Oxwall Hangout Call in Meetup Aftermath

OK, so the first Oxwall Meetup NYC is now the thing of the past. It was loads of fun, I’m sure, with beer, pizza, guitar music, etc… All enjoyed exclusively by Oxwall Founder Emil sitting alone in a Manhattan pub.

Yeah, I guess the short notice and geographical location did not do Oxwall fans any favors, and sadly no one showed up. But hey, we learned a mighty lesson here, and more thought will go into organizing meetups in the future. That’s right, we are unfazed and are moving on.

To prove our commitment to hearing directly from the community, and also taking cues from the pre-meetup feedback, we are going to setup Google+ Hangouts for admins running Oxwall-powered websites, hosted by Emil and other fine Oxwall people. This way we’ll keep the informal feel we were going after, and eliminate the minor problem of not being physically present in the US.

Watch this space, Oxwall’s Facebook or Twitter for a special announcement regarding the first Hangout. We’ll see you there!

Oxwall Meetup NYC (VENUE UPDATE)

I’ve got something exiting to share with you guys.

In just a couple of weeks we’ll be holding the first official Oxwall Meetup ever!

Oxwall team wants to see the real people behind communities built with our software. We plan to hold regular informal meetups all around the world, talk with Oxwal enthusiasts, show them what we are working on, and allow admins to mingle and get to know each other better.

The first official Oxwall meetup will be held in O’Lunney’s Times Square Pub NYC. 145 West 45th Street, New York, NY 10036, on December 9th, at 7PM. Oxwall founder Emil will be on hand to serve free pizza, share exclusive Oxwall news, answer any questions, and generally hang out (he plays guitar, just ask him).

So, if you want to be a part of our history, go ahead and confirm your attendance. We realize that not everyone will be able to make it to New York this time around, but the meetup will take place anyway, even if just a few of you will show up. C’mon, join on the fun.

Oxwall: It’s Been a Hell of a Year!

Guess what? It’s been a little over a year since Oxwall entered this world to face life as a competitive open source product. During this time the software has really come a long way (more precisely, all the way to 1.2.6), and luckily this force seems to be unstoppable at this point. Let’s look back twelve or so months and tally the sort-of end-of-year results.

We don’t want to be precarious, and so start with a little graphics courtesy of Google Analytics. Look below – we are clearly witnessing an exponential growth: more Oxwall-powered communities are being set up, more plugins developed, more people join on the fun. The graph shows the daily number of admin area accesses on different Oxwall sites.

Oxwall: It's Been a Hell of a Year!
Oxwall websites daily admin access dynamics.

As the Oxwall project matured, a key decision was made by the team last year – a more structured and carefully planned development/release schedule was put in place, resulting in a more predictable update pattern. More flexibility in development was also achieved by the switch from SVN to Mercurial Distributed Version Control System.

At the same time, the fine-tuning of the Auto-update system proved to be a success, and made sure all community members are on the same page come update time. It helped admins to consistently be on the edge by always knowing about the releases of the latest builds, or what needs to be additionally configured.

Due to these shifts in the development/release processes, we’ve been able to greatly speed up the reaction to all reported issues, and reached a new level when it comes to critical bug fixing. More importantly, the Auto–update system reduced the number of different software versions installed, as the latest build is usually employed by almost 80% of all active websites within a week of a release.

Oxwall versions in use.

Oxwall really went global, with several groups across the world setting up Oxwall-dedicated communities, working on local translation, member support, and distribution of the software. To facilitate these efforts we have tweaked our policies and even came up with the Oxwall Club; a membership in which will bring even more benefits to said groups.

Oxwall: It's Been a Hell of a Year!In the meantime, more international exposure was achieved after a page about Oxwall project appeared on the Wikipedia; while a greater market penetration through the inclusion of the software to the Softaculous and Simple Scripts collections brought significant traffic increase.

More recently we’ve added the support of Cloud File Storage for networks’ static content, and also saw the appearance of first paid plugins and themes in the Oxwall Store, which will drive even more creative and progressive energy towards the project. We are looking forward to seeing what you’ll come up with next.

And make no mistake, this is all just the beginning of a very exiting journey. The team behind Oxwall is truly committed to producing the best social builder around, and we do have great plans for the future. Thank you for choosing us.

Oxwall Policy Changes and Oxwall Club

Oxwall Policy Changes and Oxwall ClubDear community members, we would like to draw your attention to several changes and additions to our policies. For your convenience all of them can now be found in the ‘Oxwall Policies and Licenses‘ section of the main Oxwall website.

Oxwall Domain Policy

This new policy is introduced due to trademark issues and to avoid possible confusion among regional and vertical Oxwall websites dedicated to the software itself (translation, distribution, etc.). In short, we ask webmasters not to use ‘Oxwall’ in top-level domain names. Click here for more details.

Oxwall Attribution Policy

The attribution topic frequently comes up in the comments, when webmasters of Oxwall-powered networks ask us whether they can remove the ‘Powered by Oxwall’ logo at the bottom of the page. The thing is – Oxwall is Open Source, and in return we only ask the community to keep the attribution. Click here for more details.

Other important documents in the ‘Oxwall Policies and Licenses‘ section include Oxwall License, Oxwall Store Terms of UseOxwall Store Commercial License, and Oxwall Software Terms of Use.

Oxwall Club

Now we are getting to the fun part. Oxwall Foundation is proud to launch an exclusive Oxwall Club. It will unite officially recognized international communities devoted to local promotion of our software, as well as helping Oxwall-powered networks in their native languages. So now you know that anyone with a CLUB badge in the forum is actually a representative of a regional or vertical community. Click here to learn about the benefits of Oxwall Club membership and other details.

 

 

Oxwall Available through Simple Scripts

Oxwall on Simple ScriptsWonderful news everyone! Oxwall Software is now available through Simple Scripts.

Simple Scripts is a hosted service, which allows instant one-click installation of over 70 top web applications. We are now in the great company of WordPress, Joomla, Roundcube, Drupal, and many others.

In a nutshell, Simple Scripts works though a choice number of popular control panels (including cPanel), and takes care of any issues with support, maintenance, updates, etc. The current version available is our latest release Oxwal 1.2.4.

In addition to Simple Scripts, Oxwall is also available through Softaculous, a similar web service that allows instant software installation. We believe this brings our free and open source platform even closer to the community.

The New Release Schedule System

As promised in the comments section, I bring you some wonderful news. To benefit both end-users and our development team, we are switching to a new Release Scheduling System. Allow me to demonstrate it with a few helpful pictures first.

Up until recently our releases were a combination of scheduled fresh features with all the bug fixes picked up along the way. This system looks nice on paper, but in reality it often led to unexpected delays.

Imagine that we have set out to introduce a New Cool Tool for network Admins. In the past our development team would start working on it, all the while fixing up all the reported issues. But then, instead of releasing quick patches in demand, we had to wait until said New Cool Tool is absolutely ready and can be bundled together with the fixes. Sometimes it would take weeks or even months to be sure the New Cool Tool is actually cool enough for prime-time. Needless to say, the extended waiting period can be grueling, thus we decided to change the situation dramatically.

As mentioned in one of the prior posts, the switch to Mercurial DVCS gives us more flexibility. Namely we now have two development branches in place – Dev and Stable. Dev is reserved for big features, like the aforementioned New Cool Tool, while Stable will cover all the bug fixes and minor improvements.

Let me explain how the new system will work. The end-users will no longer have to wait for the new release in the dark. They will know for sure that the new release will be here every month, bringing along all the Stable fixes that are ready by the deadline. In the meantime the Oxwall team will be busy with two weeks of active development work, and a week of testing and compiling documentation. If, during this time, the New Cool Tool will appear to be ready in Dev, it will also end up in the release, along with the fixes.

Here at Oxwall we believe the new system will further improve the software development dynamics, and reinforce our commitment to producing the best professional user-oriented social network builder out there.

A Word to Community

Dear Oxwall users,

I want to thank everyone for choosing our software. We all believe in open source values and one of these is transparency. With this in mind, there’s one topic I’d like to discuss with you; namely, our latest release.

Oxwall 1.2.3 release was unplanned and was triggered by us finding some showstopper bugs affecting some users.

By releasing the update we received feedback that the rushed release caused more problems to more users than the original 1.2.2. Some people were very vocal about their problems and blamed us for “breaking” their sites. Of course, the sites are not broken. Every individual problem can be solved by us looking at it. And we want to do that. Let us know if anything is still wrong with your setup.

It would be too easy for us to take “love it or leave it” approach. Instead we believe all software should be excellent – no matter free or commercial.

I wanted to assure everyone who is using Oxwall that we are determined not only to make it the best social software product but to also make administrator experience perfect. We’ve spoiled our users by easy, 1-click updates. So when you click the button you trust us.

We rely on your trust and generally update experience is good for most users. Currently we are introducing the new release scheduling system and automating release routines. More about that in a separate blog post soon.

Thank you,

Emil & Oxwall Foundation team.

More Languages in Oxwall Forum

As all of us witness the growing popularity of our favorite social networking software, the Foundation team can’t help but notice the emergence of Oxwall-centric communities in languages other than old boring English.

To make our international friends feel more at home, and give them a place to communicate naturally, we have set up several neighborhoods in our forums.

Please welcome the soon to be busy Spanish, German, Russian and Farsi HQs!

We hope this will expand the possibilities for community interactions and greatly improve the experience for non-English speakers.

Community Leaders

As you might have noticed some users got marked with “Leader” badges. What do those mean?

Oxwall (as open source software) has to heavily rely on community support and with the growing popularity this tendency will get even stronger. At the moment of writing this, Oxwall is happy to enjoy bright individuals who proved to be genuine Oxwall enthusiasts and most active helpers. We decided they should be marked as community leaders.

If you see “Leader” badge on user’s avatar it means the user has been providing quality help for other Oxwall users on the forums for some time and we decided to acknowledge their expertise and dedication (upon their permission, of course). That way more people will know they can rely on their knowledge and will to help.

We are looking forward to have more community leaders that we will choose upon our discretion. It’s important to understand that this is not an elite club, nor is it a privilege. This is to mark people who (like Oxwall Foundation members) choose to accept open source values and do “paid work” for free for the sake of the community.

Thanks,
Emil