Wednesday, September 30, 2015

Our September Bitnami Power User: Bob Stolzberg


We sat down with Bob Stolzberg of CenturyLink, a Principal Engineer (and avid fan of Bitnami's JBoss and Tomcat Blueprints) whom we worked with closely during our Bitnami Blueprints launch on the CenturyLink Cloud. After learning about our ‘Power Users’ monthly feature he contacted our COO directly to express how much he loves Bitnami resources. Naturally, we jumped at the chance to offer Bob our September Power User spot!

Bob is the ultimate evangelist. If there is ever a chance to utilize our web apps and stacks on a daily basis around the CenturyLink office he is the first one to recommend us. Check out a helpful blog post he recently authored, “Spinning Up Servers and Performance Monitoring in Minutes.”

He kindly got on the phone to walk our team through CenturyLink’s amazingly optimized Cloud Platform where our Bitnami Blueprints live. It’s incredibly easy for CenturyLink fans to navigate and deploy Bitnami Blueprints on their cloud platform, which made them a natural fit for a Bitnami partnership. The Bitnami Team is stoked to present Bob’s Power User Q&A. Read on and learn more about one of our favorite CenturyLink engineers, Bob Stolzberg:

What is your occupation? 

Principal Engineer at CenturyLink

What are your hobbies? 

In my spare time I enjoy hunting, fishing, metal detecting and spending time with my family.

Why did you start using Bitnami, and for what purposes? 

I started using Bitnami to automate the installation and configuration of a stack through Blueprints on the CenturyLink Cloud. A developer can rapidly ‘spin-up’ a LAMP stack (for example) in a low-cost environment, craft a blueprint that calls the Bitnami Blueprint as a base (everything is scalable and interactive), and have their customer information automatically configured every time. It’s very apparent that, much like CenturyLink, Bitnami is focused on speed and productivity.

What projects are you currently working on? 

Lots. :) Recently, I was involved in the task of helping to integrate Bitnami Blueprints with the CenturyLink Cloud. The magic of [CenturyLink’s] control panel is that you can easily/quickly configure and download Blueprints in under 1 minute. It was a fun project to work on as I’m a personal fan of both.

Do you have any favorite stacks/apps in the Bitnami Library? 

LAMP, MEAN, WAMP, Magento, Piwik, WordPress. Most recently I deployed Piwik to share project updates with a small team of developers and contractors inside CenturyLink.

How do you evangelize the Bitnami brand to peers/friends? 

I tell all of my friends and coworkers about Bitnami whenever I’m provided the opportunity. Just makes life simple and incredibly easy to install software.

We love to hear hear from our users, and we would love to hear about your personal experience with Bitnami as well. Feel free to reach out to us, and you might just be the next Bitnami Power User!

Tuesday, September 29, 2015

Mautic Joins the Bitnami Library to Provide Professional Marketing Automation


Mautic is the world's most popular open source marketing automation tool, and it is now available on Bitnami. Handle advanced drip campaigns, as well as generate leads, perform email marketing, and build landing pages all with the newest addition to the Bitnami Library.

Mautic’s powerful, easy to use automation tools help every marketing campaign become a success. With the Bitnami Mautic stack, you have access to:
  • Lead Management: Monitor and track leads across websites, build lead profiles, measure your leads and move them automatically. 
  • Email Marketing: Build and send emails to your leads, using your preferred email server or your own server.
  • Drip Campaigns: Create advanced automated drip campaigns easily with a drag-and-drop interface.
  • Landing Pages: Build beautiful landing pages through an easy-to-use page builder.
  • Web Forms: Develop powerful lead generation forms to use in landing pages or inject into your website pages.
  • Page & Email A/B Testing: Test alternative layouts, weight and automate winners.
  • Reporting: See what works and what doesn't, build your own reports.


Try the Bitnami Mautic application below, and see how easy it is to get started with your next marketing campaign!


Or you can start using Mautic right away with our Bitnami Mautic installers, Virtual Machine images (VMs), and cloud images.

Once you’ve tried it, make sure to leave a review on their page! We’d love to hear about your experience.

Thursday, September 24, 2015

Bitnami Provides eXo Platform Enterprise with a 30% Increase in Conversion Rates

As many of you know, we recently announced our software partners program earlier this month. We have been working with commercial software partners to bring ease of deployment to their current and potential customers, and bring our users more amazing software to try!

With 14 partners in the program so far, we have seen a range of different success stories across a variety of unique applications. One of our partners, eXo Platform Enterprise, had a particularly interesting challenge that they realized could be overcome by partnering with Bitnami. So far, eXo has had great success with the partnership.

eXo Platform Enterprise combines collaboration, calendaring, content and document management, and other productivity tools with social features to provide a complete enterprise intranet. By providing all the tools that business users expect in a traditional intranet and then enhancing them with social graphs and activity streams, eXo Platform dramatically streamlines communication workflows and raises employee engagement.

But in 2014, the company realized that the heterogeneity of enterprise IT environments was making it hard for non-technical business users to install and try its application. Patrice Lamarque, Chief Product Officer, eXo Platform explains that “Bitnami offered people an easy way to allow people to install eXo in the cloud. We understood very quickly that using Bitnami would help us with our key problem of lowering the entry barrier for new users."

Since partnering with Bitnami, eXo Platform Enterprise has recorded a 30% increase in conversion from download to installation. They attribute the increase to the seamless installation experience their users now have with Bitnami’s local installers, VMs, and cloud images.

To read more about eXo’s success as a Bitnami Partner, see our case study.

Interested in trying eXo Platform Enterprise? Try Bitnami eXo Enterprise Platform installers, Virtual Machine images (VMs), and cloud images for Amazon EC2 and Google Cloud Platform right away.

For a limited time, you can try eXo Enterprise Platform and be entered to win a free Apple Watch! Find out more

Interested in becoming a Bitnami Software Partner? Visit our contact page here.


Tuesday, September 22, 2015

Add X-Cart’s Powerful eCommerce Engine to WordPress

WordPress is a powerful blogging and content management platform that drives almost 24% of the internet’s top 10 million websites. Every month, an estimated 53.6 million new posts appear on WordPress-based sites. Many Wordpress users are looking for an efficient tool to make money from their websites. Several options exist: joining affiliate programs, embedding ads, opening an online store to sell physical goods or distribute the digital contents they produce.

There are plenty of tools to add an online store feature to your existing website that vary in simplicity of use, ease of setup, and price. But the abundance of existing tools is not an obstacle for developers of new ones, who frequently roll out even more convenient, powerful, and easy-to-use tools with which they hope to carve out their own piece of the pie.

The creators of X-Cart, one of the leading ecommerce platforms in the world, have introduced an exciting new opportunity for operators of the millions of Wordpress websites worldwide. Just like Wordpress, X-Cart works on a powerful bundle of MySQL and PHP, is very flexible, can be easily edited, and loves customization. All these similarities make these two engines a great combination for integration together, and X-Cart’s engineers have made it easy to do just that.

X-Cart widgets inside your existing website 

X-Cart’s new integration module helps you build ecommerce blocks into your existing WordPress-based website. In other words, you can show either a category with a list of products or a detailed product page, and a minicart widget. Your visitors can not only browse the goods, but also add them to cart and place the order.

In addition to showing the blocks inside the blog entries themselves, you may display a side menu with categories and with search by products in your X-Cart store.

User-friendly management

Adding X-Cart blocks does not require any programming skills. You just create a new post, as usual, and insert a string like this:

[xcart widget='categorymenu'][xcart widget='productgrid' category_id='2' grid_size='5']

You do not even need to think of a correct string format: it’s copied from the corresponding page in X-Cart (category or product management in X-Cart admin back end).

At the same time, the X-Cart store itself may be available at an independent URL with its’ own independent traffic.

What you need to start:

We have easy-to-install Bitnami stacks for both X-Cart and Wordpress, and all you need is to mutually connect them. By the way, downloading and installing X-Cart in September, you automatically participate in Apple Watch prize drawing!

Friday, September 18, 2015

DreamFactory 2.0 Beta Now Available on Bitnami!

We have released Bitnami DreamFactory 2.0 beta so our users can have a first glance at the new functions it has to offer. We are providing an opportunity for our users to easily test it out in the cloud, natively, or as a virtual machine. DreamFactory would love Bitnami users’ feedback as they work on their final release.

DreamFactory has added many new features with the 2.0 beta release, and they are providing direct access to support engineers through their testing program. Be sure to sign up for their beta program here after launching the app. The list below shows just a few of the changes that have been made with DreamFactory 2.0.

Security
  • Easy integration with Active Directory and LDAP.
  • Easy integration with Facebook, Twitter, Google, and GitHub OAuths.
  • More flexible role-based access controls. End users can now have different security permissions for different apps.
  • More flexible authentication with JSON web tokens (JWT) and API keys. You can now set session timeout rules, authenticate users with usernames and passwords, make APIs public, or distribute API keys to specific developers.
API Customizability
  • Implement and automatically document RESTful APIs from scratch with custom scripts.
  • Customize API business logic with server-side scripting in either JavaScript or PHP, with additional languages to follow.
  • Improved API configuration UI for building custom APIs.
Modularity & Scalability
  • Fully modular architecture re-built using the Laravel PHP framework.
  • Install only the packages you need.
  • Use either NGINX or Apache web server (we like NGINX).
  • Pick default SQL database of choice (no longer limited to MySQL).
  • MongoDB is pre-installed and the REST API for Mongo is ready to go “out of the box”.
  • Higher scalability and performance for large-scale transactional mobile and IoT applications.

With this beta, DreamFactory is looking for your support to give as much feedback as possible. Their support engineers will help you get started with DreamFactory 2.0 beta, and will help you upgrade if you already have a running version. 

Launch Bitnami DreamFactory 2.0 beta in just a few clicks as Installers (available for Linux, Windows and Mac OS X), Virtual Machine images (VMs), or cloud images!

If you are an existing DreamFactory user and would like to see how to upgrade to DreamFactory 2.0 beta, see our wiki page here for easy-to-follow instructions.

Wednesday, September 16, 2015

Wordpress 4.3.1 Security Release

The WordPress project has just released a new version due to a security release. WordPress version 4.3.1 fixes important security issues, aa cross-site scripting vulnerability when processing shortcode tags and another one in the user list table.

It also includes a patch for an issue that let users without proper permissions publish private posts and make them sticky.

The WordPress team strongly encourages their users to update their site to this version. For more details please check the official announcementIf you already have a running version of Bitnami WordPress, the application will be automatically updated. You can confirm that the update has been done by checking the version from your admin panel.

We have released Bitnami WordPress 4.3.1 (and Multisite version) installersvirtual machines and Amazon EC2GoogleVMware vCloud Air and Azure cloud images that fix these issues.

Have questions about Bitnami WordPress or the security issue? Post to our community forum, and we would be happy to help you.

Monday, September 14, 2015

We’ve partnered with CenturyLink to Bring Bitnami to the Blueprint Library



The quality, consistency and ease of deployment that you’ve come to expect from Bitnami applications are now available in CenturyLink’s Blueprint Library as Bitnami Blueprints.

CenturyLink has created the Blueprints Library to solve the most time consuming problems related to deploying an app to the cloud. CenturyLink Blueprints are fully-configured, ready-to-run apps that eliminate problems related to misconfiguration and mismanagement. The Blueprints provide a template that offers a deployable configuration that can bring a new environment online in a couple of clicks. Blueprints provide customers with multiple options for how to run their software, and CenturyLink has the speed and agility to perfectly orchestrate and automate the entire process. CenturyLink customers can now deploy a Blueprint on their cloud just as easily as launching an app through our various Bitnami Launchpads.

As part of our partnership, CenturyLink customers now have the exclusive ability to choose from over 100 ready-to-run Bitnami Blueprints, providing options to run software fast and in different ways for perfect orchestration and automation. Regardless if you’re deploying and configuring 1 or 10 servers, CenturyLink customers now have the scalability to work on anything.

Much like Bitnami applications, Bitnami Blueprints are:
  • Pre-compiled and pre-configured with all necessary dependencies so that they work out-of-the-box
  • Quick and easy to install; simply sign into your CenturyLink account and select the Bitnami Cloud Blueprint of your choice
  • The most secure and bug-free versions available
For more information about CenturyLink’s Blueprint solutions, visit CenturyLink.
  1. Sign up for a free trial or log in to your CenturyLink control panel
  2. Select a Bitnami Blueprint from the list of available Bitnami Blueprints
  3. Configure your server settings and hit the "Deploy Blueprint" button
  4. Sit back and relax as your Bitnami Blueprint server is configured
Have questions about Bitnami Blueprints, or just plain stuck? Feel free to post to our community forum, and we’re happy to help!

Bitnami releases Open edX Cypress

We are happy to announce the release of Open edX's most recent version, Cypress. There are many exciting features in this release, and we look forward to hearing what you think in our review section!
The updates below are all included in your ready-to-run Bitnami Open edX image, so you can get started with them right away.
  • OLI Hinting 
  • Creative Commons Polling and Survey XBlocks 
  • Learner Profiles 
  • Course Search 
  • Randomized Content Blocks 
  • Single Sign On (SSO) 
  • Performance improvements Security and stability fixes 
  • And more 
For more information about the new features, visit the Open edX blog

We have released Open edX Cypress on installers, virtual machines and cloud images, so you can easily try this new release or update your existing Open edX. 

Have questions about Bitnami Open edX or anything related? Post to our community forum, and we will be happy to help you.



Friday, September 11, 2015

New Node.js version 4.0.0 available on Bitnami!


The Node.js foundation has released version 4.0.0 (stable) that fixes important issues, improves its functionality and upgrades some of its included dependencies. 

It is a big upgrade from the last stable version (0.12.7) that released on July. You may be wondering why jump from 0.x to 4.x, that is because of io.js last version is 3.x and to avoid collision with Node.js it was decided to merge on 4.
  • Node.js and io.js are united.
  • NPM: Upgrade to version 2.14.2 from 2.13.3, that includes a security update.
  • v8: Upgrade to version 4.5.103.30 from 4.4.63.30. 
  • Node-gyp: This release bundles an updated version of node-gyp that works with all versions of Node.js and io.js including nightly and release candidate builds. From io.js v3 and Node.js v4 onward, it will only download a headers tarball when building addons rather than the entire source. 

You can find more information about this release on Node.js webpage.

We have released Bitnami Node.js version 4.0.0 on installersvirtual machines and cloud images.

Have questions about Bitnami Node.js or anything related? Post to our community forum, and we will be happy to help you.

Tuesday, September 8, 2015

Redis Security Release


Today, Redis released Redis 3.0.4, which patches several critical security issues. Redis suggests that all users upgrade to this new version.

Due to these security issues, we have released Bitnami Redis 3.0.4 in Google Cloud Platform and a Bitnami Redis container that fixes these issues. 

Have questions about Bitnami Redis or the security issue? Post to our community forum, and we would be happy to help you.