phpFox v3
This developer inFocus is featuring YouNet/Modules2Buy. We sent them a mini interview and they were gracious to take the time to answer these questions for us. Want a discount on YouNet/Modules2Buy products? Read through the article to get a 10% off coupon code (*limitations apply).
Q. How long have you been developing Add-Ons and Templates for PHPFox?
A: It started in 2010 once we found PHPFox 2.x was an interesting and potential framework.Our first Add-Ons for PHPFox were released on November, 1st, 2010. They were Blog Importer and YouOne template. We were right, especially once PHPFox 3.x was released, it has been growing faster than ever.
Q. What is the difference between Modules2Buy and YouNet ?
A: Actually, Modules2Buy was a website service of YouNet Company. However, we now just have one brand as YouNet. In order to get customers to get familiar with it, we co-brand as Modules2Buy/YouNet.
Q. What is the YouNet Core and why is it needed?
A: It’s a license checker working at clients’ website to verify if installed modules/plug-ins do have valid licenses. It can also help to notify about our new products as well as if there is an update for a mod.
It’s only to deal with serious clients. For those who want to use a nulled products, it’s quite easy to be passed. However, once it comes to Support and Customization time, they will see the differences between nulled and paid products.
We have released an upgrade to eliminate the re-verifying stage, more information is here, Core Module update
Q. What is your most popular add on?
A: Technically, it’s quite hard for us to say which Add-On is the most popular one when any module has its own place. But we might say the Social Package products are somehow the most interesting. Social Package includes: Social Connect, Social Media Importer, Social Publisher, Social Stream and Contact Importer. Any start-up social network site is most likely to need them, right?
Once a website’s basic needs are fulfilled, it needs something to distinguish from others. In this case, we do have modules and templates which are just right for them: Advanced Event, Mp3 Music Sharing, Petition, FoxFeeds Pro and so on.
Q. If someone finds a template of yours that they like or an add on, will you customize it if they need different colors or some things changed? Do you charge for this?
A: Yes we do offer customization service. The price is varied case by case.
Q. For custom templates or other projects, what would be an average turn-around time?
A: Again, it’s case by case basis. If clients already have clear mock-up, it might need around 1-2 weeks to have it on a staging server. Otherwise, we need to have our design team work with them. It usually takes 3-4 days for design and 1-2 weeks for integration and testing. It’s the same for module development and site building; we do have Business Analysis team ready for any idea.
Q. What size project will you accept? (Do you have a minimum size for projects?)
A: Technically, we do not have any barrier for that. Sometimes the sites need some tweaks to just be right. We do understand that, especially when it comes to customization on our own products. For another vendor’s products, it is usually depending on our resource status. We do have a team to take care of small projects.
Here are some of their products to check out.
Social Connect
From the developer's description:
Social Connect is a safe, faster, and easier way to log in by using existing accounts in Facebook, Twitter, Google, Yahoo, MySpace, LinkedIn, Windows Live, Hyves, and so on. With Social Connect, saving time to sign up and securing password will make your website more friendly, professional, and interactive. Social Connect not only helps you to reduce customer care and password recovery cost but also to achieve greater customer satisfaction by eliminating frustrations associated with forgotten user identities (usernames and passwords).
Social Stream
From the developer's description:
With Social Stream, your members will be able to get all activities from their Facebook’s Walls, Twitter accounts, such as new feed, tweet, someone sharing photo, video, even they have been tagged by others and so on. With “Privacy Setting”, members are able to set feed’s privacy to them, to their friends or to public. The ability to filter out feeds from Facebook, Twitter or site is also a plus; it keeps members’ wall in order.
Contact Importer
From the developer's description:
Contact Importer plugin is a great tool for users to expand their friend networks by inviting people from all social networks (Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Twitter, Hotmail, etc.). In addition, this plugin also empowers users to connect to all contacts from all major Email Providers.
YouLinked
From the developer's description:
YouLinked Template is an advanced template for PHPFox sites that need advanced level of graphics similar to the LinkedIn style. It is believed that YouLinked template is designed as a great choice to make PHPFox sites look interesting and suitable for both formal and professional styles.
YouDate
From the developer's description:
Attract single men and women to your website with our latest YouDate template. This dating template is specifically designed to fit any dating website – a fine, cost-effective and eye-catching layout to increase your site revenue.
There are so many more add ons by YouNet/Modules2Buy that we just had to stop at a few but please check them all out here, YouNet/Modules2Buy Add Ons.
Want a discount on Younet/Modules2Buy products? Use this coupon code:
FM1000IFocus
10% off for every purchase of Younet/Modules2Buy products
Redemption limitation: 50
Due date: May/31
Note the restrictions for the coupon code. It is available to the first 50 clients that use it and is only active until May 31, 2013.
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In the past couple of weeks we have focused on improving Phpfox in ways that we had only sporadically done in the past, more specifically performance, search engine optimization and security, to me personally these are the three pillars of a solid base script and I am really happy to be part of this.
In terms of performance we have taken two main fronts, first we looked at the database logs and worked with the slow query log to find inefficient queries and worked on improving them, in some cases it meant adding an index in the database and in others just changing the way the query worked; second, we implemented a more aggressive caching approach, we now cache things like the feeds (with their likes and comments), user information, list of friends (mutual friends, random friends displayed in the profile,...), recent viewers to a profile, events, user ratings, featured users,.... This allowed us to drop the calls to the database dramatically. There are two ways a cache item can be refreshed (meaning it needs a call to the database), one is that the cache expiration time is reached and the other is that the item changed, for example if a feed does not get new comments it will not be reloaded from the database, you can view it many times and it will be "free", but if you add a comment then it will require a database call and then be cached, subsequent views will be "free".
In regards to minifying CSS and JS we tried a few ways, a couple did work very nicely but for custom themes it wasn't so easy to profit from this benefit, so we opted for generating Master files (one JS and one CSS), the benefit is that JS and CSS code used throughout the site will be cached separately by the browsers, and smaller files are quicker to download for the browsers. Besides the Master files we also create a css and js file specific to the page being loaded, which ends up being a much smaller file because it does not contain the code from the Master. To further illustrate this let us say that in a brand new site a user goes for the first time to PageA, at this point the script generates the Master files and the CSS and JS files specific to PageA (4 files created), the user then goes to PageB and the script only creates the CSS and JS files specific to PageB (2 files) because the Master files were already generated, if the user then goes back to PageA the script will not create the files again because this was already done. This is different than in current versions since we create more files, but the benefits of this are well worth it since more code is cached is more efficiently both by the script and by the web browsers. Still, to place the cherry on top, these files can now automatically be pushed to CDN which was not possible in previous versions. A last improvement we made in this regards was to rename the cookie, the new name is "chocolate_sparkles" and it seems that web browsers like this better and run to get it faster than before.
Current add-ons and themes will remain compatible. This minification routine is intended to work with any theme in use: custom themes, edited default themes and themes using the custom.css will all work automatically, without any change needed by designers or developers.
We also implemented deferring of images, the effect is that instead of loading full images the script will send a tiny little image (36 bytes) and when the browser finished loading the page it loads the full image, in reality this only changes the order in which items are loaded and displayed to the user, making for a smoother experience as the page seems to load faster.
Of all the changes the only one that is not bound to a setting is to move the JS files to the end of body, but using the new minification routines and everything else can be switched off from the AdminCP.
For now this is all I have to report, we will continue keeping you updated with the progress made, our next step is to focus on SEO and Im sure this will be a great adventure.
All the best!
We are pleased to announce that phpFox version 3.5.0 RC 1 has been released.
This is a Release Candidate version and is officially supported by our team. We advice to not upgrade your live community until our product reaches Stable but please upgrade your development site so you can start testing the upgrade script and report any issues to us.
Our next release will be v3.5.0 Stable and is scheduled for March 12th.
To find out what is new with v3.5.0 check out our Beta 2 announcement.
Live Demo
View this version in action here.Download
This version can be downloaded directly from our clients area. When you have selected a license and reached the download page look for and tick/select "Download Older or Beta/RC Version". Then select "3.5.0rc1" from the drop down list. During Beta and RC anyone with a valid license will be able to access and download v3.Requirements
Requirements for v3 can be found here.Documentation
Changelog
We are pleased to announce that phpFox version 3.5.0 Beta 2 has been released.
Please note that this is a beta release and is not officially supported by our team. We advice to not upgrade your live community until our product reaches RC (Release Candidate). You can upgrade a development site so you can start testing the upgrade script and report any issues to us.
Our next release will be v3.5.0 RC1 and is scheduled for February 18th.
To find out what is new with v3.5.0 check out our Beta 1 announcement.
Live Demo
View this version in action here.Download
This version can be downloaded directly from our clients area. When you have selected a license and reached the download page look for and tick/select "Download Older or Beta/RC Version". Then select "3.5.0beta2" from the drop down list. During Beta and RC anyone with a valid license will be able to access and download v3.Requirements
Requirements for v3 can be found here.Documentation
Changelog
We are pleased to announce that phpFox version 3.5.0 Beta 1 has been released.
Please note that this is a beta release and is not officially supported by our team. We advice to not upgrade your live community until our product reaches RC (Release Candidate). You can upgrade a development site so you can start testing the upgrade script and report any issues to us.
Our next release will be v3.5.0 Beta 2 and is scheduled for January 30th.
What's New?
You can now Check-In from the Activity Wall
In bringing this feature we included two settings: "Enable Check-In" and "Google API Key", more information on the Google API Key can be found here.
Improved Photo Sections
The revamped photo system allows you to have bigger previews, get extra information about a photo when hovering over and a better menu in the profile.
Spam Stopping Question
You can now create your custom questions and paired them with a picture to protect better from spam signups.
Blog In Pages.
You can now have blogs in your pages
Timeline in Pages.
As you wanted it, pages now implement the timeline feature from profiles. You can enable this from the Manage Page section.
Dislike Items
You can allow your users to dislike items as well, just enable the AdminCP setting "Allow Dislike".
Remove Friend from Profile
A user group setting allows you to choose which user groups can see a link to remove a friend right from their profile.
We have also...
- Allowed Admins to set expire times for marketplace listings (AdminCP Setting "Days to Notify Expiring Listing" and "Days to Notify Expiring Listing".
- Hide members from the Browse Members section (user group setting in the "user" module).
- Delete original photos after they have been resized (AdminCP setting "Delete Original Photo After Resize")
- Added an AdminCP setting to not keep files in your HTTP server if you have a CDN enabled (Keep Files In Server).
- Added a user group setting to tell who can search users by their Zip code (module "user").
- Updated the Youtube player to use the iFrame instead of the object (AdminCP setting "Use Youtube iFrame")
- Improvements to the API were also completed but we will talk more about this in another blog entry
