Oxwall Store: important improvements

Hello there Oxwallers,

Our community grows. It’s exciting to see this growth since it assures that our work is important, and warrants that Oxwall is here to stay. With user growth some aspects of the community work also need to evolve, and today it’s the Oxwall Store that is affected.

We just released some small and big improvements that I want to introduce. They are based on developers’, designers’ and users’ feedback, and also on our own careful examination of the usage patterns. Let’s look in detail:

My purchases:

  • Item list is now divided into Plugins and Themes;
  • Search by item name (new);
  • Add review for purchased items right there (new).

My items:

  • Item list is now divided into Plugins and Themes;
  • Search by license key and buyer’s username.

Item listing improvements:

  • Oxwall Store now supports version compatibility between items and the platform. From now on every item should state platform versions that it supports, and users will see it;
  • Mandatory “Terms of Use” field for items (new);
  • Optional “ReadMe” field for items (new).

Suspended items:

  • Suspended items are now shown to license holders in “My Items”;
  • “Item suspended” page is shown to all but license holders;
  • Suspended items can’t be deleted by owners but will be deleted in 4 months unless activated by Store moderators.

Reviews:

  • Now authors can not only modify but also delete their reviews.

Apart from these changes there are many tiny things changed to help developers better manage their items.

Policy updates

Last but not least, we have updated Oxwall Store Terms of Use, and added Store Item Policy and Item Review Policy. Everybody is encouraged to actually read this document, it’s written by humans for humans in the most comprehensive way possible.

Enjoy the updated Oxwall Store and leave your feedback! We are always listening. Also, there’s a special Store-related forum, so developers can find additional technical info and questions.

Happy New Year: Ten Coolest Plugins of 2013

Happy coming New Year, dear friends! We here at Oxwall Foundation are excited about the coming year and the opportunities ahead. 2014 is going to be a year of big announcements! As we are wrapping up 2013, let us take a look at the list of 10 interesting plugins developed this year.

1. USER HINT

This free plugin gives you a visual hint for user’s profile. Has a very flexible configuration page with live preview and lot of customization options.
Screenshot from 2013-12-25 11:20:00

 

2. GOOGLE MAPS LOCATION

Today users prefer seeing to reading. Visuals are always loved. This plugin displays the location information added by users to their profiles. Great tool for travel or international communities.
Screenshot from 2013-12-25 11:21:45

 

3. MYTAGS

Here is one of the most long-awaited Oxwall plugins — user tagging! Today “@” user tagging functionality is not only Twitter’s feature, it is adopted by Facebook and Instagram as well.  Every website aiming to keep up with tech updates should have this very necessary feature.
Screenshot from 2013-12-27 11:31:33

 

4. COOL CKEDITOR

Oxwall editor with a very wide editing abilities, includes MSN Smiley Pack to give more emotion to your words.
Screenshot from 2013-12-25 11:27:00

 

5. CATALOG

This plugin allows creation of any type of catalog with custom searchable fields, prices, photos and google maps.
Screenshot from 2013-12-18 15:25:26

 

6. PHOTO TAGS

It’s a necessary plugin for social networking site owners. It allows instant tagging of users or objects on photos.
Screenshot from 2013-12-18 15:40:59

 

7.  INSTANT CHAT WITH VIDEO SUPPORT

Better see a real smile of your friend than a sign of smile, right? Made for easier communication real-time video chat.

Screenshot from 2013-12-25 11:31:19

 

8. COMPOSE MESSAGE + GROUPS AND EVENTS MASS MAILING

Make composing and sending a message to multiple users at once possible to your users. Great to use when inviting to events.
Screenshot from 2013-12-18 16:21:04

 

9.  PHOTO VIEWER LIKE FACEBOOK, G+

Photo viewer plugin which inherits versatility and friendly interface of Facebook and Google Plus’s photo viewer.
Screenshot from 2013-12-25 11:33:06

 

 10. LOGIN AS USER

Plugin allows site administrator and site moderators to login with other users credentials with just one click. This allows to edit profile details, read internal messages, customize profile an so on.
Screenshot from 2013-12-25 11:36:43

Five New Free Themes For Oxwall

Remember the Darklets social networking template released a couple of weeks ago? It proved quite popular with the Oxwall crowd due to it’s universal appeal and accessibility. But that was only a teaser, since we are ready to roll out another batch of five brand-new free professional themes! What a great way to start the week, don’t you think? Take a look at these samples:

Crayon

Crayon Theme for Oxwall

City

City Theme for Oxwall

Stars

Stars Theme for Oxwall

Silent

Silent Theme for Oxwall

Pastel

Pastel Theme for Oxwall

This line of themes can be applied to a variety of niches, representing a particular mood of a given online community. All five templates are already available through Oxwall Store; enjoy them and let us know what you think in the comments bellow. In the meantime, we are happy to tell you that more regular updates for our collection are planned, and we are already hard at work creating new themes for future releases.

Paid items in the Oxwall Store: price vs quality

We have a forum user who touched the topic that we are very sensitive about, so in the process of writing the reply I understood we should make our position clear to everyone.

Here’s the original topic: http://www.oxwall.org/forum/topic/6787

Here’s my reply:


Ebony,

You are right. Oxwall needs more free plugins and themes. The long-term project success is based on building enough of a product of superior quality that will enable users run their projects on Oxwall.

The project needs exactly this type of developers and designers — those working for the idea of giving away people excellent software and seeing what happens. That’s how an open source project works before gaining critical mass. Only then people will use software for viable community projects and more people will learn about Oxwall and the demand in software will increase.

But.

All of this is only possible if the resulting product quality is good. Meanwhile, the best developers and designers know the price of their time and only spend it accordingly.

We think the best scenario for Oxwall is to have A LOT of free items and some excellent paid items. So, solving the problem here is not to make bad plugins cheaper but to develop very good plugins and charge what’s reasonable. As for bad plugins, we are on a mission to not let them in and to push them out. If you buy an unsatisftory plugin on the Oxwall Store, give it low rating. Enough low rates will remove the item from the listings.

Too bad, not many of current developers understand that there’s no point in creating a heap of cheap items. Impulse purchases do not create trust and long-term value. Developers and designers should create less items and focus on their quality. It’s just a better business model.

In the end of the day, if there’s excellent free software with necessary third party items of high quality, the end user will not care that much about their price. If price is their only factor of choice, they are not really Oxwall’s target audience. I’ve never seen viable online community projects from people who value the price of software plugins more than their time and their users’ experience. Open source is not about the $0 price tag. It’s about accessibility, options, and trust.

Our position regarding the third party items in the Oxwall Store:

  • We will encourage more free items;
  • No matter free or paid, they will have to be of good quality;
  • We choose “less but better” strategy for the Oxwall Store;
  • We do not plan to drive the item prices down. Open market will decide.

Increasingly, it will be possible to find more plugins outside the Oxwall Store. This is fine, it’s open source after all. It’s just that we plan to maintain the high standard on the official resource for the mainstream users.

Thanks,
Emil

Oxwall Store Revamped

General Thoughts

The essential changes to the Oxwall Store that we’ve talked about for some time now are finally here. As the Store experienced the increased activity, we couldn’t help but notice the system becoming cluttered. Something had to be done, and thus we undertook the task of introducing some order and organization within the project. It is our belief that Oxwall Store should be a simple and comprehensible place. Here’s what we did to achieve that.

Oxwall Store Revamped

Different Listings

Prior to the change, Oxwall Store featured one single listing of all plugins created for the platform. Needless to say, that wasn’t really convenient or efficient. Instead, we’ve come up with a division into four different listing types.

Oxwall Store Revamped

  • Featured

Items found here will be carefully selected by members of the Oxwall Foundation, as most beneficial for the entire community.

  • Most Popular

The section will show the end-user what the community thinks are the best themes and plugins. The popularity of items here will be measured by the combined score of top ratings, most downloads, etc.

  • Top FREE

Most popular free items will end up in this category.

  • Latest

This is self-explanatory – all the latest items will be automatically placed here.

Reviews

Oxwall Store RevampedReviews are now comprised of three sections – title, short user opinion of the item, and the score (with the maximum of five stars). Also, all reviews can now be rated as helpful by other users. Paid items will be open for reviews only upon purchase. In addition, all submitted reviews will be pre-moderated by the Oxwall Team. Ain’t the democracy a great thing? 😉

Oxwall Store Revamped

Note that all support questions will be separated from the item score, and could be addressed or reported only on the forum.

Oxwall Store Revamped

While converting to the new system we have moved all comments about the item to a separate section of the item’s forum called Support Questions. It is no longer possible to leave simple comments on the item’s page. The scores (without feedback) have been saved as well. So if you browse the Store and see a score without any actual reviews around, that can mean only one thing – this score was converted from submissions prior to the introduced change.

More Items Widget

Oxwall Store RevampedWe’ve added a new widget to item pages, called ‘More plugins/themes from this author.’ It will show other items the user has added to the Store, which is a very convenient tool for promoting specific store items through the ones already achieved popularity. The item list for the widget is compiled by the user through the item edit page.

Minor Stuff

We have also revamped item pages themselves, to allow visitors immediaely see all the necessary information and scores left by other users.

The presentation of each item in the overall listing was made more detailed and informative.

Traditionally, we’ve fixed some minor system bugs.

Conclusion

We hope you will like this latest improvement of Oxwall Store. In our opinion the changes will benefit everyone, including visitors looking for new plugins, and developers displaying their creative output. Check out our progress and tell us what you think. Enjoy!

 

 

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.

 

 

Oxwall Store Update

We have a new batch of fixes and improvements for the Oxwall Store, check them out:

Improvements

  •  You can now view all of your Store Items on a separate ‘My Items’ tab;

  • You can now see who and when bought licenses for each of your items;
  • You can now revoke licenses for any sold item or theme (useful for when a license is abused);

  • You can now reset the License IP for any bought item (necessary when the IP of a site with the installed item has changed);

Fixes

  • The last file on the list under Item’s Downloads can no longer be unchecked as Main;
  • Main Download option completely revamped under Item’s Download;
  • PayPal account details area is clearer defined while selecting payment method;

 

Oxwall Store Increased Quality Control

Dear friends,

We are happy to report that Oxwall Store is coming along quite nicely, judging by the steadily growing volume of new items and sales. Unfortunately, quantity does not always translate to quality, and like everyone, we notice the appearance of mediocre-to-poor submissions.

This is not what we had in mind initially. We are also sure most Oxwall admins will agree that Oxwall Store should not become another online collection of second-rate mods of existing plugins and themes.

Oxwall Foundation always strove for improved quality for the end user and we anticipate the community will follow our lead. We all still have a long way to go to reach the desired level of excellence, but with small steps in the right direction we can do it.

One of such steps will be the introduction of stricter quality control for Oxwall Store submissions, in accordance with our Terms of Use. We hope everyone understands that this decision will benefit the project in the long run. Let’s make Oxwall better together.

Oxwall Store Improved

We’ve got a couple more news we can push out before the holidays.

First of all, don’t forget to check out the updated Development Roadmap to see what to expect from our upcoming release. But while the team is busy with that, we decided to further tweak the Oxwall Store, seeing its growing significance and demand.

The changes are both, cosmetic and functional, streamlining and simplifying the Store’s presentation. We intend to introduce a more significant overhaul to the Oxwall Store in the future, but for now the changes include the following:

  • Store Search added;
  • Themes and Plugins separated into different categories;
  • Items and Listing Items display changed;
  • Item Lists simplified;