Nominate Oxwall for People’s Choice CMS Awards

Posted on August 4, 2014 by Emil

Hi guys!

We hope you are enjoying the summer (as well as our latest release), and have some free time on your hands. Feel like giving us a small pat on the back for all the work we put into the project? Here’s your chance.

The nominations for the annual People’s Choice CMS Awards are open until August 15, and we need a little help from you to get to the finals. We already claimed the accolades for Best Social Network Solution in the past, and it’d be nice to repeat that.

So here’s where you come in –

Go to People’s Choice CMS Awards nomination form;
Enter your name and email;
Enter “Oxwall” as the product name;
Tick off the ~~“Best Social Networking Solution”~~ “Best Free PHP CMS” and “Best Open Source PHP CMS” categories;
Give an example of when you’ve used Oxwall or list URLs of sites you’ve created with it.

And that’s it. The process is free and takes only a couple of minutes, but it gives us an enormous confidence boost, confirming that we are moving in the right direction.

Thanks,
Emil
Oxwall Foundation

Oxwall 1.7 release

Posted on July 8, 2014 by Emil

Today is July 8, and as promised, Oxwall 1.7 sees the light of the day. This is another big milestone for the product: an important platform update, plus completely redesigned photos and messages.

Oxwall 1.7 is available for download immediately. All details about this release can be found here.

Backup!

If you are running Oxwall of any previous version, you are encouraged to wait until the auto-update prompt appears in your admin area (that make take up to 24 hours). Before you attempt it, make sure to:

Back up your website. Seriously, folks, better safe than sorry;
Install all available plugin updates right after the platform update completes;
Install theme update right after the platform update completes.

If you don’t want to perform the update yourself, our friends from Skalfa can do it for you. Also, check other companies specializing in Oxwall support.

Theme support

With this release we drop support for the following themes maintained by Oxwall Foundation:

Grunge
Basic
City
Green
Pastel
Graphite
Graphite+
Club
Rainy
Spring
Stars
Silent

If you use one of these themes, please be aware that they are not getting updated to Oxwall 1.7. Feel free to choose another theme in the Oxwall Store (check 1.7 compatibility), or apply the changes by yourself if you have the skills. The reason for this decision is simple: focus. In order to concentrate on iterating critical product components, we have to cut off non-core ones.

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Have fun and tell us how you like the new Oxwall. We hope to impress you once again, not less than we do with every release.

Emil & the Oxwall team.

Oxwall 1.7 on July 8, beta today

Posted on June 17, 2014 by Emil

Finally, we have definite release date for the next version. Oxwall 1.7 will be out on July 8, with developer beta available today.

As you know, we first planned to have 1.6.1 release with a lot of improvements and fixes. However, a few distinct platform changes creeped in, so this release is shaping up more important than just a new build, and we call it minor version advance, namely Oxwall 1.7.

Important changes

Attention, developers, designers, and admins! Apart from some updated plugins, there are platform changes that require your attention:

New option to assign specific user roles for each account type;
New option to assign separate list of profile questions for each account type;
Modified user permission check (developers, you need to adapt your plugins!);
Attachments for all media (messages, forums, comments, etc) are redesigned (designers, you may need to adapt your themes!);
Comment box redesigned (designers, you may need to adapt your themes!);

For all changes see complete changelog.

Apart from that there are two major advancements to highlight:

Complete photo redesign

We’ve been working on the new photo plugin for the last 6 months. Hopefully, it works better than the current one, so your community enjoys easier and more effective photo sharing facilities:

Among the most notable features are:

New advanced bulk photo upload;
New photo list view;
New photo album view;
Optimized photo preview (info and comments in sidebar);
Search by keywords, users, hashtags;
Full-screen slideshow;
Photos posted to newsfeed are now collected in a photo album.

There are a lot of hidden gems in this one, so we’ll leave them for you to discover when Oxwall 1.7 gets released to the public.

Mailbox + Chat = Messages: complete redesign + mobile version support

The new Messages plugin comes to replace the two old plugins: Instant Messenger and Mailbox. When you install the new plugin, it will migrate the data from the Mailbox and deactivate it automatically.

What’s in it?

Chat only mode, mail only mode, or both;
Additional on-page interface for chat with saved history;
Now possible to send a message from mailbox to any recipient;
Revamped attachments for both chat and mail;
Inline images and video in chat;
Chat and mail is now also in Oxwall mobile browser version.

We hope you will appreciate the interconnectedness and easiness of the new way of sending messages in Oxwall.

This plugin is deeper than a few screenshots could show, so we invite you to explore its capabilities.

Developer beta

It’s available for download now. If you signed up for beta testing, you will be able to obtain it from the private beta release forum. Check it out.

If you are a developer or a designer but haven’t signed up for it yet, you are recommended to do that right away. There’s a high chance that you need to update your work to make it compatible with Oxwall 1.7. Developer’s guide to the platform changes is packed with the beta.

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We are eager to send the new bulk of awesomeness your way. July 8 is the day it hits the ground, together with the updated versions of plugins by 3rd party developers.

All hail Oxwall!

Emil & the Oxwall team

Dev Diary, April 30, 2014

Posted on April 30, 2014 by alina

Here we are again with our Dev Diary series. This time we want to let you know about the upcoming changes in internal communication tools in Oxwall.

As you know, there are two plugins now, Mailbox and Chat. They are independent, so you can only communicate in real-time chat or using mailbox (that mimicks email). There are several important issues with that though, namely:

Messaging communication keeps getting transformed. There’s a reason why the border between email and instant messaging blurred so much, and we are not fully content with any one of these.
People don’t necessarily want to remember where the talk happened. It’s just convenient to have everything in one place with ability to search.
Sometimes it’s really much more convenient to keep your chat going in a focused, standard page interface, than to type and read in that small chat window; or to have back-and-forth email followup’s in bite-sized messages.

Fundamentally, while a social website is a complex system, sending a message is a trivial, casual, frequent operation. It means, there have to be different ways to send, receive, and respond to messages, all suitable for context and task at hand.

But then, communication is different. While casual messaging is sufficient for some websites, other may really benefit from a more formal, email-style approach. Since Oxwall websites are used for different purposes, we have to support both paradigms and make them work nicely together, if required.

With all this in mind, we decided to do the following:
– Make a unified Messages plugin that will incorporate functionality of both Mailbox and Chat plugins;
– Allow to enable either of those, or both at once;
– Have chats and “emails” in one interface with search (retaining chat and contact list windows, of course);
– Provide granular (if excessive) permission settings for every action in mailbox and chat.

The new Messages plugin will be available as the successor of the two current plugins with the platform 1.6.1 release. We hope communication in Oxwall will become much more efficient now. And of course, we are ready to iterate on your feedback.

Thank you for being such a fantastic community!

Dev Diary, February 21, 2014

Posted on February 21, 2014 by alina

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.)

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.

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?

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.

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.

Dev Diary, February 6, 2014

Posted on February 6, 2014 by alina

We know that as a rule our posts tend to be surprise announcements of releases, despite the fact that many community members are keen on learning what us, Oxwall guys, are actually up to in the times between updates. Well, recently we’ve come to think that it’s a pretty good idea to let you in on all the fun we have inside, namely, our work process and development progress. Ready? Here we go.

We understand that there are still many elements within Oxwall software that can be improved. Let’s take a look at one such area, which will likely make it to the next iteration – the functionality extension of user roles and account types.

The problem here is the lack of option for admins to assign an individual user role per individual account type during new member registration. At the moment all new site members get the same user role, unless admins set said roles manually, which significantly complicates their work on community-driven sites. Say, you have a literature-driven community with writers and readers. These roles are obviously different for members, as writers write posts, while readers can comment or grade them. Putting an option in place for admins to assign individual user roles during registration will make their lives much easier.

Now, there are also a couple of related issues with account types. The interface is somewhat difficult to grasp, and there is also the fact that one question can be assigned per one account type only. Both of these will be tackled, and in the result the interface will become significantly more user-friendly, while single profile questions will be allowed to be assigned per multiple account types simultaneously.
Hopefully this gives you a bit of insight on the things that keep us occupied. There’s a lot of stuff we have to share with you, so keep reading our blog for more info on our adventures in development.

Love,
Oxwall Team.

Moving forward

Posted on January 23, 2014 by alina

Hi all. With the successful release of Oxwall 1.6 we wanted to express our appreciation for your passion, assistance, valuable feedback, and patience. All we aim for is to give you the best product, while remaining committed to the constant improvement.

It is no secret to anyone that mobile is the future. Thus it’s quite satisfying for us to finally make the first all-important step in this direction, and give you the long-awaited mobile platform. This is just the beginning, with plenty of new features forthcoming, in addition to all kinds of mods for the already present ones.

Excited and full of energy, we are moving on with our other development plans. Check out our Roadmap. It’s gonna be cool, so make sure to stay tuned! Once again, thank you!

Oxwall 1.6 released

Posted on January 8, 2014 by Emil

Today is January 8, and somehow this date is important… Oh yeah, today Oxwall 1.6 is getting unleashed into the wild.

Oxwall 1.6 is available for download immediately. All details about this release can be found here.

Important: If you are running Oxwall of any previous version, you are encouraged to wait until the auto-update prompt appears in your admin area. Before you attempt it, make sure to:

Back up your website. Seriously, folks, better safe than sorry;
Install all available plugin updates right after the platform update completes;
Install a theme update right after the platform update completes.

If you don’t want to perform the update yourself, our friends from Skalfa can do it for you. Also, check other companies specializing in Oxwall support.

Everybody, have fun!

Emil & the Oxwall team.

Happy New Year: Ten Coolest Plugins of 2013

Posted on December 30, 2013 by alina

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.

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.

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.

4. COOL CKEDITOR

Oxwall editor with a very wide editing abilities, includes MSN Smiley Pack to give more emotion to your words.

5. CATALOG

This plugin allows creation of any type of catalog with custom searchable fields, prices, photos and google maps.

6. PHOTO TAGS

It’s a necessary plugin for social networking site owners. It allows instant tagging of users or objects on photos.

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.

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.

9. PHOTO VIEWER LIKE FACEBOOK, G+

Photo viewer plugin which inherits versatility and friendly interface of Facebook and Google Plus’s photo viewer.

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.

Oxwall 1.6 goes live January 8, beta today

Posted on November 29, 2013 by Emil

Oxwall community is a patient bunch; That’s a hard fact, which we really appreciate, and have something to show you in return. Oxwall 1.6 has finally taken shape for a beta release, and I’m glad to give you a sneak peek of what our team has built.

New Theme: München

Per our tradition, we highlight every major release with a brand new theme. This time it’s a shoutout to the fine town of München:

Theme Auto-update

One important thing to note is that now themes can also be auto-updated, just like plugins. It will definitely make life easier for designers and all users.

Social Share Plugin

We decided to make our own integrated social sharing solution that third party plugins may also utilize. It doesn’t place sharing buttons on every page, instead locating them exactly where you need – right near the content in question.

Mobile Browser Version

That’s right, Oxwall is now mobile-friendly. Yay! First of all, this is neither a responsive theme, nor a hack to “mobilize” content. This is a completely reimagined product for phone screens (that’s one of the main reason why it took so long to develop it), and it’s optimized for performance in major mobile browsers available today:

In this roll-out we are starting with basic features and several native plugins that show the direction for what Oxwall mobile browsing experience is going to be. We can’t wait to hand it over to the community. You can also expect other native and third party plugins to have their mobile executions ready soon.

Beta and Release

We are entering public beta stage, making Oxwall 1.6 Beta 1 available today.

If you are an approved beta-tester, join us at the Beta forum. We start accepting feedback immediately.
If you are a plugin developer / theme designer / translator, then you have work to do right now. We urge you to apply for beta-tester status and start making your goods 1.6-compatible.

On January 8, upon the completion of public beta period, the upgrade will be available for all the Oxwall websites out there, as always, right from the admin area.

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Oxwall 1.6 is a huge milestone in the product lifecycle, since it finally opens up the new platform for plugins, namely mobile. In a sense, this is more important than anything we’ve done in the last couple of years. Now that mobile context is enabled, other developers can pick it up, and continue their work along with us. Let’s see how this turns out.

This has been a long and arduous year for us, finally bringing the team to the final stages of hard work during this holiday season. January 8 can’t get here soon enough.

Big and exciting things come to Oxwall, so stay tuned and we’ll surprise you. I promise.

Thank you for creating with us!
Emil & the entire Oxwall team.