Category Archives: Release

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.

Oxwall 1.2.3

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Well, it looks like three’s the charm, so get ready for another quick update.

This time we have fixed several critical errors:

  • WYSIWYG Java script glitches in Floatboxes
  • Bugs in RSS feed
  • Navigation problems (linked to hidden components)
  • Several general Mailbox issues

As always, be sure to follow instructions during the update!

Oxwall 1.2.2

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Dear Oxwall users,

We are releasing the 1.2.2 version of our software to address several reported issues.

Here’s what have been fixed:

  • Event Invitation Button sometimes missing
  • Event Invitations not disappearing after an Event has begun
  • Big images messing up Mailbox Layout after upload
  • Forum Customization not being available
  • Several general layout problems
  • View Permission issues during the creation of custom pages
  • Incorrect Video Codes cut-offs
  • Improper spacing between avatars and ‘View More’ in Newsfeed
  • Missing Values disappearing in feeds
  • Unnecessary Line Wrappings in Blogs
  • Improper calculation of ready Values for Language Keys

Important Note:

Please don’t forget to update your themes for the fix to work properly.

Oxwall 1.2 Release

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(Dear users, remember to follow the UPDATE INSTRUCTIONS BELLOW precisely (even with autoupdate)!

Oxwall Foundation is proud to announce the long-awaited Update to 1.2.

We consider this a major step forward, as both admins and users will see the results of the Update across the entire platform.

You might already know that this release brings you an Advanced Photo Upload, More Privacy Options, an Enhanced Newsfeed, and Improved Text Input. (For more details on these features please refer to the wonderful post by Oxwall Founder Emil). Alternatively, you can read on for a point-by-point explanation of the changes we made to the software.

CORE CHANGES

  • Enhanced Text Input

Text Input

  • My Preferences now include subscription options for Mass Mailing
  • Mass Mailing now sent only to active (non-suspended) users
  • New option to create a customizable Welcome Letter
  • Javascript Code now available throughout the site for web statistics, special effects, and other purposes
  • Favicon change in page settings
  • New option to include Avatar Upload and ‘Terms of Use’ checkbox to Registration

NEW PRIVACY PLUGIN
Privacy

Download and install this new plugin from Oxwall Store (but only after you upgrade the platform to 1.2). After the Privacy Plugin is activated in the Admin Area, network members will have several options for setting up their profile and content privacy. All other plugins across the platform will be affected correspondingly.

TWO NEW THEMES

 

          

‘Spring’                                                                                 ‘Grunge’

IMPROVED FEATURES

Advanced Photo Uploader

  • Upload up to 100 photos at once
  • Rotate and auto re-size
  • Add tags and descriptions

Newsfeed

  • Now corresponds to privacy options
  • Improved news item relevancy system (promotes only member-related news items)
  • Improved news item dynamics (shows only recent actions related to news items grouped, as opposed to several news items for every similar action)
  • The long awaited Newsfeed content customization options for admins

Instant Chat

  • Sound notifications for messages
  • ‘Friends Only’ or ‘View All’ modes

Misc

  • Mailbox captchas for sending bulk messages
  • Options to turn off file attachments and set allowed file sizes
  • Newsfeed birthday notifications
  • Various minor bug fixes
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INSTRUCTIONS

Download

The new shiny Oxwall 1.2 in downloads section: www.oxwall.org/download

Update: File Permissions

IMPORTANT: There’s an old permissions problem that can affect your update process. Before you attempt to update your site (either manually or automatically) you need to set full permissions recursively on your ow_static folder. For example in Linux you need to execute chmod -R 777 ow_static command. If you work with an ftp manager here’s an article to help you.

Autoupdate

IMPORTANT:  Upgrade to Oxwall 1.2 before upgrading any plugins! Seriously, you don’t need to end up with a broken website. Upgrading is easy, just hit that button in the admin area. After that feel free to update and install all other plugins. Even if after platform update your site seems to be broken, keep updating plugins. You should be fine in the end.

Manual update

If you want  to update manually, grab the scripts in downloads sections as well.

 

Themes

Keep in mind, themes need to be updated too. ‘Graphite’ and ‘Club’ will be auto-updated since they are in the package but other themes require your attention. Download your updated theme from the Store. If you made any changes in files, you will have to merge them with the new ones since they contain important fixes and additions. If you didn’t change anything in files directly but in admin area only, feel free to overwrite the theme folder ow_themes/your-theme

 

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Oxwall Foundation is truly grateful to the entire community for its support and understanding during the prolonged waiting cycle, as well as assistance and feedback during the actual development. We are really proud of our work and hope that our efforts will improve your Oxwall experience even further.

 

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*UPDATE*: To kill some minor bugs that aren’t showstoppers (but are annoying to know about) we’ve just pushed 1.2.1 update. Apply it with all above instructions. If you already have 1.2 working just wait for autoupdate to popup and press it with no hesitation!

Oxwall 1.1.1 – maintenance release

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We just packed up Oxwall 1.1.1 – maintenance release that fixes one significant bug in user input. If you paste text with a right-click -> Paste, an empty textarea would not receive the buffer contents.

We advise you to upgrade since your users could potentially face this issue even if nobody reported this before. Just click the “auto-update” button when it appears in your admin area.

Have a nice Oxwall day!

Emil


Oxwall 1.1 + new plugins

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Boy look what we’ve got here! Oxwall 1.1 + plugin updates + new plugins + new themes — it’s like Christmas came early!

What’s new:

CORE:
- Jquery 1.5
- Cron run check and notification
- Authorization mechanism enhancements (affects all plugins!)
- Avatar display change, requires new decorator use (affects all plugins!)
- User console refactored for adding elements by plugins
- Language handling refactored to enable plugins to add global language keys
- User and config tables cache enabled for better performance
- Platform version in admin dashboard
- URL highlighting for all user content for easy clicking (finally!)
- SEO-oriented meta page information in all plugins to allow better and deeper indexing of your site by search engines. If you have incoming links to your site that should do great job for its promotion.
- Avatar labels for particular user roles. You can have specific user roles like “admin”, “staff”, or even “pro” or “gold”, so users can show them off on avatars. Configure user roles and color-code avatar labels on your community!
- Display type disabled for index page comment wall
- Comment form now has posting user’s avatar
- User list selection for plugins’ needs optimized
- Suspended users can now edit their profiles
- Multiple ‘untranslatable’ spots eliminated
- Custom pages access issues solved

… and more small enhancements including killing pet peeves constantly reported on support boards. Too much to list here so we let you discover and enjoy those one by one. :)

NEW PLUGINS

Virtual gifts:

- User can send each other public and private virtual gifts with optional personal messages in them.
- Gifts can be customized and divided into categories.

User credits:
- User credits can be purchased through payment gateways (such as PayPal), earned by activity on site, and spent on things like virtual gifts.
- Complete customization;

NEW THEMES

‘Club‘ and ‘Rainy‘ themes. Enjoy.

EXISTING PLUGINS ENHANCEMENTS

Newsfeed:
- ‘View more’ without page refresh
- Feed context highlight: groups, profiles
- Unlike;
- Comments and Likes expand/collapse
- Optional status update on Index page
- Profile comment wall support

Links:
- Voting interface enhancement

Events:
- On-site event invitation notifications
- Past events list
- An event is now still ongoing until the end time
- Chronology problems in event widgets corrected
- Event authorship problem substitution when edited by moderator is solved
- Event icon is now optional
- Inactive ‘invite’ button problem solved

Friends:

- Multiple friend requests problem solved
- Suspended users no longer show up in friends lists

DISCONTINUED PLUGINS

‘Last Activity’ and ‘Status Updates’ plugins are now discontinued and no longer will be updated. They are replaced by Newsfeed.

IMPORTANT!

Those impatient can download the new release, new plugins, new themes, and updates manually for now. Tomorrow we are unleashing auto-update upon you so you will be able to update right from the admin panel.

PLEASE UPDATE PLATFORM CORE FIRST. Only after that you can update everything else and install new plugins. PLEASE UPDATE THEMES MANUALLY AS WELL – they contain important additions and corrections.

Thanks for creating with us!


Oxwall 1.0 stable + plugin updates!

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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