Questing for the Digital Grail

Again time for little status.
Although some people could think that the application is dead, I can reassure that it isn´t, I have just been facing huge problems with my company, which I have been running during the last years, and which has grown into an interesting company dedicated to entertainment. It has taken me a lot of time, and now, I am trying to comeback to my original idea, and make CM4F progress again.
If everything is going fine, I might even consider getting onboard a fulltime team to actually make the solution move forward.

This will create a couple of changes in the project, as a lot of things have progressed in this area aswell.

I when first start this project, it was called mail2forum and it was only focused in integrating mailinglists and forums,as to create a gateway that could bridge both worlds. I release the project into opensource (www.mail2forum.com) and then I decided to try to move into another direction than the one that project opensourced was taking.

Instead of focusing only in phpBB and in one mailinglist, I decided to make as open as possible an to create a system to bridge biderectionally mailinglists, mails, and other texts based messages systems into multiforum formats, as to create an effective community messaging system. Community a big name back then. Now they are called social networks.

And this were I am trying to head. CM4F is intented to become a Virtual Router for Messaging systems, and I am planning to try to integrate Social Networks as well. Which would mean, that from Facebook, you could get a message post into linkedin or vice versa or on twitter, or on PhpBB, or on XoopsBB or in Vbulletin, or in mailinglist, etc… Seems interesting? I found it extremely interesting, and it is were I am focusing right now.

I have been creating source forge project that I will be communicating shortly, and I am planning to try to get people to work with me on this as an opensource.

Come on and join in the fun.

I was coming to the site, just to see that the last date, was from April. I am very sorry for that, again I have been delayed with progress and status update.
I know that there is a lot of people interested in testing the product, but unfortunetly, I am stuck at the moment with my reallifejob. Let’s see If can make some time free to free the last files in the sourceforge account.

Regards,
D.

Just a quick status update as to have everyone on the same level of knowledge.

I am currently setting up the site, and the support forum which will be again phpbb, and not any version of postnuke/zikula, I am trying to recover the information, as they were  in the database important content for the community with answers to a huge list of known problems, that it not recovered will have people asking them again, or people new to the system to be lost with the system installation or setup.

After that, I will start to upload the content of the builds to the sourceforge, that will be cm4f.sourceforge.net

Thank you all for your patience, but it is very hard to keep an opensource product while working and taking care of a family

Regards,

D.

Over the last years with the evolution of communication lines, hardware, and technology associated with videogames production, the number of MMO games available for players has been growing at an incredible pace, and above all of them, World of Warcraft, that has been generating incredible profits, not only directly to the creators, but also to a large network of  parallel economies, that have been able to take the rising curve of players and revenues from the WOW and create their own  business activity out of it.

There is a wide variety of supporting services to the orignal WOW service, that have been able to create a competitive space on their own, and create an added value to players as to have them using their services.

One of those services is <a href=”http://www.buymmoaccounts.com/wow-game-cards”> buymmoaccounts.com</a> a website dedicated to sell and buy  <a href=”http://www.buymmoaccounts.com/wow-game-cards”>world of warcraft game time</a> or WoW Accounts , yes, as you have read, game time, that allows players to sell there account if they want to get out of it, or if they have been able to create an interesting and powerfull character and want to make some profit out of it, or in the reverse option, if they don´t have time to actually play the game, or they don´t  to have a long term relationship with Blizzard, to buy a smaller access to the game with World of Warcraft accounts . So basically, they put in contact two opposite needs and have been able to create a very interesting marketplace for it with a common mean WoW Accounts.

When I first came to the site, I was having my own doubts about it, and about the overall finality of the site, but after having read for a while the rich information available, it was quite clear for me,   the several options made available and to process my order. I was not aware of services  to trade WoW Accounts, and it was very interesting to understand the core of business and how from, WoW Accounts, you could actually define a business.

The site is very cleanly designed and very well designed, you can see instantly all the options, and most of it, as it should into a commercial site, is about giving you confidence about it, and that you can trust your financial data to the company behind it, as displayed by all the certifying tags in the top of the site. All the options available for the potential customer are clearly displayed and each of the options is well documented as to make the potential buyer/seller about the process to be followed and about the security of their private information ( as we are trading WoW Accounts with people accounts and people data).

Contact information  is given a high importance, and you see several contact channels to the company behind the site, and you can see immediatly that they are a business that understands the nature of the product being sold, and that customers will have doubts, problems or issues that will require direct contact with the company representatives as to provide a high quality service. I have not my self needed to contact them, as I was able from the rich information to understand exactly all the steps to be taken.

Once the product is put on the shopping cart, the overall checkout and payment process is fast and well documented, payment information is treated with the same level of professionality as the other processes, a wide variety of payment mechanisms is provided, which makes the task easy for the buyer or the seller, which is able to provide several ways to receive the money from the transaction.

In deed a very interesting site of WOW fans.

Once the product is put on the shopping cart, the overall checkout and payment process is fast and well documented, payment information is treated with the same level of professionality as the other processes

When you deal with communities software, you are always interested about any tool released that is, somewhat, close yours, as to understand what are the core features, and if they can be added to yours as to improve it.

In the last weeks I have giving a lot of attention to the open source tools used to build social networks, trying to understand how they work, and if they could in any mode be useful to CM4F, because in the end, social networks are for individuals to gather between themselves, but they can be also belonging to a community, which means that it would make sense to have some kind of integration.

My quest for those tools has taken me to believe that the following tools are the ones more advanced/stable:

(list taken adapted from http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/the-5-best-open-source-social-networking-software/)

1. Elgg.org

http://elgg.org/

Elgg has just won the best open source social networking platform for the year 2008, so there is no doubt about the usability of this software. Overall, Elgg is a powerful software that offers blog, networking, community, collection of news using feeds aggregation and file sharing features. In fact, it is one of the most versatile pieces of software that offers almost everything you need to start a social networking site.

Elgg operates on a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySql and Php) environment and it is easy to install and configure. With a little php knowledge, you can get your social networking site up and running in no time.

2. Mahara

http://mahara.org/

Unlike the rest of the social networking software that is meant for general use, Mahara is designed as a platform to allow its users to demonstrate their life-long learning, skills and development to selected audiences. With Mahara, you can create an e-Portfolio platform and set up an online learner community. Features in the software include blogs, a resume builder, a file manager, institutions detail and the social networking aspect where you can add and maintain your list of friends.

Mahara runs on LAMP, although Postgres is preferred over MySql.

3. Lovd by Less

http://lovdbyless.com/

Lovd by Less is among the first and only few open-source social networking platforms built on Ruby on Rails. Some features of Lovd by Less include blogs, photo gallery with captions, site search for friends, activity update and user-to-user messaging. Other things that are built into the software include Flickr and YouTube integration.

4. Xoops with Yogurt extension

http://www.xoops.org

XOOPS is an extensible CMS that allows you to build sites based on your needs. You can first start off as a personal blog and expand later to include social networking, forum and much more via the use of appropriate modules.

Yogurt is the particular module that allows you to build a social networking site with XOOPS. You can setup your personal album of pictures, videos from YouTube, mp3 files, add your list of friends, a public wall for messages (scraps), to create communities (tribes) and many more useful features.

XOOPS and Yogurt are based on php and work well in the LAMP environment.

5. Inoshi

http://github.com/insoshi/insoshi/tree/master

The open source social networking platform in Ruby on Rails from the author of RailsSpace

6. Drupal

http://www.drupal.org

Drupal is a free software package that allows an individual or a community of users to easily publish, manage and organize a wide variety of content on a website. Tens of thousands of people and organizations are using Drupal to power scores of different web sites, including

• Community web portals
• Discussion sites
• Corporate web sites
• Intranet applications
• Personal web sites or blogs
• Aficionado sites
• E-commerce applications
• Resource directories
• Social Networking sites

One of the most diffult problems that some one who uses intensivly his computer for work and for fun, is to actually manage correctly the file extensions associated with the files used in his system. It is usually a nightmare to keep them up to date, or even to know exactly their use, or how to get the right programs to read it, or in some cases, to actually remove them from the system.

I didn´t had any clue about this new File Extension DWG and that the possibilities that it was bringing for the graphics applications, so it was actually very interesting to read about its description, which in my opinion could be a little longer and probably with more content like a demo or references.

www.fileextensiondwg.net is an interesting site, that a part from providing some interesting file extensions definitions, like the File Extension DWG, but refers also to a very interesting software called Driver Detective, that is able to analyse your system, and give you and update on the status of the drivers being used on your system. The system is easy to use and after a couple of minutes of search gives you a detailed view of the status of your system regarding the drivers in place used, and which are actually needed and importan, or the ones that are actually useless.

File Extension DWG is being controlled by Autodesk and used  specifically
by the Autocad suite and it is the main format being used to transfer files
between CAD (Computer Aided Design) software and CAMs ( Computer Aided
Manufacturing) systems, which allows systems to integrate the production
pipeline of industrials plants.

If you can configure your browser to open it
by adding the following mime types :

Mime: application/acad
Mime: application/autocad
Mime: image/vnd
Mime: image/vnd.dwg
Mime: image/x-dwg
 

As part of the came back that I want to introduce to the new CM4F, I will be moving all the development files to the Sourceforge acccount, as to guarantee that the source codes and the packages are always available independently of the community site.

This will improve the code management of the project, and allow other people to access the code and contribute to it, of one or all the versions where the system is able to run.

Regards,

D.

Over the past weeks, with a lot of problems with the postnuke/zikula branch, I have decided to stop using it, and to split the site between the overall functionalities that I think are needed to actually keep developing CM4F.

The first one is to setup the BLOG part with wordpress, which will allow me to create a better community communication tool as to keep the status of the project more transparent.

In the next weeks, I will be including back the content to the forums supported by CM4F, and but a more clean look for the overall strucutre of the modules.

regards,

D.