable features to your existing blog network.

BuddyPress has recently released its new version 1.1.1. The fixed issues include,

• Fixed an issue where themes designed for BuddyPress 1.0 would cause a signup page failure.
• Fixed issues with creating and posting on private and hidden group forums.
• Fixed missing forum topic title in activity stream entry when editing a forum post.
• Fixed missing ability to pass an array of template files to load.
• Fixed post new topic and post new reply links displaying on group forums, even when logged out.
• Fixed issues with viewing paginated friend lists in the default theme.
• Fixed issue with multiple ajax loaders on the groups and friends pages for a user when searching or clicking navigation.
• Added username compatibility fallback setting to provide support for dots in LDAP usernames.

Source

Download BuddyPress 1.1.1 here.

Tags: buddypress, open-source, plugins, themes, wordpress MU

BuddyPress Version 1.1 Released

Sep 30, 2009 by Srikanth ADcloseAuthor: Srikanth AD Name: Srikanth AD
Email: adsrikanth@gmail.com
Site: http://www.srikanth.techonaut.com/about
About: Srikanth is a web designer and a pro blogger. You can see his blog or contact him by email at adsrikanth[at]gmail[dot]com for more information.See Authors Posts (98) MyTestBox News

BuddyPress, is a set of plugins and themes, which can be used to extend the functionality of  WordPress MU and bring social networking features to a new or existing installation. These suite of plugins can be used either independently or cumulatively to create a complete social network. Some specific plugins could also be used to add desirable features to your existing blog network.

BuddyPress has recently released its new version 1.1. This new release includes a substantial number of core code improvements as well as an array of useful new features.

Some highlights of this version are:

• One click internal bbPress forum integration. This allows you to set up group forums in no time.
• A global forum directory (example) allowing you to easily browse public facing forum posts regardless of the group they are attached to.
• Completely re-written theme handling. Now, one theme controls all of your installation. There is no hidden HTML and everything is in the template ready for you to tweak.
• Easily create themes that are upgraded automatically when BuddyPress is updated.
• Total site administrator control of all content within an installation. Edit user’s profiles, update avatars, mark users as spammers, manage all groups, delete site activity entries.
• Activity streams everywhere. Activity streams can be filtered allowing for feature specific activity streams or adding an activity stream to your custom plugin.
• A new status updates feature is included in BuddyPress 1.1. Actions and filters are included to allow plugin developers to hook into any external service.
• An awesome group extension API allowing developers to easily extend groups and add completely new features.

Download the latest version of BuddyPress here.

Tags: automattic, buddypress, new version, plugins, social network, themes, wordpress MU

WordPress 2.7 Release Candidate 1 Roll Out

Dec 3, 2008 by Mircea GoiacloseAuthor: Mircea Goia Name: Mircea Goia
Email: mtb@mytestbox.com
Site: http://www.mytestbox.com
About: Mircea Goia was born in Romania and imigrated to USA in 2005. He lives in Phoenix, AZ and works as web developer. Aside, he works also on several entrepreneurial Web projects. He shows a keen interest in commercial Web development such as social networks, viral marketing, online video. His artistic hobby is filmmaking with special interest in directing.See Authors Posts (76) 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.

Tags: blog, blog software, new release, open-source, plugins, themes, wordpress

The team behind Elgg, the free open source social networking software, launches themes option

Oct 21, 2008 by Mircea GoiacloseAuthor: Mircea Goia Name: Mircea Goia
Email: mtb@mytestbox.com
Site: http://www.mytestbox.com
About: Mircea Goia was born in Romania and imigrated to USA in 2005. He lives in Phoenix, AZ and works as web developer. Aside, he works also on several entrepreneurial Web projects. He shows a keen interest in commercial Web development such as social networks, viral marketing, online video. His artistic hobby is filmmaking with special interest in directing.See Authors Posts (76) MyTestBox News

The interface for Elgg v1.0, the free open source social networking platform, underwent a radical overhaul due to the overwhelming users request for theming.

The team has created two basic themes to help those interested in theming get to grips with the components of an Elgg theme. Check them out here!
Elgg themes are developed as plugins which makes them distributable, customizable and powerful (they can also be enabled and disabled easily).

Here’s a short tutorial  on how to get started in theme creation.

There’s a dedicated place on Elgg website for theme development and it can be found here.

Elgg is a pretty new free open source social networking software and recently they launched its first version 1.0. It competes with a plethora of other free social networking platforms like Dolphin, PHPFox, PHPizabi, AroundME, WordPress MU+Buddypress  and others.
It is PHP/MySQL built and it seems it’s gaining momentum in this crowded space.

Download it for free from here.

Tags: elgg, free, mysql, open-source, php, platform, social networking, software, themes

WordPress – the most used open source blog software

Mar 30, 2008 by Thursday BramcloseAuthor: Thursday Bram Name: Thursday Bram
Email: thursday@thursdaybram.com
Site: http://
About: Thursday Bram is a freelance writer and media consultant. She shares offices with a computer scientist and two cats, all of whom she hopes to train to take dictation. Thursday graduated with a B.A. in Communications from the University of Tulsa and is currently pursuing her M.A. at the University of Baltimore.See Authors Posts (1) 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