Announcements on SWiK

Slidestory Bergman High School Announcements

Fri, 29 Aug 2008 08:56:32 -0700

Capistrano 2.5.0

Thu, 28 Aug 2008 20:57:56 -0700

Capistrano 2.5.0 is now available! You can read the full release announcement on the capify.org news blog.

qooxdoo 0.8 released

Thu, 28 Aug 2008 18:57:42 -0700

Finally, here it is: the most amazing piece of software we ever released.

qooxdoo 0.8 is a milestone, for sure. Unlike the minor jump in version number may suggest, this release includes tons of changes and improvements over the previous 0.7.3. It is impossible to account for all changes here, it's even hard for the most significant ones. So if you haven't closely followed the development of qooxdoo 0.8, you may just go ahead and see yourself to get an idea.

There have been two main areas that improved substantially: GUI toolkit and developer tool chain.

GUI Toolkit

qooxdoo 0.8 features a complete rewrite of the GUI toolkit. It is state-of-the-art and supports all major browsers (IE, Firefox, Safari, Opera). The GUI toolkit has a layered architecture: on-top of a low-level DOM-oriented layer (that might be used as a separate library), it includes a large set of widgets and layout managers (perfect for building RIAs). Online demos are available.

Users can very easily implement additional custom widgets or layouts to fit their individual needs. Theming of widgets continues to be independent from the widget code itself, and now allows for virtually unlimited styling possibilities, e.g. rounded borders, gradients, shadows. While qooxdoo comes with two new attractive themes, it is also easy to create custom themes, without any CSS knowledge required.

Special thanks go to ERGOSIGN, a leading provider of user interface design services. In a close and fruitful collaboration we created the new default theme, that nicely demonstrates some of the UI capabilities of qooxdoo 0.8. Indulge in the so-called "Modern" theme!

Tool Chain

Besides the exciting changes in the GUI toolkit, the developer tool chain has also been improved tremendously. The built-in tools free the developer from tedious and complex tasks and also aid in development.

Unlike the previous versions, which featured a Makefile-based build process and required Windows users to install and use Cygwin, in 0.8 all that ceremony is gone: Essentially, all that's needed is a working Python installation, which is trivial to setup on any operating system, including MS Windows.

With those low entrance hurdles any user should greatly benefit from the power of the integrated tool chain. There are too many features of 0.8 tooling to be mentioned here, but some highlights include image combination, integrated internationalization support, JSON-based configuration, etc. Of course, also API doc generation and unit testing.

Getting Started

API documentation is progressing towards full coverage. The wiki-based user manual of 0.8 is being updated and improved to account for all the changes and improvements.

It has never been easier to get started with qooxdoo: Download the qooxdoo 0.8 SDK package, unzip it, and see the included index.html for next steps in creating a hello world application.

Development

See the impressive number of commits over the time span of qooxdoo 0.8 development:

You notice the drop in 0.8 development activity end of last year? At that time we successfully supported and mastered large-scale qooxdoo application development. If you haven't checked out GMX.com, a large free webmail service, you should definitely do so. Some of the experience we gained from that task was also helping with the further development of qooxdoo 0.8.

Thanks

Many factors - but mostly people - play a key role in developing such a ground-breaking release. qooxdoo 0.8 could not have been possible without the many users, supporters, partners, contributors, developers and, of course, 1&1.

Thanks a lot for all your input, work and support!

Please see the release notes for a detailed list of changes. Go download and enjoy!

qooxdoo 0.8 released

Thu, 28 Aug 2008 18:54:47 -0700

Finally, here it is: the most amazing piece of software we ever released.

There have been two main areas that improved substantially: GUI toolkit and developer tool chain.

GUI Toolkit

Tool Chain

Getting Started

API documentation is progressing towards full coverage. The wiki-based user manual of 0.8 is being updated and improved to account for all the changes and improvements.

It has never been easier to get started with qooxdoo: Download the qooxdoo 0.8 SDK package, unzip it, and see the included index.html for next steps in creating a hello world application.

Development

See the impressive number of commits over the time span of qooxdoo 0.8 development:

Thanks

Thanks a lot for all your input, work and support!

Please see the release notes for a detailed list of changes. Go download and enjoy!

SQLite3-Ruby 1.2.3

Thu, 28 Aug 2008 18:10:12 -0700

SQLite3-Ruby version 1.2.3 is now available. It is a maintenance release, fixing just a few things:

The permissions on the database.rb and translator.rb files in 1.2.2 were incorrect, resulting in broken sqlite3-ruby installations for many *nix users. This is now fixed.
A few more Ruby 1.9 compatibility issues were patched.
Some optimizations were applied to speed up iterating over result sets.

To install or upgrade:

  gem install sqlite3-ruby

Thanks!

First release candidate of qooxdoo 0.8

Thu, 28 Aug 2008 18:08:16 -0700

We are getting closer to qooxdoo 0.8 final: a first release candidate is available.

Please download the corresponding package and take it for a test drive. There are some open issues that are planned to be tackled within the next few days. It would be great if you could report all issues you find while working with qooxdoo 0.8-rc1. Documentation of qooxdoo 0.8 is in the works and should become more complete and accurate day-by-day.

There have been many improvements after the beta version, so checkout the detailed release notes, run some demos.

Introducing Zoho Share: Sharepoint Meets YouTube

Thu, 28 Aug 2008 18:07:04 -0700

Many of you have used our applications to create, share and publish content. While you’ve had control on the creation part and the sharing part, there was little visibility on the published content. The documents you published are a list of URLs. We plan to change that with our new addition to Zoho Suite - Zoho Share.

Our vision for Zoho Share is Sharepoint meets YouTube: the business benefits of organizational document repositories, presented for the YouTube generation, with a friendly, familiar interface.

The Sharepoint part is very important: Zoho Share is a central place where we bring together all published content. If you are an individual publishing your documents, the content appears in Zoho Share under your profile. Zoho Business users have an option to publish the documents within the organization. In this case Zoho Share acts as a published document repository within (and only within) the organization. The analogy here is an organization’s internal Sharepoint repository, but with YouTube style enhancements.

Zoho Share is about content that is published and the people who publish it. All the public content from Zoho Writer, Sheet & Show can now be viewed in Zoho Share. You can browse through various documents, presentations, spreadsheets and PDFs under the Content section of Zoho Share. These different types of documents can be viewed in different modes. You can Comment, Rate, Bookmark, Email and Embed the content from Zoho Share.

The following video provides a quick overview of the application.

One of the unique functionality of Zoho Share is the ability to define a license for the content you upload/publish. Users can also view the content by the license type.

Under the People Section, Zoho Chat is integrated into Zoho Share to facilitate interaction between content creators and content consumers. ‘My Area’ section lets you view all your documents from Writer, Sheet & Show.

Currently documents published with Zoho Writer, Sheet & Show will appear in Zoho Share. Other content will follow. Going forward, we will also add the ability to publish documents directly to Zoho Share from other Zoho Apps.

Please note that only published documents will be listed under Zoho Share. Any shared documents will continue to remain private. If you wish to remove any public documents, please do so from the ‘My Area’ section in Zoho Share or the appropriate Zoho applications.

Please do give this a try and let us know what you think.

(Update: Reviews at TechCrunch, Webware, Mashable, …

Many reviewers think of it as “YouTube for documents” which Scribd & Docstoc have popularized. We view Zoho Share more of as “Sharepoint Meets YouTube” or “Sharepoint for the YouTube generation” which is a key difference. In keeping with it, we have avoided too much Flash (!) and kept the players as simple HTML/Javascript. It is an intentional design choice.)

Zoho Projects : Create Project templates, Bulk upload documents and more

Thu, 28 Aug 2008 18:07:04 -0700

Today’s Zoho Projects update brings in a few more goodies.

Project Templates : Zoho Projects has had Tasklist Templates for quite some time now. This has now been enhanced to include defining whole projects as templates. In addtion to defining tasklists, you can now have Milestones (consisting of various tasklists), documents, forum posts & users added to a template. And whenever a new project is created, you needn’t start from scratch but make a copy of a suitable project template (whereever applicable).

Bulk Upload Documents : Typically, when a new project gets started, you upload various documents like requirement docs, drawings, design plans, test procedures etc related to that project. What better way than to choose once and upload all of them in one go? Zoho Projects now offers multiple file uploads.

Log time : Logging time has now been made easier. A clock icon comes on moving your mouse over the days in the calendar view. You can click on it and log the time for your tasks in that project.

You can also log time, edit the logged time in the List View under the Timesheet tab now.

Do try the latest features in Zoho Projects.

MySQL Workbench 5.1 Alpha for Linux in Less Than 30 Days

Thu, 28 Aug 2008 18:05:40 -0700

A lot of people have been waiting for this a long time - so I am very happy to announce that we will publish the first Alpha that runs natively on Linux end of September. We will release generic binaries and the 5.1 source tarball including everything that is needed to build yourself.

This will not be a feature-complete beta release yet, but we are trying to get the basic functionality working so everybody can start modeling right away. We spent most of the last few months working on updating the Back-End implementation to use the GRTv4 and to prepare our platform-independent mForms. I expect the actual Front-End port to make good progress.

Let me share two screenshots I just made on Ubuntu, our Linux distro of choice. The first one shows the MySQL Model page. The Sakila demo model has been loaded.

The second screenshot shows the EER Diagram. This first Alpha will still use the software rendering option but we are looking forward to enable the OpenGL pretty soon.

Keep monitoring the blog - we will publish new screenshots as we go.

Recommended Add-ons

Thu, 28 Aug 2008 18:04:24 -0700

The Songbird add-on developer community has been on a tear! We’ve been seeing a ton of great add-ons being published lately. In order to help new Songbird users dive in with a good starter set of add-ons, we’ve taken a page from our friends at Mozilla and have published a list of recommended Songbird starter add-ons, hand-picked by the Songbird team.

This list is dynamic, and you can expect it to change over time as we identify those add-ons with broad community appeal. Your participation on the add-ons site is important in establishing which add-ons are most vital for new users, so be sure to use the rating tool and leave a comment on your favorite add-ons. We use a variety of statistics to help guide the selection but the key metric is community activity.

Tip: Check out the list in Songbird to get recommendations tailor fit for your platform and player version.

Songbird Beta is Released!

Thu, 28 Aug 2008 18:04:24 -0700

Songbird Beta is now available for download!

We’re excited to announce that Songbird is now in public Beta! This update to Songbird includes a new default look and feel, several new features, performance gains, improvements to stability and additional playback capabilities.

New Features

A New Look
We’ve completely redesigned Songbird to make it simpler and more intuitive. We’ve improved drag-and-drop throughout the application and worked to optimize music management vs. web browsing experiences.

Smart Playlists
Create dynamic playlists that automatically update based on criteria you set.

Concert Tickets
Discover upcoming shows in your area based on the artists in your library. Event listings powered by Songkick.

Last.fm Scrobbling
Integrated Last.fm support that allows you to scrobble, love, and ban your tracks.

Album Artwork
Display the currently playing track’s album art and write new artwork back to the file.

Note: If you are upgrading from an older version of Songbird, be sure to get the Concerts and Last.fm add-ons so you can enjoy all the new features we’re talking about!

Performance Enhancements

A lot of users have asked us to devote cycles to focusing on performance and stability improvements. We made substantial investments in this release and will continue to dedicate much of our next release to focusing on this area. In this release we:

Started our migration towards adopting GStreamer as our media core on all platforms. Starting with this release, GStreamer handles playback of FLAC files. In our next release, GStreamer will become our default media core and handle all codec playback and enable additional functionality, such as gapless playback.
Improved startup performance. Launching Songbird is now significantly faster than before, in some cases by several orders of magnitude.
Reduced memory usage on Windows and Linux by enabling jemalloc as Songbird’s memory allocator.
Reduced the time it takes to import media and scan metadata. On all platforms reading metadata is now twice as fast.
Improved search results and sort order by ignoring diacritics (like á, ö etc).

For Developers

We’ve created a simple guide for updating 0.6 Feathers to be 0.7.0 compatible.
We introduced a new Playback History API that allows add-on authors to access users’ playback history. The new Last.fm add-on is based on it.

Early Feedback on 0.7

“A marked improvement over the last release” - Jason Kincaid - TechCrunch

“Songbird’s new UI is also a major improvement” - Sarah Perez - ReadWriteWeb

What’s Next

As we march towards a 1.0 release, our goal is to improve existing features while continuing to focus on performance gains and stability issues. Stay tuned to the blog to keep up to date, or if you like to live dangerously check out one of our nightly builds and see the progress for yourself!

We’re always interested in hearing your feedback so please comment below and file bugs and/or feature requests in bugzilla.

First release candidate of qooxdoo 0.8

Thu, 28 Aug 2008 18:02:29 -0700

We are getting closer to qooxdoo 0.8 final: a first release candidate is available.

There have been many improvements after the beta version, so checkout the detailed release notes, run some demos.

Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 and Web Standards

Thu, 28 Aug 2008 18:01:08 -0700

Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 was released today. There are several cool UI enhancements that this beta brings to the table that I won't cover in this post, but you can learn more about them on the IEBlog. Instead, I want to talk about how beta 2 affects IE's relationship to web standards.

First, CSS Expressions are no longer supported in Standards Mode:

Also known as 'Dynamic Properties', CSS expressions are a proprietary extension to CSS with a high performance cost. As of Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2, CSS expressions are not supported in IE8 standards mode. They are still supported in IE7 Strict mode and Quirks mode for backward compatibility.

In case you don't know, CSS expressions were actual bits of JavaScript that you could run from CSS rules; this was commonly used to simulate the CSS max-width property for IE:

PLAIN TEXT

CSS:

div.someClass {
/* Internet Explorer */
width: expression(document.body.clientWidth> 600) ? "600px" : "auto";
/* Standards-compliant browsers */
max-width: 600px;
}

IE 8 beta 2 also now supports alternate style sheets:

Internet Explorer 8 now supports alternative style sheets as specified by HTML4 and CSS2.1. The alternative styles that are defined by the Web page author is available through the Style menu under the Page menu. The styles are also available through the Style menu under the View menu. The No Style option on either menu can be used to disable all authors styling.

In terms of the Known Issues with IE 8 Beta 2, the first is related to Ajax bookmarking and back button support and using window.location.hash to do cross-domain communication:

Internet Explorer 8 create entries in the travel log and back button for each instance of window.location.hash that is set. This is part of the behavior for Internet Explorer 8 AJAX Navigation. If you use this technique to communicate between documents, we recommend that you switch to the Internet Explorer 8 Cross Document Messaging feature that is based on Section 6.4 of the HTML 5.0 specification.

Finally, there are some issues with the onload event for IE's XDomainRequest object that helps with cross-domain communication:

The onload event may not fire reliably. We recommend you use the onprogress events which continues to fire as the data is received.

Unfortunately this is it for this release. You can see the full Beta 2 release notes, or download it yourself.

On a related note, IE 8 Beta 2 includes cross-site scripting attack (XSS) protection:

The XSS Filter operates as an IE8 component with visibility into all requests / responses flowing through the browser. When the filter discovers likely XSS in a cross-site request, it identifies and neuters the attack if it is replayed in the server’s response. Users are not presented with questions they are unable to answer – IE simply blocks the malicious script from executing.

Finally, PPK has also published a post on IE 8 Beta 2 and its changes.

Drupal in Libraries

Thu, 28 Aug 2008 17:54:01 -0700

"Drupal in Libraries" is the subject of the May / June edition of Library Technology Reports. (http://www.techsource.ala.org/ltr/drupal-in-libraries.html) Authors Andy Austin (aaustin) and Chris Harris (cgharris) present an overview of Drupal for the library audience hoping to show why and how libraries can get started using Drupal.

Library Technology Reports is published by ALA Techsource, a unit of the publishing department of the American Library Association. The ALA Techsource website also runs on Drupal.

Click To Play

Pro Drupal Development ships for Drupal 6!

Thu, 28 Aug 2008 17:54:00 -0700

The much-anticipated second edition of Pro Drupal Development has shipped! Newly updated and revised for Drupal 6, it includes more than 200 pages of additional content covering the Actions API for automating complex operations, the Batch API tools for managing long or complex processes, and other new tools. As with the first edition, it covers important foundational issues like building modules, working with FormAPI and the node system, using Drupal's search tools, and more. Purchases of the book made through its web site also benefit the Drupal Association.

When Pro Drupal Development was first released in 2007, it was a runaway success, hitting the Amazon.com top 100 in just a few days. As critical tools like Views, CCK, and Drupal are shipping for Drupal 6, the book's release should help give another important boost to the Drupal development community.

Spring Integration 1.0 Milestone 6 Released

Thu, 28 Aug 2008 17:50:58 -0700

Dear Spring community,
We are pleased to announce that Spring Integration 1.0.0.M6 is now available.
Download | Reference Documentation | JavaDoc

To see a list of features added and issues resolved since Milestone 5, view the changelog. For more information, visit the Spring Integration Home or join the discussion at the Spring Integration Forum. Community feedback is more important than ever as we approach the Release Candidate.

Mark Fisher
Spring Integration Lead

Upcoming Web Site Changes

Thu, 28 Aug 2008 17:50:58 -0700

The Spring community web site has always been the best place to get all the information you need about Spring and Spring related projects. With the goal of better serving the developers and architects that use Spring and improving their overall web experience, in the next couple of weeks, we will be making some changes and enhancements to the SpringFramework.org web site. These changes include:

A new look and feel that emphasizes the Spring community
Navigation changes to make key projects and resources easier to find
Content reorganization to improve the grouping of related content
Better integration of the multiple systems that the Spring community commonly use

If you want to make requests for features, can't find a previous resource that has changed in the update or if you just want to provide some feedback then send a message to the web design team. Thanks for your patience during these changes.

Spring.NET 1.2.0 M1 Released

Fri, 15 Aug 2008 08:14:09 -0700

Dear Spring Community,

We are pleased to announce that Spring .NET 1.2.0 M1 has been released.

Download | Support | Documentation | Changelog

This release contains the following new features:

WCF Integration - Configure WCF services using dependency injection. Apply AOP advice to WCF services.
MSMQ integration - MSMQ helper classes to increase your productivity developing messaging applications. Provides integration with Spring's transaction management features.
ApacheMQ integration - Helper classes to increase your productivity developing messaging applications with ActiveMQ/NMS
TIBCO EMS integration - Helper classes to increase your productivity developing messaging applications with TIBCO EMS
Quartz integration - Configure Quartz jobs, schedulers, triggers using dependency injection. Convenience classes for implementing Quartz Jobs and integration with Spring's transaction management features.
AOP - New inheritance based AOP proxy generation.
NHibernate 2.0 RC1 support.

Other notable items

Improvements were made to regarding web dependency injection performance.
QuickStart applications are available for WCF, Quartz, MQMQ, and EMS integration.

Please refer to the changelog for additional details.

Enjoy!

Support Drupal: Sponsor Drupalcon Szeged

Thu, 14 Aug 2008 12:05:59 -0700

Update, August 20: After some more sponsors have come forward (thank you!), Drupalcon Szeged now needs about €10,000 of new sponsorship to meet costs.

Looking for a way to show your support for Drupal? Easy: sponsor the upcoming European Drupalcon. You'll be helping to fund critically important work--and increasing your exposure and profile in the community at the same time.

Drupalcon sponsorship: mainstay of the Drupal Association

Drupalcon is the single largest source of revenue for the Drupal Association, the non-profit that supports Drupal. Sponsorship revenues make it possible for us to tackle key Association priorities, from protecting the legal integrity of the Drupal codebase to improving the infrastructure driving drupal.org.

Revenue from past Drupalcons is directly funding pressing projects like our top priority this year: improving the drupal.org website. Sponsoring Drupalcon is a direct and concrete way to financially support the Association's work.

Profile and Benefits

Sponsoring Drupalcon is not just a way to support important work promoting the Drupal platform. It's also an opportunity for exposure and profile in the Drupal community.

Drupal 6.4 and 5.10 released

Wed, 13 Aug 2008 19:05:28 -0700

Download Drupal 6.4
Download Drupal 5.10

Drupal 6.4 and Drupal 5.10, maintenance releases fixing problems reported using the bug tracking system, as well as critical security vulnerabilities, are now available for download.

Upgrading your existing Drupal 5 and 6 sites is strongly recommended. There are no new features in these releases. For more information about the Drupal 6.x release series, consult the Drupal 6.0 release announcement, more information on the 5.x releases can be found in Drupal 5.0 release announcement.

Mark Boulton Design named redesign partner by Association

Wed, 13 Aug 2008 17:05:55 -0700

The Drupal Association is pleased to announce the selection of a design partner in its Drupal.org redesign efforts. Through a competitive process, UK-based Mark Boulton Design Ltd. was selected. Their proposal stood out because of their work on Coolspotters and the upcoming Standaard.be (launching Q4 2008), their agile design approach and their highly-experienced project team including Mark Boulton as Creative Director and project lead, Leisa Reichelt as Information Architect & UX Research and Carolyn Wood as Content Strategist.

Macro Recording & Playback in Zoho Sheet

Wed, 13 Aug 2008 07:03:47 -0700

Some of you may know that we recently launched Macros (and Pivot Tables) support in Zoho Sheet. With our recent update, we now have a new addition - Support for Visual Basic Macro Record & Playback in Zoho Sheet.

While writing Macros from scratch requires knowledge of Visual Basic, recording Macros for your spreadsheet just needs couple of mouse clicks. Under the Macros Menu, you’ll now see the ‘Record Macro’ option to record your Macro.

After you start recording, all the changes you make to the spreadsheet will be recorded and the appropriate Visual Basic code will be created at the back-end for you. Once you are done recording, you can view the Visual Basic Macro code and apply that Macro to other Sheets.

This video shows this functionality in action.

We have been rolling out quite a number of features and enhancements to our applications and some of them give us a great level of satisfaction.This new feature in Zoho Sheet certainly falls into this category.

The fact that Zoho Sheet is the only spreadsheet (apart from Excel) to support Visual Basic Macros says a lot about our focus on the depth of our individual applications. With feature-rich apps, we are trying to address the business needs of our user base.

Please give this new Zoho Sheet functionality a try and let us know what you think.

Show your support for Drupal at South by Southwest!

Tue, 12 Aug 2008 16:05:11 -0700

South by Southwest (SXSW) is an annual festival and conference held every spring in Austin, Texas, dedicated to bringing together creative indviduals from around the world for a week-long celebration of music, film, and interactive technology. The interactive portion of the festival features over 150 panel discussions on cutting-edge topics in the new media industry and culture, as well as a trade show, Web Awards Competition, video game tournament, and some great after-parties.

MySQL Workbench 5.0.24 online

Tue, 12 Aug 2008 15:14:03 -0700

Finally, the next release of version 5.0 is available on our download servers. During summer time, our release-cycle got a bit loose, but we’re about to tighten that again so the next release will hit the servers in less than a month again. 24 bugs were closed since release 5.0.23. Unfortunately one of the bugs discovered lately (and of course fixed in this release) was a bug in our auto-update module that could lead to a crash of Workbench when updater tried to close the running application. As a result, we had to deactivate automatic updates for versions < 5.0.24 so please fetch you copy manually this time via our download page. All customers of SE version please log into your account and download the updated SE package from there - sorry for the inconvenience.
The ongoing work on version 5.1 is making good progress, while we’re further decreasing the number of remaining bugs in 5.0. Download our latest build - manually this time - and keep on designing …

Randy Charles Morin Becomes RSS Advisory Board Chair

Tue, 12 Aug 2008 10:13:32 -0700

Randy Charles Morin has become the chairman of the RSS Advisory Board, taking over for Rogers Cadenhead, who will continue as a member.

Morin, a member of the board since 2006, is an RSS software developer who created the enormously popular RSS-to-email service SendMeRSS, which had 50,000 users when it was sold to NBC Universal in 2007. Morin began the site -- originally called R-Mail, as a personal project, turning it into a business when it grew by 15,000 users over a 90-day period.

A member of the RSS community who's been evangelizing the format for years, Morin publishes the RSS Blog, a how-to site forRSS publishers and developers that has more than 6,800 subscribers toits feed.

While on the board, Morin led the development of the RSS Best Practices Profile, a set of recommendations that make it easier for feed publishers and programmers to implement RSS 2.0.

New "Getting Involved" docs handbook coming!

Mon, 11 Aug 2008 13:06:07 -0700

There has been a lot of work going on in the Docs team lately and we want to share that with the larger community. The biggest news that will impact everyone is that we are in the process of creating a new top-level handbook to be added to drupal.org, called "Getting Involved." It will be listed along with the other handbooks on the main Documentation landing page as well as be the new target for the Contribute tab. We have also been working on other plans and ideas to collaborate on the docs. Here is a run down of the cool stuff we have to shout about.

Automatic Payment Reminders For Invoices

Mon, 11 Aug 2008 05:03:14 -0700

Our goal is to make invoicing fast, easy and painless for our customers. When we say invoicing, we include the entire process of creating, sending, tracking and managing the invoices. More often than not, tracking and following-up for payments takes a lot of time and energy than the other activities. We clearly understand this. So, here we are in line with our goal introducing a brand new feature “Automatic Payment Reminders” which we hope will definitely help reduce your pain points.

Yes, now you can automate the process of sending payment reminders to your customers. We have tried to make this feature as flexible as possible (at least that is what we think :~))

You can specify when each of these reminders has to be sent. Say for example you can configure that the first reminder has to be sent 2 days after the invoice due date, the second one 14 days after the due date and the third one 21 days after the due date.
You have full control over the content of each of these reminders, still better you can make use of the placeholders in the content.
You also have complete control over who has to be notified via each of these reminders. You can send it to yourself or send it to your customers directly and have yourself copied.

Configuring these automatic payment reminders is simple,

Click on the “Settings” link and select the “Payment Reminders” link under “Invoice Settings”.
In the “Payment Reminder” page that comes up each of these reminders can be configured by clicking on the appropriate row in the table.

You can try out this feature by signing into Zoho Invoice now. We would definitely like to hear your comments and don’t forget to drop us a note when you enjoy using this feature.

Happy Invoicing
Siva

Gábor got married yesterday!

Sun, 10 Aug 2008 12:03:15 -0700

I've been working with Gábor for almost 5 years. First as a contributor to Drupal, next as my Drupal 6 co-maintainer, and more recently as a co-worker at Acquia. Yesterday, Gábor got married, so needless to say, a number of us traveled to Hungary to attend his wedding. In the picture below, you can see some of the Drupal people that were present.

Announcing Drupalcon Szeged draft program, ticket discount extended until this Friday

Thu, 07 Aug 2008 02:02:39 -0700

We have just published our draft session schedule for Drupalcon Szeged 2008 yesterday based on feedback from you, the track chair selections and available rooms and timeslots. While building up the program, we took great care to find enough time for attendees to network, discuss code and business.

The unconference never received so much attention at Drupalcons. We set aside three workshop rooms for bigger BoFs, and now allow you to schedule your BoFs yourselves way in advance. It was a popular request to be able to know the unconference program before the event for easier planning (even though this goes against the unconference definition a bit). While BoF speakers can modify their placement whenever they see appropriate (even on the day their BoF would be held), the pre-scheduling possibility might help you gauge the wealth of program available on this event. You will be able to submit and schedule new BoF proposals on the spot in Szeged, but submitting earlier will help you get more attention to your topic.

Some early quotes we have heard about our program include Peter Wolanin of Acquia saying yesterday: Hmm, I might have to cancel all my BoFs - too many sessions I want to see! and Mikkel Høgh of Peytz & Co tweeting just took a look at the tentative Drupalcon schedule [...] – so much to see, so little time. It's going to be hard to pick….

Now that the program is out and unconference sessions are put into place, we thought you might decide easier to attend Drupalcon. So to make it a trivial decision, we extended our discount on tickets until this Friday. You can still buy 120 EUR tickets for Drupalcon today and tomorrow. If you are still not among those registered, don't miss the opportunity now!

At last but not least, some sponsor spots are still available and we are now selling booths at the different exhibitions as well. If your company would like to reach the hundreds of Drupal people at the event, or would like the developers among them to resell your hosting or other services to their customers, you should sign up as soon as possible to get into our booklet and have maximum impact.

Knight Drupal Initaitive Monthly Proposal Review -- 7 August 2008

Wed, 06 Aug 2008 12:02:52 -0700

The Knight Drupal Initiative is an ongoing grant program for Drupal development. To make the program successful, community review of proposals is essential.

We will meet for the next round of proposal reviews on Thursday, August 7th at 15:00 Eastern (US) (19:00 UTC). This meeting is part of our ongoing monthly review meetings. To be held in #drupal-dojo on IRC [freenode]. (See http://drupal.org/irc for information.)