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!

Oxwall 1.0 RC2 + plugin updates

Here’s a nice new release from the Oxwall headquarters – Oxwall 1.0 RC2. This is a maintenance release as we head towards 1.0 stable.

IMPORTANT: UPDATE PLATFORM CORE BEFORE UPDATING ANY PLUGINS!

We discovered a minor problem that affected all previous releases. You need to update platform first, otherwise you may end up with various plugin problems or a _fully broken_ site.

This is the list of changes (although not complete):

OXWALL CORE

Admin area:
– Admin can now manually change “unverified” user email status to verified.
– Page edit, “back” button fixed.
– Page add, spaces are no more allowed in URL.
– Profile question description edit fixed.

Frontend:
– “Autosuggest” input now has better response.
– Mailbox icon in avatar widget now correctly checks if mailbox plugin is present.
– User lists now respect display name preference.

PLUGINS

Forum:
– Quoted location fixed in post input.

Blogs:
– “Browse by tag” sorting fixed.
– “Editing blog post” now doesn’t change its date.
– Text formatting while writing text is now more convenient.

Advertisement:
– Fixed display for single country selection.

Blogs, Forum, Photo, Video, Links:
– ‘View’ permissions now support additional pages, like view latest, browse by tags, albums, etc.

When you do actually perform all updates and take your time to enjoy your new, ever-strong community site, do something good while you’re at it – kiss your wife, go play with kids in the park, plant a tree, quit smoking, say “sorry” to someone, or call the old friend you almost forgot about.

*UPDATE*: Autoupdates will be open on Monday. If you want to upgrade right now, go for manual update.

Oxwall 1.0 beta 5

W00t! Meet Oxwall 1.0 beta 5. It contains:

– Minor bugfixes;
– Proper data export support;
– Proper user password recovery mechanism.

If you have beta 4 feel free to auto-update to beta 5 from your admin area. If are running an earlier install you will need to perform manual update.

IMPORTANT: Please update platform core first (to 1.0 beta 5) before updating _any_ plugins. Otherwise you may end up with a broken site.

We are heading to RC and stable release. At this point we support all plugin and core updates so your data should be fine if you use Oxwall at this time for a live website.

Enjoy!

Oxwall 1.0 beta 4!

Yes, it’s been quite some time after beta 3 release. Now meet the shining beta 4!

IMPORTANT: Beta 4 requires manual update. Auto-update will not work this time. Please read how to update Oxwall manually.

IMPORTANT: A lot of plugins are also updated to take advantage of the new platform. Make sure you update the platform before you update plugins, otherwise you can end up with a broken install.

What’s special about beta 4? Frankly saying we’ve been aggressively adding features to the core through all these betas and these releases could easily be tagged as 1.0, 1.1, 1.2… We’ll behave now and freeze features in beta 4 until the 1.0 stable release.

Bugs fixed:

– Full-size images uploaded to blogs and forum with media panel;
– user input in comments;

New features:

– Suport for data import/export.
– New plugin handling framework that allows to make important notifications in admin area about required configuration.
– More robust auto-update framework that will make it possible to update core starting from beta 4.
– Forum, Facebook connect and groups in the main package. Since several plugins became free we threw a couple of those in the main distro.

Are you still here, reading? Go download like there’s no tomorrow! Beta 4 is the best invention on this damn planet since toilet flush!

Oxwall community software 1.0 beta 3

Beta 2 and Beta 3 come into a bar… Ok ok, we’ll behave. Oxwall 1.0 beta 3 is available for download.

Please be aware that we don’t support automatic upgrades from beta 2 to beta 3 until we release upgrade toolkit together with version 1.0 stable. So if you have a running site on beta 2 and want to keep it alive please wait until then.

Apart from many minor fixes we added server requirements check to the installation wizard which should help clear up and eliminate 60 to 70% of problem reports that people submit in the forum.

Enjoy our work as much as we do!

Meet Oxwall software

We are happy to announce the initial release of Oxwall – free open source community software. Version 1.0 beta is available now. Feel free to use it for your own social networking websites, fan-clubs, family sites, and other community and collaboration projects.

One special thing about this release is that it’s not a regular open source 1.0 beta release. In other cases you get a heap of source code with very rough basic functions not going beyond the barely viable product. Often even less.

Of course Oxwall is not mature either – we release version 1.0 beta for a reason. But this same software has been tested on more than 12,000 websites since January on WackWall (our hosted version of Oxwall software).

Our original strategy was to test software on a lot of live sites with real communities and real targets but to have development and deployment as streamlined as possible. This allowed us to roll out new features and bug-fixes at a pace that our WackWall customers have been enjoying so much and giving us credit for. This package has come a long way before being released as it is now.

There’s also one big thing about this release: it supports platform and plugin updates within admin panel. You just click buttons, enter your FTP details and it should do the rest. All subsequent releases will support smooth updates so theoretically you can start your community without fear of incompatible future software updates. I said theoretically because it’s beta, don’t forget! 🙂

Enjoy and welcome onboard!