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Move to new server completed successfully
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| (Wednesday, 23 July 2008) Written by Beat |
| You may have wondered what happened with me in the forums in last 10 days...
Well, we have been preparing a smooth move of Joomlapolis.com to new servers !
We have now moved successfully Joomlapolis on new dedicated servers almost without any interruption of service last Sunday noon.
We would like to thank very much our hosting sponsor of last 2 years, Kreativmedia, for the managed dedicated server hosting they offered us up to now.
As this project grows fast (155'000+ registered users so far, wow !), and with upcoming release of CB 1.2 stable and of other CB plugins, it was time to plan for a larger server which still fits within the project's budget, but will be able to handle smoothly the additional load that can be expected.
In next days we will have completely finished fine-tuning the new server, and will be back full-speed to core CB and plugins tasks.
We are really extremely thrilled by how well the new servers are performing, and we are now very confident that they will be able to serve the community really fast, securely and reliably. There is now plenty of margin in CPU power, memory and bandwidth
Many thanks goes to all those who helped in the forums and to Nick who managed the forums while we were preparing our new servers. Special thanks go also to those who helped us setup the new server.
More details will follow later when we have catched up with our other tasks.
Please don't hesitate to use the website's contact form to report me anything which wouldn't work as expected on this website. |
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Tests, fixes, tests, fixes, tests....CB 1.2 RC2 beta 3 and paid subs plugin beta 9 are in test-teams
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| (Saturday, 28 June 2008) Written by Beat |
| Lots of tests are underway right now:
CB 1.2 RC 2 beta 3 is in CB testteam, 90 testers have received notification for test a few minutes ago.
CB paid subscriptions plugin is since this week in beta 9: 10 testers are trying it on live sites, over 50 bugs got fixed since beta 8, and around 20 bugs and 3 features are left until commercial release.
It has been very busy months since over a year here, and we are happy to see things coming to great stability and nearing stable release quality.
CB 1.2 also has lots of old code rewritten in a modular way, and a better structured, new API, while preserving backwards compatibility.
The cross-platforms native support has also been a huge work, which is now stabilized thanks to the lots of tests done in the past months by the test-teams.
Finally CB 1.2 sets a milestone in CB as it sets solid grounds for CB releases 1.3 and 2.0, that we hope both to see the light in 2008, thanks to the really nice and solid support of the CB documentation subscribers.
If you asked yourself if the 25 euros of yearly doc subscription really make a difference to us ? , the answer is yes, they do. They allow us to work full-time on CB and this site since a few months, and that makes a huge difference for this project and the impressively big community using it. We hope that this community support will continue and even get stronger, so that we can really boost this project into the next generation of social networks.
There are really lots of good things which are being developed in the last year, and really exciting progress is being made on all fronts. Not always as fast as we would like it to be, but as a result much more stable and flexible than we imagined when setting the initial goals for CB 1.2, and for the first release of the CB paid subscriptions plugin.
Very special thanks go to the CB testteams, and also to severdia for the nice icons designs that he donated to the CB project, that you see in CB 1.2 RC, and there are some more which are now in CB 1.2 RC 2 login module as well.
Special thanks also goes to the whole community on this site, which has been very supportive to this project, and very active in making it better and better, step by step, contribution by contribution, idea after idea, positive feedbacks, improvement ideas, information, wishes, dreams, all good things making this project what it is today. Thank YOU all, and special thanks to all of you who actively helped in forums, those who subscribed to the documentation, those who helped others, those who shared results, code, designs, ideas, contributed to the community openly. That's what makes a community strong.
The last months have been very exciting, the next months will be even more exciting...
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Paid subscriptions CB plugin status
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| (Sunday, 24 June 2007) Written by Beat |
| As you may have noticed, the paid subscriptions CB plugin got delayed quite a bit. Numerous reasons have delayed its release, and we hope to have cured most of them. The plugin is now running on a few websites in production, and lots of usability concerns have been cured.
We have completed implementation of PayPal payment subscriptions (automated recurring billings), as well as of Authorize.net AIM and ARB.
Soon, a first group of a few testers, selected among the persons having expressed interest, will be selected for beta 1 tests. Main selection criteria will be their presence helping in the forum on this site, allowing us to put more time into development, and their level of knowledge in CB. Then beta 2 tests will be started on a larger base, before we go RC and final on a commercial base.
One final word about this plugin and CB: For us here, it is "business as usual". JoomlaPolis and CB have been preserved from the joomla debates, and we have taken quite some time to make sure that this place will stay an island of freedom and peace. CB will continue to run fine on Joomla and Mambo for the forseable future, allowing a peace of mind. CB team's interpretation of the GPL licence hasn't changed since its begin, and is not going to change. We have taken quite some time in the last months to do our own due diligence on that subject, to make that sure.
I'm not giving dates on purpose, as we sincerely don't know the time the test-phases will take, and got our estimates wrong each time on this quite larger than expected application, with quite more flexibility than anticipated.
We will post as soon as we got more news. Thanks for your ongoing support and understanding.
Please simply subscribe this thread to be notified of beta releases when they get available.
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Paid subscriptions CB plugin reaching final development stage
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| (Sunday, 25 March 2007) Written by Beat |
| Oops !!! Time flies... Time for an update on the Subscriptions plugin...You haven't seen me much around here, because I was developing the paid subscriptions as full time as possible.
Well, first of all, I must confess... I'm (again) quite late on my tentative schedule...but reaching final development stage of the plugin itself.
It's not by lack of time, as I'm currently 100+% on this since weeks, actually months.
But...I underestimated the work on integrating automated recurring billings with upfront payments, as well as on backend administration interface work by a quite large factor.
Also we couldn't resist to either build-in or prepare for a few very nice features requested by a few customers,
already paying for features-extensions to this in-development plugin. I simply couldn't turn those requests down.
We couldn't turn down these requests, because they implied doing a needed refactoring, which needed to be done before releasing,
as this changes considerably the installations, and would have implied a complicated upgrade script if done after release.
As this plugin will be commercial and we don't want to stumble under configuration support, we also needed to make the
backend user interface as clear and easy to understand as possible, while accommodating for the extended functions requested.
Finally, as the authorize.net automatic recurring billing system required to also implement and integrate the AIM payment processing for the
upfront initial subscription payment, which has also set us back by two week, but also adds an important payment processor method to the party.
The biggest chunk has been in the backend administration, and that's where some very major progress has been made,
which will eventually flow back into CB.
We have developed a new XML framework to accomodate for the rich settings of the paid subscriptions in the backend plugin parameters !
It's something we feel as really major in terms of web applications development, which, once integrated into CB will allow us to implement much more efficiently new features.
More on that once this plugin is released and I get some time available again for blogging.
In the mean time, here a few sneak-previews of the backend user-interface (non-binding non-final pictures):
Oh, forgot to say: release plan: very hard to say right now, I'm targetting some beta tests starting in hopefully about 2 weeks from now.
Please simply subscribe (simply click subscribe at bottom of the forum page when logged-in) to the forum discussion thread to get notified of the start of beta phase.
Again sorry for the further delay and beeing less present on the forums, hope you will appreciate the added features as much as we appreciated developing them.
Please feel free to continue discussing this plugin on this forum thread or comment this blog below. Looking forward to your feedbacks :-)
Thanks also to all those supporting us by buying our documentation subscription, which is also a great way to checkout the CB subscriptions plugin in operations.
Now, back to work !
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Paid subscriptions CB plugin used on JoomlaPolis!
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| (Tuesday, 16 January 2007) Written by Beat |
| It's time for a short progress update on paid subscriptions CB plugin !
If you didn't notice yet, we have started a limited field trial on this site of a pre-release of the still-under-development Paid Subscriptions Community Builder Plugin. First results look really good, as all payment processes seem to work well and we don't see a single error in our logs.
You can see it in in action on this site:
in your own profile as logged-in user: there is a new tab called "Subscription" (link to your own Subscription tab, if you are logged-in)
as guest (or logged-out user): there is a new section at the end of our registration page ("Register" link of login module).
The front-end is almost complete, but for now you see only a small portion of the functions in action on this site.
The back-end part is still under development, as well as a front-end module and the automatic reminder emails and account expiration parts (for this site we have some time until end of year for this... ;-) ).
So far, the plugin has following features complete:
Supports a fixed number of subscription plans (up to 5 for now, will be quite easily extended to unlimited later).
Plans have a wide range of time (from 1 hour up to 3 years, or lifetime) or calendar duration (from 1 day "Today", up to "This and next 2 years"), including for free plans, so you could have a 1-day free trial plan, which can be upgraded to a e.g. monthly or yearly paid plan.
Supports registration fully integrated and extending Community Builder registration processes: you can choose individually for each plan if you wish to (and in which order) to 1) confirm user email, 2) process payment, 3) approve user.
Plans can be user-managed: renewed, upgraded, re-activated using the "Subscription" tab from the CB User-Profile.
Plan renewals advance periods can be configured
grace periods for calendar durations (e.g. subscribing within last 3 months of a calendar year subscribes you for the next calendar year, and gives for free the last months of current year).
For plans upgrades, the "remaining value" of current plan (means proportionally the price of the remaining subscription time) is automatically discounted from the price of the upgraded plan (if both plans are non-free), and the benefit presented to the customer in the upgrade part, as an incentive to upgrade now without loosing anything.
Purchases can be redirected directly from "Register" button to paypal, or a purchase "invoice" can be presented to the user, with configurable texts, as well as configurable "pay" buttons.
In backend user-edit interface, admins can also manage users' subscriptions (similar functions as in frontend user profile).
All payment processor events and Subscription purchases are fully logged.
Any purchase can be interrupted at any stage, and continued later, as the last workflow state is kept, avoiding for double-payments and/or non-payments.
It has a fully automated full support of full PayPal website API, including PDT, IPN, and automated treatments of refunds and reversals (yes, a refund in paypal will automatically cancel the corresponding paid subscription !). Other payment processors are in development or will be developed on demand, as the API has been designed to support multiple payment processors).
It supports multiple user levels and integration with Joomla-ACL compliant 3PD ACL extensions, such as JACL.
The payment authentication and security is done using 2 secured direct communications between the website server and paypal's processing server (double-checks), to exclude all frauds.
Asynchronous support for subscription changes (e.g. upon successful clearing of E-check or receipt of funds from bank account).
Automatic user-level change without needing for the user to logout.
fine-grained CSS templating
multi-currency support: you can specify the main currency, as well as a secondary currency (indicative prices).
Currency conversion is done automatically, using daily automatic updates, cached on website for performance.
Prices and currency display formats are user-defined.
Supports User-installable plugins for this CB plugin (yes!)
2 plugins already done:
for docman groups and CB field settings: when you take a documentation subscription here, it will add you automatically to the corresponding docman group for the Downloads section (and on expiry or cancellation of course remove you from that group).
CB Field plugin: so it also adds automatically the "2007 Documentation subscriber" status to your user profile upon payment.
import of userid-lists as subscriptions to given plans with given subscription states and subscription dates (corresponding expiry dates are automatically computed during import).
extended tests
support of real Paypal and sandbox paypal.
This was the minimum we had set to ourselves before starting to use it on our own site, and all code has been written from scratch, as we didn't find any implementation meeting our security and complete-features and integration requirements.
So you will ask: what's missing until we can release ?
On our to-do list we currently have:
subscription information module showing user which plan he has, and his upgrade or renewal possibilities.
expiration of accounts
finish language files (right now it's English-only) and more customization possibilities for the workflow texts and layouts.
support for 2 more payment processors on the way (at least).
support for multiple subscriptions in parallel, with upgrade/crossgrade possibilities.
but most importantly to finish the backend user interface (which is not very intuitive for now), to be able to do more stats and see all the information available about subscriptions.
We have also carefully listened to feedbacks from the community these last months, and thanks to positive feedbacks on that matter, and given the big amount of professional development work invested into this plugin, we have chosen to give a commercial status to this plugin. As somebody pointed out on this site, it makes sense, as finally it is made to collect money ;). In addition, as such, it is a critical extension.
So we plan to release it with very affordable and flexible licensing schemes and services. Release date is tentatively planed actually in second half of February mid-March 20007 (subject to confirmation ;) , as usual). DISCLAIMER: this is not an official announcement ! :-)
Please feel free to discuss this plugin on this forum thread or comment this blog below. Looking forward to your feedbacks :-)
Update of 22 February:
Here a small update on the CB Paid Subscriptions plugin:
The first tests on first build here at Joomlapolis showed no errors at all, everything runs very smoothly, which is very encouraging. Only problems were with some texts on this site still referring to the donations button, instead of the subscription tab on the profile, which have now been updated. Thanks a lot to the CB documentation subscribers for their support to the CB project, it's a nice feeling receiving the payment notifications emails, and seing the code under development working well :)
Since my last blog, we accepted a few features requests from paying customers to extend this plugin's features, which will provide some very nice additions and extend the possibilities of the plugin. More on that soon.
The status/upgrade advertisement module is finished as well (we added also an API to next CB release for joomla modules to be able to interact with CB plugins), and will be tested on this site as soon as we stabilize the next build.
We're a little behind schedule regarding backend functionality, and need to complete some more exceptions workflows after account expiration, to help people find their way to renew their expired subscription.
At this time, we are feature-freezing the project, and finish implementation and stabilization. Implementation should be finished within 15 days approximately, and stabilization within around 3 weeks.
Sorry for the ones having asked, there is no final pricing fixed yet, but as said, it will be reasonable and affordable :)
So we are aiming a release starting mid-march (yes, sorry, release date slipped by two weeks due to added features :) , and february is a short month :whistle: ), which is (as usual) subject to stabilization and tests completed.
Update of 25 March:
A new blog update on the CB Paid Subscriptions plugin reaching final development has been published.
Thanks for all your feedbacks. Please comment on the newest blog or in the forum thread. |
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20'000 registered users ! unbelievable !
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| (Thursday, 20 July 2006) Written by Beat |
| Dear Joomlapolitans,
Today is a big day. We reached 20'000 registered users here.
Thank You All !
Thank You all for helping us make CB like it is today;
Thank You for supporting us;
Thank You for spreading the word, voting for it and writing reviews;
Thank You for using it;
Thank You for your feed-backs helping us improving it;
Thank You also for helping each other in the forums, offloading our time for development.
These 20'000 registered active users are in fact the top of the iceberg...
Today, Community Builder is #1 popular extension for CB. 92'000 hits there alone ! It gets downloaded about 700 times from the forge each day !
So there are many many more silent webmasters, and many many websites using CB, most of these websites certainly running many many users.
Community Builder helps building as well virtual as also real communities, and that's a warm reward for all of us.
This unbelievable success of this Free component in such a short time and all your feedbacks and contributions keep us running.
But the Community of you, 20'000 Community Builder active users, is also a fascinating and great community in itself.
We are looking to great times ahead together, and have lots of fun doing what we are doing here.
THANK YOU !
Beat |
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Paid subscriptions CB plugin advancing
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| (Friday, 14 July 2006) Written by Beat |
| It's time to write a blog entry...perfect timing for a small update on my paid subscriptions plugin development. Woohoo...
Although my free time has been rather sparse these last weeks, I've advanced in the design (almost completed) and implementation (well on the way now) of the paid subscriptions CB plugin.
I've also had some interesting discussions with customers looking for this, and am following-up some more.
The implementation of the selection of a paid or free subscription plan as part of the site's registration page is 80% done.
It already supports:
multiple subscription plans (including free and trial ones)
flexible business logic
multiple plan durations, including unlimited ones
plan titles and descriptions
currency setting
and full CB integration, with all usual CB bells and whistles (template styling, multi-language, profile integration, etc).
I'm also advancing well in the payments processing itself, which has proven itself to be far more complex than most current open-source shop implementations do. That part is 60% done, and first transactions tests work fine.
The automated payment processor, which will be handling subscription payments and driving subscriptions state changes, is also well advanced, and supports now paypal quite well.
I've looked at the new google checkout quickly also, but it's kind of geographically-limited for now, as the country-field seems not editable for buyers and sellers... anyone else saw that bug ? :D
I'm also in touch with two other (sorry, not yet to be named) international payment processing companies in order to extend the choices in payment processing.
The part which I will be working on next week is implementing the automated subscriptions management part itself, the heart of the system, before working on the backend administration tools.
The whole design and implementation is targeted to support fully automatic user management for small and also very large sites with many (micro-)payments per hour. And that's much more complex than managing payments in a small online shop, as all exceptions which arise sometimes need all to be treated fully automatically.
I still don't have an ETA (estimated time of Arrival) yet, but as it looks, I should have more time in the next weeks to advance on this.
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Update on CB 1.0 stable.
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| (Saturday, 22 April 2006) Written by Beat |
| Please see post about latest news here: FORUM THREAD Re: 1.0 stable build 3 in Test-team . |
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Moving towards CB 1.0 stable
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| (Tuesday, 28 February 2006) Written by Beat |
| Today, I could finally catchup with Joomlapolis forum ! Read a few hundreds posts, and replied to about a third.
I have to say that I feel that there is a very positive energy here. A lot of promising developments going on through the plugin framework that JoomlaJoe and the CB Team started in RC2. People help each other, and share their findings and expertise, growing the knowledge of this Community. Reading through your posts has given us lots of inspiration and energy in what we do. Thank you !
These last weeks have been very interesting for us, as we have contributed to the interoperability tests of Joomla 1.1 with Johan and Louis, and shortly thereafter to those of Joomla 1.0.8 with CB, where we also did some session hardening review and enhancements with Rey.
Having looked deeply into Joomla! 1.1, I have to say "Wow!, Great Times Ahead !"
I also had the pleasure to review a few plugin codes, among which the currently biggest and long-awaited one is Nick's ProfileGallery plugin. But I'm quite sure that soon even "larger" plugins, integrating with even larger components or systems will appear.
Now we need to squash the 9 remaining bugs on the forge (plus about that much which are still in test-team findings to be confirmed before they go to the forge). Then a build no. 2 will go to testteam, in order to squash hopefully last bugs and a release golden master will be tested by testteam for a few days before public release.
Don't ask me for an exact release date yet for CB 1.0 stable, as there are some more of exciting things on the grill (or on the way, as you prefer) but it should "not be to far away". |
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CB 1.0 stable in test-team + Joomla! 1.1 support
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| (Monday, 06 February 2006) Written by Beat |
| Community Builder 1.0 stable is now in test-teams hands. It corrects all known errors (reported in the bug-tracker) without adding features, so it should be...stable..., and..... It supports Joomla! 1.1 alpha 2, just released by the Joomla! core team. More in a real article shortly. |
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Making your update smoother...
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| (Tuesday, 24 January 2006) Written by Beat |
| Ok. My first blog I guess...
Now that all known bugs have been squashed off the bug-tracker, thanks to JoomlaJoe's great help during my busy time (my turn...); That the new automated package builder has been written (we don't want a last-minute human-error there): We are now trying to smooth a little your own path to upgrade from RC2 to 1.0 final. Specially with plugins and their numerous parameters. We are pretty sure you would not like to loose all of the plugin parameters and redo them all after update...Right? So we have a little more work before the first testteam build release hitting the dozens of testteam servers.
Thanks to all for the great reports and ideas sprinkling all over the forum and trackers, we see most of them, sometimes a few days later as time permits, but can impossibly reply to all while concentrating on development.
Thanks also for all the new plugins being developed and shared with all of us in the spirit of open-source software cooperation. It's great to see all these new plugins expanding the use of Community Builder to build better communities, and helping numerous users in their communities
Ok, back to development, wooohooohoooooo...
- Beat
Community Builder Development Team |
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