News

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.

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.

Simple Content And Webform Modules Released

We've just added two nice modules to the base Webiva download (still on the development branch) - a "Simple Content" and a "Webform" module. While thse modules don't drastically extend the functionality of the system they do significantly streamline the ability to do a couple of basic things inside of Webiva normally would take a number of extra steps with custom content models.

The first - "Simple Content" allows you to create Simple content models that are used to fill in structured information directly on a page. For example you could create a banner content model that has fields for an image and text and then create a site feature to style it correctly. Users could then add that simple content model directly to pages and instead of futzing around with the WYSIWYG editor could just select an image from the file manager and some text and get a correctly styled paragraph.

The second - "Webform" is fairly self-explanatory - it allows you to quickly create forms and collect information - optionally connecting those forms to the people tab. A single site feature can be used to style all your Webform paragraphs. A simple results paragraphs allows you to show realtime results (like a simple poll module) back to your users.  Great for petitions and the like: "join the 5021 people in supporting X." Also has a dashboard widget to show you incoming results for review.

If you are familiar with the custom content system using either of these modules should be fairly self explanatory.

Webform

Simple Content

Webiva Facebooked Module release

The Webiva Facebooked module was released over the weekend, a lightweight Facebook Connect integration module that allows users to use FB Connect for Authentication on your site allong with a slew of utility paragraphs for things like recent visitors list, sharing, etc. The module can be pulled from the Webiva-facebooked GitHub repository. Just install in vendor/modules, activate, and it will even show you the settings necessary to create the application inside of facebook.com.

The module uses the mini_fb gem by Appoxy to handle the backend integration, which make it a lot cleaner to integrate than something a little more exhaustive like facebooker.

Webiva 0.9.10 Released

We've just pushed our first maintenance release - 0.9.10 - to GitHub. While the new changelog isn't huge, in addition to a boatload of bug fixes over the past month we've added a few new features:

- Sitewide Pingback support (in the feedback module)
- Blog module pingback checking (for pushing pingbacks)
- A Rewrite of the Captcha support to make it extensible via various modules
- Content paragraphs that let you display updated content in whatever types you like.
- A new edit account paragraph with full site feature and custom content model support
- A rework of the filter support in custom content model detail and list paragraphs

What else have we been working on?

Getting Webiva ready for Rails3 (still needs a lot of work to fix the deprecation warnings - but it's up and serving pages - check out the rails3 branch on GitHub)

A full redesign of Webiva.org, Webiva.net and some new Demo sites (E-commerce and Community examples)

Open-sourcing the existing Webiva modules:

Released

Book - Allows you add "books" to your Webiva with some simple wiki-like capabilities (the Webiva Docs are an example of this module in use)
S3 - Plugs in as a file processor to let you serve your Webiva filemanager files on S3
Forum - a full-featured configurable user forum for in-site discussions
Custom code - a simple module that lets you run custom ruby code on your Webiva sites (admin accounts only as this can be dangerous)

Soon-to-be-released

Mailing - A complete emailing system that lets you send customizable blast emails
Message - an in-site messaging system
Social - a social networking module that adds a bunch of social-networking features to Webiva
Shop - a full-featured, customizable and extensible e-commerce solution