News

Webiva Tour Video - building a site in under 5 minutes using wizards

We just put together a new video that shows you how to use some of the new wizard and theme importing functionality in Webiva, take a look.

Webiva.com Hosting Platform Launched in Public Beta

This morning Cykod LLC launched the Webiva.com Hosting Platform in a public Beta.

Webiva.com gives users access to a paid platform on which to quickly build Webiva websites without worrying about any of the IT challenges involved in deploying, updating or scaling your websites. Webiva.com is built on Amazon's Web Service offering and all sites are load-balanced between multiple servers and serve files using Amazon's CloudFront Content Delivery Network.

Signing up at Webiva.com gets you a free 48hour trial of the system, but during the public beta we will be extending trials accounts for any users that request an extended trial. Paid plans start at $40/mo and allow you access to all your websites from a single dashboard.

Webiva.com sites are built using the exactly same software that runs the open-source Webiva CMS, so you aren't locked in to a proprietary CMS but can easily take your site with you if leave the service.

Check out Webiva.com for a free trial!

Webiva posted on DiscoveringStartups.com

Webiva was recently posted on DiscoveringStartups.com as Webiva.org – Don’t Just Manage Content, Build Websites

Take a look (and vote for us!) at the link above.

Important: Structural updates to Webiva

We recently pushed some fairly large structural updates into the development branch on GitHub.

If you are tracking the development branch, and see some issues in your Webiva install, run the following command:

  $ rake cms:update_domain_databases

To push database information from the filesystem into the master Webiva database.

Next, make sure you follow the instructions on the upgrade page

That's not the preferred nomenclature, dude

After trying and failling too many times to explain Design Templates and Site Features to people, we've come to realize we had a naming problem, so the front end interface has been updated to reflect new names for these two crucial pieces of Webiva:

Design Templates are now called Themes
Site Features are now called Paragraph Themes

Sync to the latest development branch to see the new names.

We think the new names will make it easier for people to understand what these do. You may see the the old terms hang around in the documentation and in various places in the system while we work to eradicate the old names, but the primary interfaces have been changed to reflect the new name.

June Webiva Updates

We've got a number of things in the works for Webiva soon and in the coming months.

The big news: Webiva.com - our SaaS platform for hosted Webiva websites is in the works and should be launching for Beta users at the start of August. We'll be collecting email addresses at Webiva.com soon for people interested in helping us test the hosted version of Webiva (and get a bunch of free hosting thrown in for their help)

On the development front:

The Webiva "People" page is getting a much needed overhaul with a new ridiculously-powerful User list filtering system. The new system lets you build User Lists off of pretty much any criteria you can imagine - and those user lists can be used in other parts of the system (such as in the Mailing Module to send emails to very customized lists)

You can filter people by using a custom query language:

But don't let the words "custom query language"  scare you away, as the system has a uber-powerful query builder that guides you through the process of putting the queries together by progressively revealing available options in a context sensitive manner:

The new people system is designed for sites with large numbers of users and won't choke on complicated queries (such as, show me how many of my 500,000 users have purchased this product but not logged in the past month) as it will run the query in the background if necessary and cache the results.

Easier Multi-server deployments. As part of the work we're doing for Webiva.com, we're going to make it much easier to do load-balanced multi-server deployments of Webiva. In fact, once you've run the quick_install.rb script on all machines, your work will be done. Uploaded Files will automatically sync among servers, and since all other assets (like themes) are stored in the database - a load balanced Webiva install will be completely transparent to users and website integrators.

Docs, Tutorials and Screencasts. Look for lots more documentation and gaggle of new screencasts taking you through some common tasks in Webiva.

Webiva.net Overhaul:  Webiva.net hasn't yet gotten a much need facelift. Look for a new site in the coming weeks with a lot more social functionality built-in, letting you showcase your Webiva projects and offer your services to people looking for Webiva websites and custom development.

Webiva MassChallenge Pitch Video

We got our application for MassChallenge in at the wire (11:45 PM for the midnight deadline if I remember correctly) - check out our pitch video

Webiva E-commerce Demo Released

We've released the Webiva e-commerce demo site available on Webiva.org/demo

If you want to get your Webiva install set up with a full-featured e-commerce shop, just install the Webiva-shop module from github as follows (from the base Webiva directory)

$ cd vendor/modules
$ git clone git://github.com/cykod/Webiva-shop.git shop

Then restart your install of Webiva. The shop module is private by default, so you'll need a Super Admin account to go into System -> Domains -> [ Your Domain ] and click "Make Available" to make that module available on the selected domain. Then go through the standard module activation process by going to Options -> Modules and activating the "Shop" module.

There are a lot of different pieces to configure to get a real shop up and running, luckily you can use the built in Wizard to get a demo shop  up and running quickly. Go to Website -> Wizards and click "Add an E-commerce shop to your Site" to be presented with options like those below:

Check the three checkboxes in the last three sections to add a test setup to your shop install, click "Add To Site" and you be ready to go (you'll need to add some products to your shop to actually put and order through however)

Webiva version 0.9.20 Released

We've pushed the 0.9.20 release of Webiva to the master branch at GitHub, while we've got a bunch of fixes along some nice new things in the core repository, specifically 3 new included modules: Simple Content, Web Form, and User Profile (See the previous news post about the first two)

The main purpose of this release, however, is to bring the core up system up to speed with changes we've made for new modules that we've released. These new modules are the "heavies" as I like to call them:

Webiva-shop - A full customizable e-commerce system
Webiva-social - Social networking support including Friend & Groups
Webiva-facebooked - Integration with Facebook, including OAuth2 login support (this module uses the new post-F8 authentication scheme)
Webiva-tweet - Integration with Twitter, including OAuth login support
Webiva-post_stream - A personal updates paragraph with embed media support
Webiva-mailing - A E-mail campaign module for sending targeted mailings

There's also a couple support module we released (Webiva-oauth, Webiva-message) that are needed as dependencies for the above modules.

With the exception of the Post Stream module, which is new, these are all modules we've built over the past three years that represent thousands of hours of work (they're not quick-and-dirty stuff we threw together over a couple of weeks) We've taken the time to refactor and adjust functionality to make them cleaner, more modular and happier working together. They should still be considered to be in a "beta" state, but we will be putting all of them to hard use in the coming weeks in production settings so they are certainly functional.

With these modules, you've got a rich feature set right of the starting gate. We're feverishly working on finishing up two new demo sites (See the previous news item about new CMS Demos to give you an idea of what's in store). Those demos should be up at the new Webiva.org in the next week. We're also going to be putting out some screencasts to show you how to build sites using the new modules.

One module we're particularly excited about is the Post Stream module as it's a powerful yet flexible module that lets you bring a lot of rich media content into your site. You should be seeing a lot more on that module in the near future.

Webiva Twitter account and New Webiva.org launched

We've launched the new Webiva.org with a focus giving visitors a better overview of the system from both the home page slideshow and the about page. We've also started actively using the @webiva twitter account for Webiva related news and updates. Give us a shout on twitter at @webiva with any feedback on the new site.

The demos are now at http://webiva.org/demo - we're finishing up a couple of sites showing of the reworked E-commerce and Social networking modules that should be live middle week (May 12ish).