Plugin Links: looking for a new owner

We at Oxwall always try to streamline our operations because there’s only so much a small team can do. Sometimes it means that we have to give up an area of activity that no longer serves community’s best interests. Today is the case with one of our old-timer plugins, Links (view item in the store).

Rather than let it slide into the oblivion, we decided to give away this plugin to a 3rd party. Probably somebody can take better care about it than we did. So, if you:

1) have experience with Oxwall plugin development;
2) have ideas how to improve this plugin;
3) are ready to make it happen,

… send an email to info@oxwall.org and let us know about your vision for this plugin. Also, don’t forget to attach the link to your plugin portfolio. We’ll review the applications and hand the ownership to the best applicant.

Thank you,
Oxwall team

P.S. The new owner is found, thank you.

Dev Diary, February 21, 2014

Ah, the last breathes of winter… It’s getting warmer, so the life’s good, and that’s exactly the attitude that boosts our strive to get a few more ideas through to the next release. One such idea is the improvement of the Photos plugin – a real essential toy in the arsenal of any serious social site. Our goal here is to fix all the obvious bugs and add some exciting options to make users happier.

As you know, at present the plugin operates by means of either basic uploader, or through flash upload. And frankly, both are dated. The flash one cannot be customized in css/html, and requires an additional plugin in the browser. Sometimes this leads to unnecessary confusion, and that’s what we want to eliminate.

The solution – a photo uploader that uses native browser capabilities and doesn’t require additional browser extensions. Also, it’s easily customizable in css/html, maintains drag’n’drop interface, and allows quick editing at the very first step (rotate, hashtags, album name, etc.)

Photo1

 VIEW PHOTOS

One of the things we learned with the old system is that most users find comments under pictures inconvenient. When the page is scrolled down for more comments, the picture itself gets out of sight, and is basically “lost.”

An easy solution to prevent this is to move comments and description to the right side of the picture. That’s the trend across the industry anyway, and seems to be the right approach for us. Still, we are leaving the old system as an available option as well, so you can choose what’s working better for you.

Untitled-1

 PHOTO LIST

We’ve also decided to play with the visual presentation of the photo list, which was kind of boring (being strictly square and all). The addition of a Pinterest-like mode should spice things up a bit, don’t you think?

Untitled-2

SEARCH PHOTOS

There are no search options for photos in Oxwall right now, which isn’t handy, since users resort to tags when they are looking for something. We’ll change that by making it possible to search by descriptions, usernames and hash tags.

Capture4

So that’s the gist of things to come. But there’s even more interface stuff that we are tinkering with right now. Liking and varying privacy settings for different photo albums are on the plate too, and will be ready to be served with Oxwall 1.6.1, or soon thereafter.

Keep reading our Dev Diary guys, and learn what else keeps us busy.

CSV import for Oxwall

While Oxwall 1.6 development is humming along nicely, we never stop making other, less noticed but very useful things for the community. Earlier we released a CSV user data import plugin. Here it goes: http://www.oxwall.org/store/item/718

It does what it says — lets you import your user accounts from other databases to restart your community on Oxwall. It doesn’t import other content like blogs, photos, etc, but attempts to bring all critical user profile data into the new place.

People always asked for such a tool, so we tried to make it as useful and easy to use as possible. Feel free to try it out. This is version 1.0, so we are listening to your feedback, and of course, problem reports.

Thanks,
Emil
Oxwall team

Oxwall Store Digest:
Top of the Line

Dear friends,

With great pleasure we want to present a new section of this blog. After seeing the steadily climbing popularity of the Oxwall Store, as well as general improvement in quality of the items that end up there, we decided to shine some light on the best plugins and themes on display. And today we have not one, but two of them!

Mochi Games for Oxwall

Oxwall Store Digest: Top of the Line

Games are often one of the most thought-after features in social networking and Mochimedia.com presents a wide variety of options in this area. Mochi Games for Oxwall plugin integrates Mochimedia services into any Oxwall website almost entirely hassle-free.

Oxwall Store Digest: Top of the Line

You’ve got everything from Action to Strategy to Racing, to even Classic Nintendo Spoofs, all as part of a huge collection that can make any casual gamer happy.

Among other things, the plugin eliminates all steps requiring the insertion of custom Javascript codes, and allows most games to set up Leaderbords integrated into Oxwall Newsfeed, to keep members posted of new highscores. On top of that, Mochi Games for Oxwall works perfectly with User Credits plugin, allowing admins to charge or award members with credits for using games on the site.

Mochi Games for Oxwall is sold for a one-time fee of $20, and its creator promises frequent updates and support.

Download Plugin.

Try Demo.

Questions

Another top-rated plugin that is quickly gaining popularity is Questions, which allows users to submit polls for others to answer, Facebook-style.

Oxwall Store Digest: Top of the Line

Incredibly easy to setup and manage, Questions are very useful for adding interactivity to any site, and getting the community even more involved in joint activities.

Oxwall Store Digest: Top of the Line

Needless to say, after publishing the created poll will appear in the Newsfeed, and depending on chosen options, members can select a ready answer or add one of their own.

The plugin is absolutely free and has already seen over 1000 downloads since appearing in the Store.

Download Plugin.

Try Demo.

Oxwall: The Progress

Oxwall: The ProgressLadies and gentlemen,

Today we would like to share some great news with you. Oxwall Foundation has reached several important milestones, which prove that we are moving in the right direction, steadily giving the community tools necessary for our common success.

First of all, Oxwall Software now boasts over 71000 source lines of code. Compare that with 64000 of the very first Oxwall iteration released in August 2010. Not bad, considering that this metric is a very important indicator of a project’s size, and shows the effort the development team puts behind it.

Now, that was the platform itself. Even more impressive is the rapid increase in the number of source lines of code for plugins developed by the Oxwall Foundation. Altogether they now take over 64000 LOC (30% growth from the times of Oxwall 1.0.1), which is really impressive, when you take into account the time-frame and the relatively small team size.

All of that, coupled with the success of the recently released Oxwall 1.3 helped to boost the platform downloads from the 250 per day average in 2011, all the way up to 350 at the start of 2012.

Finally, Oxwall Store also witnesses some stable evolution since its full-scale launch a mere year ago. By now, the gradually growing number of published items have passed 100, adding even more to the progress of the entire project.

With our joint efforts and great input from the international Oxwall community, these achievements have been reached in just under two years. This is the programming productivity and expansion rates we are quite content with, although we’ll be obviously looking to build on this success even further in the near future.

UPDATE

An unfortunate slip made its way into the above text. Of course we meant the DAILY download average (not monthly) in the fourth paragraph. So, the daily platform download average in 2011 was 250, boosted up to 350 since the release of Oxwall 1.3.

 

 

Instant Chat plugin

Oxwallers rejoice!

The long-aiwated, much hyped, for centuries promised, and god-knows-what-else instant chat plugin just released.

With that release Oxwall just became more engaging, more interactive, and more capable of retaining users. We are very serious about making Oxwall more interactive and dynamic, and this chat is the very first step in that direction.

This is of course the basic version of the plugin. Zarif (the developer behind the plugin) already works on the next iteration – including for-everybody mode, sound notifications, and more.

Feel free to install the plugin and share your feedback.


Events plugin

Here’s another free native plugin for your needs. Grab the new Events plugin from the Oxwall Store while it’s still smoking!

It’s pretty simple and straightforward – create a public or a private event and invite your friends there. They can post stuff on the comment wall. We will iterate to make this plugin more powerful so we’re waiting for your feedback.

Here is the demo.

Oxwall 1.0 stable + plugin updates!

What is the best way to start 2011 in your opinion? Right, install the new shining Oxwall 1.0 stable!

On the day when my son was born it’s fascinating to finally officially give birth to another child – our new social software hit.

Core changes:
– Overall system performance improved;
– HTML sanitizing and XSS filtering improved;
– development API extended: Javascript events added, optional parameters in routing interfaces;
– You can now change default avatar from admin area;
– Numerous language changes (spelling and other);
– Total user count in admin area;
– Occasional usability improvements for admin area;
– Javascript can now be disabled when editing widgets if incorrect scripting breaks the page;
– User can now remove all comments on their profile wall.
– fix: some hosting setups reported error: “Message: SQLSTATE: General error: 2014 Cannot execute queries while other unbuffered queries are active. Consider using PDOStatement::fetchAll(). Alternatively, if your code is only ever going to run against mysql, you may enable query buffering by setting the PDO::MYSQL_ATTR_USE_BUFFERED_QUERY attribute”. It should be gone now but we need you to verify this since the error was rare and we couldn’t reproduce it.

New plugin, Newsfeed:

The much awaited feature brings likes and comments to status updates and user activity events. It has the potential to become the central place of interaction on any Oxwall-powered site. Newsfeed plugin now replaces two plugins: Status updates and Latest Activity. Those plugins will not longer be shipped in downloads and will be pulled from Oxwall Store.

Other plugin changes

– Groups, fix: it’s no longer possible to create groups with the same names;
– Mailbox, new: you can now attach files;

IMPORTANT: Since we also introduce numerous plugin updates you should _apply platform update before installing plugin updates_. This is important because otherwise it can make your site temporarily broken.

Thanks for creating with us!

Emil Sarnogoev
Oxwall community software

UPDATE: We had to make an urgent rebuild down the road because apparently a significant new bug slipped through our hands in the first time. So “1.0 stable” wasn’t all that stable after all. 🙂 Meet 1.0.1!

Forum, Facebook connect, Contact importer, Ning importer now FREE

We gave a hard look to the existing prices of our plugins in the Oxwall Store and decided to set free all those that were paid: forum, Facebook connect, contact importer, and Ning member import.

IMPORTANT: You need to have at least 1.0 beta 4 to install these plugins. Do not attempt to do that on earlier releases.

At this point it makes sense for us to start gaining popularity for Oxwall software not focus on short-term monetization. Thus we plan to keep all essential functions free. This is not to say we will discourage third parties from making money on plugins and themes, it’s just that we don’t want to pursue aggressive pricing strategies. After all, this is what open source is about.

Those of you who purchased any of these plugins within one month may contact us to arrange a refund or to put those funds on Oxwall Store balance.

Enjoy!

Paid membership support, PayPal, CCBill

There are three new plugins available in Oxwall Store: Paid membership, PayPal, CCBill. You can now charge your users for extra features and permissions on your site.

How it works

Basically, ‘Paid Membership’ plugin allows to create membership levels on top of user roles. It will accept payments from users on subscription page and automatically handle start and expiration of premium memberships as well as recurring charges and renewals. Every membership level can also have different period/price plans so you can give discounts on longer subscriptions. PayPal and CCBill plugins come as payment gateways for the membership plugin.

Important: these plugins will only work on Oxwall beta 4. Don’t try to install them on earlier versions.

VERY important: No, I mean really, folks. Only Beta 4!

Feel free to play a little bit with those plugins. Take your time to configure them properly. Questions can be asked in Oxwall support forum.

Enjoy!