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 !

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.

Upgrade

July release, “Barbès”, is now discontinued and you are encouraged to upgrade as soon as possible.

To upgrade, retrieve the updated web installer, upload it on your server as installer.php (replace the earlier one if you haven’t erased it before), then execute it through your web browser. It’s just that simple!

Fresh install

To do a fresh install, retrieve the updated web installer, upload it on your server as installer.php, then execute it through your web browser. You can find more detailed instructions on our wiki.

Sandbox

Finally, for the lazy guys (yes, you), we just made available a sandbox to quickly test La Distribution.

It’s available over this URL http://sandbox.appslots.com/ with sandbox/sandbox or demo/demo as login/password. Warning, having multiple users playing with it at the same time can result in strange things, and we’ll reset everything on this install as necessary.

Thanks!

Thank specially to this people for their support: julie, srcmax, krome, benfle, abrachet, CharlesNepote, bblfish, karlpro, davidbgk, rgaidot, xibe, greut, sunfox. Be sure your feedback is always appreciated!

Photo: CC BY-NC-ND DarkB4Dawn Concorde, Paris

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?

Localisation

The localisation strategy is now in place. The first language officially supported is French and everything should be correctly translated en français. If not, it’s a bug!

You just have to add the French repository to your Repositories:

Then enable the locale in the Locales panel:

CLI

A good one for advanced users or system administrators, you can now control your La Distribution install from the command line. A detailed documentation is available on Trac.

Here is an example of how to install the command line with SVN:

And then, we use the new command line to init La Distribution in a new folder and install Wordpress as our first application:

OpenID

The OpenID strategy has slighty changed. Now, applications are encouraged to share the same login interface in which users are being able to login using their standard credentials (login and password) or their OpenID.

There is also an OpenID provider included by default into La Distribution, you can now log in everywhere with your LD account. How cool is that?

Default application

Now, you can define a default application that will be used as the homepage of your website. A dokuwiki, a wordpress, the administration panel, you choose!

UI Refresh

Covered in a blog post a few weeks ago, the UI had been refreshed to look more polished and professional. Of course, it can still be improved in many aspects, but it’s an interesting step forward.

How to install it ?

The Concorde beta version is currently available through the Edge repositories.

So, to update from Barbès (release from July), you have to change the repositories to:

Another option is to test a fresh install using the web installer: drop it in a folder, fix permissions and launch the script in your web browser.

Finally, for advanced users, you can try the subversion install covered in an earlier blog post or on the development wiki.

Please!

If you find the time, please test the new features, send your feedback, and help us make Concorde a better release. Thanks!

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.

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?

• 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!

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).

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!

Except the clone feature, this is mostly a bug fix release, so there is nothing huge to expect, only stability improvements and little UI touches to the admin.

On the package side, bbPress is promoted to the main repository, this mean it’s now sufficiently stable, fully featured and supported. Two new packages make their apparitions in the contrib repository: moonmoon (a feed blender application) and gallery3 (the new version of the popular photo gallery application).

To get this new release, just update your current install, or if you don’t have one yet, maybe it’s time to install one with the web installer in a few seconds.

On the development side, a branch was created to help maintain this version while we’ll be moving fast forward on trunk with the development of the new major version. An interesting point is that the now famous 3 flavors of La Distribution are at the time of writing exactly identical. This will not last long!

Bellow you’ll find a more detailed changelog for this release:

Install

• more solid web installer
• SVN restructured to allow easy install for developers
• support for environments without mod_rewrite

Admin

• repositories are now sortables (useful because the firsts have the priority over the later)
• nicer HTML tables
• file older than 12 hours are purged from tmp repository
• ability to clone an application from a backup (beta)

Packages

• enforce new feature/quality guidelines for all ‘main’ applications

  • custom css (ability to add some custom css rules somehow)
  • registration (ability to register from the application)
  • topbar/superbar (ability to disable bars)

• packages upgrades

  • bbpress 1.0-2 (and now in main repository)
  • wordpress 2.8-2
  • habari: support for configuration and backup/restore

• new packages

  • moonmoon (feed blender) in contrib repository
  • gallery3 (photo gallery) in contrib repository
  • geshi based code colorer plugin for wordpress (in contrib repository)
  • jQuery table drag’n'drop plugin (in main repository)

Libraries

• major refactoring pass, cleaner interactions between classes. [179]
• SQL backup now handled by default. [185]

Photo: CC BY-SA Gilles Klein Barbes, les gens sont noirs les murs en couleurs

Current Stable Release: Barbès

The stable release is the one you get when you’re installing La Distribution with the default Web Installer. In this flavor, La Distribution is updated time to time (like your OS) and you should enjoy the most stable experience. When updates are available, you’re notified in the dashboard and encouraged to upgrade.

To install this flavor, just grab the web installer script, upload it as installer.php where you want to perform the installation, adjust directory permissions and run it through your web browser. That’s all.

This release is made of two package repositories: ‘main’ & ‘contrib’. The first contains the core application and packages that pass our quality requirements. The second is optional and contains more but less advanced packages.

The two URIs for the Barbès release repositories are:

Edge Rolling Release

With the edge version, La Distribution is updated almost daily and you will always have fresh packages. You may encounter issues, but this is why this flavor is made for: find bugs.

To get this flavor, you should do the regular install and replace the default repository URIs by these ones.

We encourage every enthusiasts to use this version, and report bugs as they occur.

SVN trunk

Finally, for developers or advanced users, if you want to synchronize directly with the development, you can now use subversion.

Just checkout the trunk, make some directories writable by your web server and execute installer.php through your web browser.

Once done, to follow La Distribution’s development, remember to svn update your copy time to time.

Note that this only concerns La Distribution’s core packages (admin, libraries, …), application packages (wordpress, dokuwiki, …) will come from the repositories defined in your configuration. Building applications packages from SVN is of course possible but will be covered in a future blog post!

So, now that you chose your flavor, maybe it’s time to test La Distribution?

In this tutorial we’re going to package Moonmoon a PHP based PlanetPlanet clone. It’s relatively simple, it’s representative of a typical web application, and better, it’s from my friend Maurice! Frankly, I had no clue if the packaging was possible before starting writing this tutorial, so let’s cross our fingers.

Create the simplest package.

For the first step, we’ll focus on the basics: the deployment procedure. We’ll let the user finishes the installation through the Moonmoon install form.

Let’s start.

1. Create an empty folder named ‘package’ containing 2 sub-folders: ‘application’ and ‘dist’.

2. In the dist folder, create a ‘manifest.xml’ file with the following content.

   <package>
     <id>moonmoon</id>
     <name>Moonmoon</name>
     <version>8.12-1</version>
     <type>application</type>
   </package>

3. In the ‘application’ folder, copy all the files of the application you want to package. You can download Moonmoon here.

   You should now have the following structure:

   

4. Now, zip everything in the ‘package’ directory (but not the ‘package’ directory itself). The ‘application’ and ‘dist’ directories must be at the root of the zip archive.

Test the package

5. Log in your La Distribution install, go in the Repositories panel and create a local repository if you don’t have already one.

6. Upload the zip archive you just created.



7. You should now be able to install a new instance of Moonmoon in the Applications panel.

Doh!

The cache directory was not created! I could have fixed that in the tutorial before but I chose to keep it real. It’s a common issue when trying to copy empty directories. One way to fix it is to create a dummy non empty file in the empty directories.

8. Now update your package version in the ‘manifest.xml’ file.

   <package>
     <id>moonmoon</id>
     <name>Moonmoon</name>
     <version>8.12-2</version>
     <type>application</type>
   </package>

9. Go on your Repository panel, upload the new version.

10. Go on the Application panel, update the application, it should works now!

Handling advanced installation

Because we want La Distribution to provide the same experience for all applications, we now have to skip Moonmoon install form.

There are generally three approaches to integrate an installation process with La Distribution:

1. Use the web installer provided by the application, and interact with it with PHP through HTTP. Isn’t that quirky ? Yes it is, but we don’t have often the choice, and well, you just have to say yourself it’s like using a REST API ;-)
2. Use the application libraries to perform the install. It’s currently rare but it’s the best approach, the La Distribution Wordpress package has been developed this way for example.
3. Code directly in the package the installation procedure, by handling the necessary steps.

For Moonmoon, the install procedure is so simple that we’ll go with the third solution. Generally, it’s always easier to do the first, while the second is the one we have to promote, particularly for complex installs.

Introducing the installer

Basically, an installer is a PHP class that must be added in the ‘dist’ directory, named installer.php and extends the Ld_Installer class provided by La Distribution.

Now, let’s have a quick look at Moonmoon’s install.php file, line 9 to 25. It seems like we’ll just have to create two files. Let’s code that!

The install method will be automatically called when the user will create a new instance of the application with the La Distributions user interface.

Where does the preferences parameter come from?

The preferences come from the information entered by the user in La Distribution’s install form. By default, only the ‘title’ and ‘path’ preferences are present in this install form but you can add other preferences in the manifest file.

The ‘admin_password’ preference does not exist yet. So we’ll have to declare it in the manifest.

Don’t forget to increment the version number of the package. Packages are cached and you may become mad if you don’t do it!

Also, you can now delete the install.php file of the Moonmoon application as it is now useless.

Now, create the zip, upload it, test a new installation. Everything perfect!

Next?

In a next tutorial, we’ll see how to handle advanced users integration (SSO and Roles) and UI integration (integrating the permanent bottom bar).

As you can see, with a minimal technical background, creating La Distribution packages is fairly easy, now what are you waiting for to create your owns?

Thanks Benoît for reviewing this tutorial!

The presentation (in french) about La Distribution went well and was very nicely received, generating lot of questions from the audience. As I remember:

What kind of applications are you thinking/dreaming about?

Coming from Netvibes, i can already answer that a widget dashboard application would be a great addition :-)

Also, for me, a killer application would be a personal/social mp3 jukebox where you can put all your music and exchange with your friends. This doesn’t seems very legal at first, but this is a great example of the kind of things you can do when you are 100% in control :-)

What about La Distribution in the enterprise ?

It depends the current needs of the company. For internal communication, blogging and wikis are already great, and generally we’ll do our best to add productivity applications in the catalog. But as of today, if you think about word processor or spreadsheets, i don’t know yet a decent alternative to Google or Zoho.

What do you think of Opera Unite ?

Opera Unite is very interesting, especially their proxy feature. But imho, it would have been better with a traditional server side programming/hosting environment, say PHP. Also, what happen when the laptop running Opera unite is off power or off the network?

Is it possible to apply a theme on all applications?

Not yet, but the ongoing Minimal Themes series is a step in this direction.

How to build a package? Is it difficult?

Building a package is fairly easy, but building a great package is more difficult. Detailed instructions are coming but if you’re a hacker, you can already have a look at the existing ones.

That’s all for the questions I remember. But you, dear reader, maybe do you have other questions about La Distribution?

This is the first post on this blog, hello!