Category Archives: Community

Oxwall Policy Changes and Oxwall Club

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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 Use, Oxwall 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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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