Trip out to 3 years of bitweaver code

Here is a cool graph created by /nickpalmer from our CVS source commits:


Bitweaver Code_Swarm from Nick Palmer on Vimeo.

bitweaver is community powered software. All of our contributors help with bitweaver because that enables them to complete their own endeavours, be it personal or professional. With our increased number of commits and features, bitweaver is looking for some talented individuals to help us grow. Any and all help is welcome, however, we do have several particular needs:

• Project Manager 1 position - This is an Project Admin level position open for anyone with a strong sense of organization, and a passion for web technology. Coding skills not required.
• Community Manager 2 positions - Help nuture and lead the community by tending to our forums, blogs, and outreach to other websites. Coding skills not required.
• Release Manager 2 positions - URGENT Unix shell guru need to get our ReleaseProcess going when so we can improve our release frequency. Also tends the bug database . Coding skills not required.
• Webmaster 1 position - Upkeep of the entire bitweaver.org website, in particular the wiki and usability improvements. No technical skills required, just a power user knowledge of bitweaver.
• Software Developers are always welcome. Top notch coding skills required.

If interested, please contact us on IRC or the bitweaver-core mailing list.

A significant new utility has been added to the TreasuryPackage: A script for converting it into your own custom gallery package. You say, "a custom gallery package? wha? who cares?, a gallery is a gallery is a gallery". So you might think, but think again. One of the great things about Treasury is that its generic, galleries with items and sub galleries in them. You can store anything in there. However, this is also its weakness for people looking for more specific gallery-to-item relationships. If you want to have say a gallery of data uploads, say word processing documents for example, or podcasts and audio episodes, would you want those all mixed in Treasury? And if you had those things on your site and did a search, would you want all results to say "TreasuryItems" even though some are Documents, and others are Podcast Episodes? With a new shell script included with Treasury you can convert the package to unique content types so that you can customize the package for those content types.

In Treasury you'll now find mkpackage.sh. You can run this file on the command line to convert Treasury to any package you want, and you can replace the content types of the TreasuryGallery and TreasuryItem with your own custom names. A great example is to consider if you want a PodcastsPackage. Podcasts are basically rss feeds of related mp3 files. Using the Treasury we can host multiple podcast programs, each with its own feed. Treasury Galleries are converted to Podcasts and Treasury Items are converted to episodes. Using the included shell script we just run:


and poof! we have a Podcasts package with unique content types. You can then add to this package if you want to customize it even further.

Because Treasury does not make perfect podcast rss feeds (after all its a general gallery package and does not include special rss tags for iTunes and such) we've created a few extra files that you can download as a podcasts kit. This has a special feeds file and some templates that have been customized to make your podcasts layout look nice. This kit also shows how with just a little tweaking of a TreasuryPackage conversion you can make new robust features for your website.

The great thing about this too is, by creating new content types from Treasury, you can have multiple instances of Treasury installed on your site, each a conversion from the original package, each tailored for a specific use.

Hope you enjoy.

After much work the past three months we proudly announce the beta release of 5 new packages: GroupsPackage, LibertySecurePackage, ModerationPackage, ModCommentsPackage, SwitchboardPackage. These packages are stable enough to use on small sites, and we are looking for people to test them out. These packages can be obtained from cvs code repository or the links below. If you decide to run them you need to use them with the latest release R2.0.2 or update your install from cvs as well. Many upgrades to bitweaver have happened in the process of developing these packages. Because these are in Beta there will be minimal schema changes, there may in fact be none, but there is the off chance we may make a couple - changes will be posted to the SchemaChangelog.

Download Them Now:

Download Groups (requires all others)
Download Liberty Secure
Download Moderation
Download Mod Comments
Download Switchboard

Be sure to read the important install instructions on the GroupsPackage page.

Website developers will likely find the Groups and Liberty Secure packages the most exciting. Groups lets you create user group spaces on your website like Google Groups or Fickr Groups. However the Groups package goes beyond what you can do with Google Groups, letting groups include any variety of content types within their group. The Groups package fills a missing core component in bitweaver making its base feature set competitive with the most popular open source CMSs. You'll find more information about Groups capabilities on the package page linked above. Liberty Secure for its part is an extension of the custom content permissions of Liberty. Liberty Secure will provide strict permissions enforcement across all access points - most notably lists which under conventional custom content permissions do not limit access on private content. For those trying to run a tight security configuration Liberty Secure is indispensable. Website admins will also enjoy the features of ModComments which let admins and/or content owners hold comments for approval before they are made public.

CMS developers will likely find Switchboard and Moderations packages even more exciting. These are new system services that developers can build other features with. Switchboard is a communications package that provides a central way to register and send messages. It's registry and message sending functions greatly simplify setting up events like sending emails to groups of users. Moderations similarly provides a registry, but for defining ticket like processes. Developers can define the steps of a process and Moderations takes care of managing the process.

If you decide to install any of them, and would like to help us with final debugging please join us on IRC freenode channel #bitweaver and let us know.

Release of a bitweaver Vmware Appliance

Ever wondered if bitweaver could be the solution for your next web project? May it be a blog, a news site with a forum or a portal for much more services. Bitweaver can do this for you.

Yeah, most CMS say, that they have this or that feature, that you can "do it all with just 2 mouse clicks". So how are you going to know, which one would be the right one? Why don't you try for yourself what bitweaver can do for you?

The easy way to explore bitweaver is to just download the bitweaver VM and try it out without having to worry about your own system or configuring a web server or how to set u…

It seems we are facing similar problem like the guys from Openbravo - bitweaver has been actively deleted from Wikipedia. After several failed attempts to create the page, it was even deleted from the List of content management systems. The Bitweaver Wikipedia "issue" should be resolved as fast as possible.