July 1st, 2010

Microblogging with Status.net

After Firefox Sync, Status.net is the second application to join this month La Distribution growing list of supported applications.

For those who don’t know it, Status.net is the leading open source Twitter alternative. It allows users to install their own microblogging service for their company, their community, or simply for a personal use.

How did we integrate it in La Distribution?

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June 30th, 2010

Keeping spammers away with plugins

La Distribution targets human beings and we’re pretty sure one thing human beings doesn’t want to deal with is spam!

Thank to our brand new plugin support, and a selection of 3 plugins (all bundled by default) you can now keep 99,9% of spammers out of your web applications.

What are this magical plugins?

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June 24th, 2010

Firefox Sync now available

Firefox Sync (ex Mozilla Weave) is now available in La Distribution.

If you don’t know Firefox Sync, it’s a Firefox extension that allow you to save and synchronize all your Firefox related data (bookmarks, passwords, history). It’s an essential extension for people who use Firefox on different computers.

We’re now proposing in La Distribution the server part, where the Firefox extension actually store the data.

This is an important package for several reasons:

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June 23rd, 2010

Danube Released

Today, Danube, our new release is officially ready for prime time.

It’s obviously our best release to date, and it’s amazing, you should definitely try it!

The new features were covered in an earlier blog post, here are the most interesting improvements:

We plan to cover most of this features in separate posts, so keep an eye on this blog in the next days.

I wish you a nice summer and long life to La Distribution!

How to get it?

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May 4th, 2010

In a few days, our 4th major release

After 3 months of hard work, the new major release of La Distribution is now approaching.

Today, we think it’s time for beta testers to start giving it a try! Help us hunt bugs, use it in improbable environments, give it a hard time :-)

So, what’s new in this release? Read the rest of this entry »

January 26th, 2010

A new year, a new release

Few news from the La Distribution front since our last release, 3 months ago. To be frank, things were a little bit slow lastly!

In October/November, i was very occupied relocating from Paris to Berlin, and December was all about family and friends. In January, back on track, i didn’t work on a new major release but small updates on top of Concorde: package updates, security, performances, stability.

The name for this release is Concorde 2 and you’ll find a detailed changelog on an external page.

La Distribution is currently used in production on a few websites, and I’m learning a lot from this experience. Near all latest improvements come from real world usage and that’s a terrific thing.

For the future, Concorde will continue to be maintained, and if needed we’ll release a third version. Also, as soon as possible, we’ll start working on the next major release.

The focus of this next release is to code what we need to deploy our appslots.com service, which represents what we think a mainstream hosting provider should be in 2010. To achieve this goal, the main features will be ‘multi domains’ support and hackability (through plugins, hooks, filters, …). Cool uh?

La Distribution is an open project, so feel free to join the fun :-)

Happy New Year !

October 14th, 2009

Concorde just landed

3310143544_779c1d6da5

Last night, our last release Concorde (aka 0.3-42-3) was pushed to the stable repositories. It’s now officially available for everyone !

The new features were covered in an earlier blog post, but for the end user, quickly, the 3 most interesting improvements are: Localization (french now available), OpenID (consumer and provider) and UI enhancements.

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September 29th, 2009

Upcoming release: Concorde

Photography of the Concorde Metro Station

La Distribution current policy is to release a new version every three months. This allow us to regularly showcase our progress, giving opportunity to testers and enthusiasts to submit their feedback and influence the roadmap.

The end of September approaching, it means a new release is coming its way. It will be named Concorde, after the Parisian Metro Station, no link with a defunct aircraft ;-)

So, what’s new?

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August 21st, 2009

Gallery available one click from you

A decent photo album application is definitely a must have for La Distribution. It’s a top feature, needed by near every user. Who doesn’t have at least one photo camera, and a bunch of photos to upload these days?

When i reviewed the available PHP powered solutions, it seemed that Gallery2 was the most serious solution: pretty well commented code, solid installer, good community. Other evaluated packages were Zen Photo and Coppermine Gallery, but as a developer & maintainer, i decided to focus on one.

logo And actually, Gallery2 was not the final choice … Few months ago, the team behind this application decided to rewrite everything from scratch aiming to build a better, simpler and more modular app. While I’m always suspicious about people that believe they need to restart their project from zero, it seems in this case it was not a bad idea. As of today, development had been relatively quick and the current beta is really promising.

What do i like about Gallery3?

gallery2-350

  • simple MVC code (powered by the Kohana framework)
  • mass uploader (in flash)
  • efficient organizer
  • support for GD or Image Magick (with appropriate detection)
  • out of the box Cool Iris support
  • installer available as a PHP class
  • modular
  • it works

You can test it from the “edge contrib” repository. The package is already pretty good, it supports Single Sign On and UI integration, but it’s still in development, our quality guidelines being pretty rude.

I believe we should be able to have something excellent for (or during) the next major release. Exciting, go Gallery team!

August 4th, 2009

Summer UI Refresh

I commited last week an interesting design update for La Distribution.

While, it was not on the roadmap for the next version, it’s part of a background effort, aiming to always have a simpler, easier & nicer user interface.

So, how does-it looks? (On the left, earlier version, on right, updated).

mini

Hmm, what changed? Well:

  • The Super Bar (on the bottom) start to looks a little bit like a dock, far better.
  • The Top Bar is much simpler, with a small logo on the left, and user/session informations on the right.
  • In the admin application, bread crumbs are now in an expected place, just bellow the Top Bar.
  • The application list is completely refreshed, more colorful, looks fresher.
  • The application settings panels now feature tabs to navigate between different sections
  • Generally, the default width is now simply 1000px instead of the old weird value calculated in ems.

It’s of course not a final version. For example, we’ll likely add a bit of color before next release. Also, maybe we’ll rely more on ajax/javascript to offer a more responsive feeling, and accelerate some user scenarios.

You can already test the updated version, you just have to use the SVN or Edge flavor. As always, we’re waiting for you feedback!