Big News from Small Web Firms

Release notes for BestPartyEver.com v 3.0.0 ALPHA Build 1000

This release mainly focused on bootstrapping the party planning guest lists, and the additions to the “basket” model

• Minor CSS enhancements and text/grammer fixes
• Added TinyMCE to a few textareas for content submission
• Users can now create guest lists for each created party. Guest lists use the hcard microFormat
• Inline editing for guest lists using AJAX
• Users can now add party ideas to their saved item basket, and manage saved vendors and ideas in their global basket. (Future: integrate these saved items into the party planning process)
• Added session data to our bug reporting form
• Added double email verification on registration form

Release notes for v3.0.0 ALPHA build930

4 days and 3 releases, why not
In this release:

• Expanded search results - Party ideas and user profiles now appear in search results
• Better search - continued refinement of the search algo
• Social Timeline RSS - http://bestpartyever.com/timeline.rss
• Contact form now uses proper Validation
• Automated Google Sitemap Generation
• General UI improvements and JS bug fixes

Cool deal..

Here are notes for the first of many to come weekly build updates to bestpartyever.com.

BPE v3.0.0 build 900

Included in this release:

• Profile privacy settings now work. Currently locks down all profile info and meta objects (blogs, parties, ideas etc)
• Friends timeline date calculation bug fixed
• Sally will now be the first friend for all new users
• Latest elements added to 404 page for better SEO
• Minor js and css changes
• Slight Refinement of  search results
• “Basket” feature for vendors completed (users add objects to a basket for later reference)
• “Spotlight Search” debugged and working for basket. (Users can now search past created items and items in basket from object creation pages.)

As part of the 1.0.2 release we updated the JumpBoxes for MediaWiki and Wordpress to contain the latest releases of those applications.

The JumpBox for MediaWiki was updated to contain MediaWiki 1.11.0 and you can see what changed in this version of MediaWiki in their release notes. This was a fairly minor update to MediaWiki.

The JumpBox for Wordpress was updated to contain Wordpress 2.3 and you can see what changed in this version of Wordpress here. This was a fairly significant update to Wordpress.

The typical JumpBox migration mechanism

Yeah!

Sometime around 7:10pm MST, We will push bestpartyever.com v.3.0.0 alpha live. Basically we rebuilt the site from the ground up with new social network functionality in about 5 weeks.

We pulled a very large chunk of features at the last minute to hit our Oct 1 deadline. The site is solid yet still rough in a few UI areas.
In this release:

• All new code base built on Code Igniter
• All new xhtml/css and “design”
• New “social network” auth system
• Customizable user profiles
• Add/Create/Manage Party Ideas
• Add/Create/Manage Party Objects (60%)
• Basic Vendor Search
• Basic UI elements for features to come
• and a whole bunch more…

This website is a perfect example of the ease of use in creating a website with Flare9.com. This website for a property in Estella Mountain Ranch was created in less than 45 minutes and most of that was just uploading the pictures. If making a website is this easy, what could you create?

Obu Web Co-Founder and VP Sally Boldt-Strebel needed a new blog to post her thoughts on business, marketing, party ideas, etc. Sally is also Founder and CEO of BestPartyEver.com a party planning social network site that we (obu) are doing the design and development work on. We used design queues from the upcoming release of BestPartyEver.com do create a custom skin for Wordpress. Check out her blog at

We just published updates to all JumpBoxes. This brings all applications on to JumpBox platform 1.0.1 and also includes the latest OS level fixes.

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We are happy to announce the re-launch of Gigacrete.com. GigaCrete is a “green building” materials company that just opened a new headquarters here in Scottsdale, Arizona.

At GigaCrete, we develop and manufacture next generation building materials that structurally, economically and environmentally outperform today’s conventional building products. Why? To positively impact human lives.

Build strong. Build forward.

A new version of the JumpBox for Twiki has been released.

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We are happy to announce the launch of 11 more website templates for use with the flare9.com website builder.

Two new website template families join the mix, Lite, and Elegant.

Lite:

Elegant

The folks over at Office Snapshots just did a piece on us.

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Happy days, a new JumpBox is born. Say hello to the JumpBox for the Twiki wiki system.

Twiki is a flexible, powerful, and easy to use enterprise wiki, enterprise collaboration platform and knowledge management system. It is a Structured Wiki, typically used to run a project development space, a document management system, a knowledge base, or any other groupware tool, on an intranet or on the internet. Web content can be created collaboratively by using just a browser. Users without programming skills can create web applications. Developers can extend the functionality of TWiki with Plugins.

We have just launched 13 new website templates for our Flare9.com website builder. If you need a quality website, that you can maintain yourself, without breaking the bank, have a look at Flare9.com.

We have a dozen more website templates that will be up next week as well.

MacWorld just posted a review of Parallels 3.0 where they used the JumpBox for Drupal to test out the Virtual Appliance concept.

Like its competition, VMware Fusion (currently in public beta), Parallels 3 offers a selection of downloadable virtual appliances, which are pre-configured systems ready to be used with only a few mouse clicks. For example, I downloaded and installed a JumpBox virtual appliance set up with the Drupal content management system. Parallels recognized the virtual machine. All I had to do was answer a few Drupal configuration questions, and the system was up and running. I could then load the Drupal system from any browser on any machine in my home—in OS X or Windows. Using virtual appliances is an easy way to install and test complex software: there’s no configuration required, and if you don’t like what you’re testing, you can just throw it away when you’re done.