CMS Made Simple more simple than ever!

We are happy to announce that CMS Made Simple is now part of the Bitnami Library!

CMS Made Simple provides a fast and easy way to create a web site and manage its contents. It can be used by everyone from large corporate IT departments to home users.

Thanks to the community votes, CMS Made Simple is even easier to start working with it. To get started with it, you can download free, ready-to-run installers for Linux, Windows and Mac OS X, virtual machine images (VMs) and cloud images for the Amazon EC2 and Azure clouds.

CMS Made Simple installer

If you just want to check out CMS Made Simple, you can instantly launch a free 1-hour cloud demo server with the Bitnami Cloud Launchpad by clicking the button below. The default password is "bitnami".

In case you are not familiar with the project, some of the main features of CMS Made Simple are the following:

• SEO Friendly URLs
• Modular and extensible. There is a large catalog of Themes and Modules that allows you build your own site faster
• Easy user and group management
• A large and active community

CMS Made Simple Admin console

 
Would you like your favorite app to be part of Bitnami? Be sure to suggest and vote for it in our contest!

New PHP Platform Stacks released with 5.5.7, 5.4.23 and 5.3.28

A PHP security vulnerability with OpenSSL was recently published. An attacker could use a malformed certificate to cause PHP to crash, resulting in a denial of service, or possibly execute arbitrary code.

If you are using Bitnami PHP Stack, it is recommended that you upgrade PHP to the new patched versions: 5.5.7, 5.4.23 or 5.3.28. We just released new versions of the PHP development installers, virtual machines and Amazon EC2 and Azure cloud images that ship the new PHP version.

Bitnami PHP development stacks ships Apache, MySQL, PHP in addition to other libraries and dependencies. You can click in the images to download the files.

There are also available for download PHP development versions with PostgreSQL database instead of MySQL.

WordPress 3.8 now available on Bitnami

WordPress 3.8, nicknamed "Parker" (after Charlie Parker), with its beautiful new design, is now available from Bitnami. If you are already using a Bitnami WordPress image, you can simply upgrade your version from the admin panel.

Not familiar with Bitnami WordPress? In short, it is the easiest way to install your own wordpress instance. We've packaged Wordpress up as a self-contained, incredibly fast distribution that makes it simple to deploy. To get started with Bitnami WordPress, you can download free, ready-to-run installers for Linux,Windows and Mac OS X or our virtual machine images (VMs). Or, if you want to have a hosted Wordpress, you can deploy Bitnami Wordpress into the cloud via the Amazon and Azure clouds.

Sounds too good to be true, right? Give it a try. You can also launch a free cloud demo server and in minutes have a fully configured Wordpress 3.8 instance up and running.

Some of the most important features of WordPress 3.8 include:

- It brings a fresh new look to the entire admin dashboard. Gone are overbearing gradients and dozens of shades of grey. It uses the Open Sans typeface that provides a simple and friendly text.

New WordPress 3.8 Dashboard

- New vector-based icons that scale to your screen. By ditching pixels, pages load significantly faster, too.
- It ships eight new admin color schemes.
- New theme management
- New Twenty Fourteen theme, a sleek new magazine theme.

Twenty Fourteen theme

Get started with new WordPress easily with Bitnami Wordpress stacks.

Need massive compute power? Bitnami now supports C3 instances in Amazon EC2

We’re pleased to announce that Bitnami now supports AWS C3 instances. C3 is the next generation of high performance and economical processors for helping EC2 users to crunch big data or manage 3D graphics or perform other magnificent feats of computing glory.

We already support the general purpose M1-M3 types and computer optimized C1 types. When Amazon announced the new C3 type last month, we got to work.

Selecting a C3 instance through Bitnami is simple.

1. Launch an image from our library in the cloud
2. Open the Bitnami Cloud Hosting interface to manage your server
3. Select the server you want to manage, click the Manage button, then resize the server using the slider 

And you're done!

Ready to get started?

Get an instance of Wordpress, Joomla, Alfresco, MongoDB, or any of our other 80+ open source apps in minutes.

New Bitnami logo from 99 Designs

It’s been a long time in coming, but we have a brand new, something-we-can-be-proud-of logo. As a small and fast-growing startup, there are scores of well-deserving, high priority projects, but designing a spiffy new company logo wasn’t one of them. Until it was.  

Last month, Amazon RE:Invent 2013 was right around the corner and, given the over 100 MM hours of AWS usage we drove this year, we decided to have a booth at the show. It was now or never to have a spanking new look for the 8000+ attendees who would be there. The old logo had its time in the sun, but we wanted something that was modern and could work anywhere (website, tshirt, dog collar, tattoo, etc.).

We did what any self-respecting startup does: waited until the last minute then signed up for 99 Designs. And it was flawless. We received an overwhelming 338 designs to choose from. It wasn’t an easy choice, but we finally selected a winner from GEEDSIGN. After a few more mods, voila! Let us know what you think of the new design! (In case you forget what the old logo looked like, you can see it here)

After the logo was selected, we produced a tradeshow booth, brochure, and lots and lots of t-shirts all with less than two weeks before the event. A big thanks to our own Fred Kelly for churning out the tradeshow collateral lickety-split. 

The logo is part of a larger focus on marketing, which is apropos because I'm happy to announce that I've just joined Bitnami as their first full-time marketing director. Before Bitnami, I worked at Atlassian where I was their first full-time marketing director hired back in 2005. And now I am absolutely stoked to be part of the coolest cloud company around – and I'm secretly in love with the office location in the heart of everything San Francisco. (Ready for your own change of scene or know someone who is? We're hiring, both in San Francisco and Sevilla.)

Made it this far? Lucky you, because the first 10 people to comment on this form or below in the Comments on which Bitnami apps/stacks they're using get a free shirt. :)

Rails security issue: Bitnami apps updated

Several important Rails security vulnerabilities were recently published. They affect the current 3.2 and 4.0 versions of the Rails framework. You can find more info about them at this Rails blog post.

If you are using Bitnami Ruby Stack, it is recommended that you upgrade Rails to the new patched versions: 3.2.16 or 4.0.2. We just released new versions of the installers, virtual machines and Amazon EC2 or Azure cloud images that ship the updated Rails versions:

- Ruby Stack 1.9.3,   with Ruby 1.9.3-p484 and Rails 3.2.16
- Ruby Stack 2.0.0,   with Ruby 2.0.0-p353 and Rails 4.0.2
- Ruby Stack 2.0.1preview2,   with Ruby 2.0.1preview2 and Rails 4.0.2

We have released updated Redmine, GitLab, Spree, Tracks, Gitorious stacks with the latest Rails version and will shortly release new versions of Discourse, Publify and Diaspora.

For more details about these security issues please check the information provided in the official Ruby On Rails blog. If you already have installed a version of these applications please make sure that you update your environment or apply the appropriate patches.

Are you ready for Black Friday?

For most of us, we think of the day after Thanksgiving as the beginning of the holiday shopping season. For the administrators, maintainers and programmers of online stores, it may be the busiest and most stressful day of the year. Is your marketing team already emailing thousands of customers regarding upcoming promotions? Are you ready for them all to show up on your site at the same time? Read on to learn how to prepare your server for large spikes in traffic, as shown below. Note that most of this article and instructions apply to servers running in Bitnami Cloud Hosting.

Resize your machine!
If you expect a significant spike in traffic and your server is not yet prepared, we strongly recommend that you re-size your machine in advance. IMPORTANT: Resizing your server will stop it so that it is unavailable for a few minutes, so make sure you do this when you typically have the least amount of traffic. Also, if resizing the disk is not necessary, you should avoid doing so, as it slows down the resize process.

If the worst-case scenario occurs and your server suddenly becomes unresponsive, it will probably be due to the larger-than-normal number of visitors on your site. The slower the server response is, the more often your users hit the Refresh button in the web browser, which makes things even worse.
You can re-size your machine to a larger instance type, but there are few things you may want to consider doing first:

- Let your users know about your performance problems. Update your Twitter/Facebook account statuses to let you them know that you are working on fixing things, and try to update it often so they are aware of the process. This may help to reduce the number of people who are constantly refreshing the site.

- Turn on your application's maintenance mode if possible. Some applications allow you to switch to a special read-only maintenance mode which informs the end-user that the page is unavailable at the moment but it is going to be back online soon. This way users will not try to refresh your page constantly. It also prevents them from running into further issues or inconsistent states for example when clicking the order button and getting a timeout.

Once you are ready, sign into the BitnNami Cloud Hosting console and go to your server manage section. Click the Resize button:

The bigger the instance you use, the better. While the cost may be higher, it will significantly improve your server's performance and, because you are running in the cloud, you can simply resize back down to a smaller server after the rush is over.

Once your server is back online, turn off the maintenance mode and wait for few minutes. All your users will want to try to access it now, which may cause performance problems again for few minutes but then the server load should return to a more normal state. This is the time when, if you use caching, all of the cached pages are regenerated. Observe your machine but do not make rapid decisions. If everything is ok, then update your Twitter/Facebook accounts.

Are Evil bots affecting your site performance?

Performance problems may also be caused by misbehaving Internet bots or some other malicious scripts trying to index or scan your site, accessing as many sub-pages as possible at the same time. Follow the steps below to see if this may be happening to your site.

First, analyze the last 10000 entries in your Apache access log. The first command will show you when the analyzed period starts and the second one will list the most active IP addresses.

$ cd /opt/bitnami/apache2/logs/
$ tail -n 10000 access_log | head -n 1
$ tail -n 10000 access_log | awk '{print $1}'| sort| uniq -c| sort -nr| head -n 10

Based on the results, you can check the IP addresses with the highest number of requests using the “whois” command. You may reject all of the requests from the specific IP address by adding the Deny option in the Apache configuration file. In the example below, we will reject the 1.2.3.4 IP address in the WordPress config:

…
<Directory /opt/bitnami/apps/wordpress/htdocs>
deny from 1.2.3.4
…

Before restarting Apache, check if your changes are okay by executing the following command:

apachectl -t

Then restart the Apache web server:

sudo /opt/bitnami/ctlscript.sh restart apache

Improving the performance of your site
Improving the performance of your site is not an easy task. There is not a "one size fits all" solution to any problem and good configuration requires lots of research, testing and depends on many different factors: application technology, installed application plugins/extensions, type of the application etc.

There are few things that you may start with:

• Cache your pages and limit the number of requests to your database.
• Minify your Javascript and CSS and minimize the number requests to your web server.
• Use Varnish.
• Use CDN.

We describe all these aspects in our wiki.

Gitorious 3.0 released!

We are happy to announce a new major release for Gitorious, version 3.0.

Gitorious provides an open source infrastructure for hosting projects that use Git. It also supports projects with wikis, a web interface for merge requests and code reviews and activity timelines for projects and developers.

BitnNami Gitorious Stack provides a one-click install solution for Gitorious. You can download installers and virtual machines or run your own Gitorious server in the Amazon EC2 or Azure clouds. You can also now launch a free cloud demo server with the Bitnami Cloud Launchpad by clicking the launch button below.

The recently released 3.0 version ships a refreshed UI, a lot of improvements, and new features. The new repository browser comes with improved syntax highlighter, ability to select lines of code and friendlier navigation. It also has a nicer Dashboard, an improved merge request page and a new settings section.

Project Activities

Diff page

The service hooks feature was extended with the support for built-in integrations for external services.

 

Web hooks

In addition to that, Gitorious 3.0 now uses Ruby 1.9.3 and Rails 3.2.15 and all 3rd party gem dependencies has been updated to the latest versions.

Gitorious is developed by Gitorious AS, which also provides commercial prepackaged versions of Gitorious as well as managed servers and professional consulting services. Make sure to check them out if you need commercial support for Gitorious.

Ruby security issue: Applications Updated on BitNami

A Ruby security vulnerability was recently published: Heap Overflow in Floating Point Parsing. We want to let BitNami users know that our Rails-based application installers, virtual machines and cloud images have been updated already and released: Redmine, Tracks, Discourse, GitLab, Publify, Spree or Gitorious, Diaspora and we continue releasing others like Radiant.

We have also updated our development Ruby Stacks to include the latest patched version of Ruby: 1.9.3, 2.0.0 and 2.0.1preview.

If you already have installed a version of these applications, please make sure that you update your environment or apply the appropriate patches.

Welcome to the Newest Bitnami Stack, SiteCake!

We are happy to announce a new member in the Bitnami family: SiteCake! SiteCake is a simple, drag-and-drop CMS for fast editing.

Thanks to the community votes in our contest, SiteCake was selected to be packaged as part of the BitNami Library. You can now download free, ready to run native installers for Windows, OS X and Linux, virtual machines and Windows Azure & Amazon EC2 cloud images.

If you just want to check out SiteCake, you can instantly launch a free 1-hour cloud demo server with the BitNami Cloud Launchpad by clicking the button below. The default password is "bitnami".

Nikola Mircic, developer of the SiteCake project, was kind enough to answer some questions for those of you who may not be familiar with the project.

1. What is the goal of the SiteCake application?

SiteCake's goal is to make website editing a simple, drag-and-drop experience. Every type of file, document, media file or item you drag on your website SiteCake should be able to interpret and integrate in the most meaningful and beautiful way. On the other hand, SiteCake should empower designers to make pure HTML websites editable. No savvy developers needed.

SiteCake CMS sample application

2. What are some of the features of SiteCake?

- SiteCake is very basic CMS, it has only 10% of the feature set of other systems, but it is the 10% that is used 90% of the time.

- It's true WYSIWYG. There is no separate admin section, you can click any page element and edit it in-place.

- There is no special template system. Editable zones are assigned with simple css 'sc-content' class.

- It's the fastest CMS on the market - all server calls are done in the background.

- It has unlimited undo steps. It allows you to experiment and be creative.

- Also many more little things that make the experience of editing frictionless.


3. Which projects or organizations are using SiteCake currently?

SiteCake is a CMS for simple static websites that need partial content updates. We targeted small businesses, organizations or event organizers. Restaurants that need an easy way to update daily menus, B&B hotels that want to change prices and accommodation details quickly, NGOs, event websites and portfolios.

4. What do you expect will be the main benefits of having BitNami packages available for SiteCake? 

With Bitnami packages, cloud will become an easy hosting option for small business and personal websites. Packages are great opportunity for a user to quickly test and evaluate the CMS.

We are glad that SiteCake is now part of BitNami. Would you like your favorite app to be part of BitNami? Be sure to suggest and vote for it in our contest!

Security fix for Drupal, new versions 6.29 and 7.24 released

The Drupal project has just released two new versions that fix multiple vulnerabilities. You can find more info about them at the Drupal blog post by the security team.

We have released BitNami Drupal 6.29 and 7.24 installers, virtual machines and Amazon EC2 and Windows Azure cloud images that fix this issue. You can also download BitNami Drupal 8.x version that allows you update Drupal files to the latest development version with Git.

We also released new versions of Drupal-based projects: CiviCRM 4.4.2 and OpenAtrium 2.09

Diaspora*, the Online Social World Where You are in Control

Diaspora* is an Open Source distributed social networking service. It was released as part of the BitNami Library a month ago.

You can now download free, ready to run native installers for OS X and Linux, virtual machines and Azure and Amazon EC2 images for Diaspora*. You can also now launch a free cloud demo server with the BitNami Cloud Launchpad by clicking the launch button below.

Jason Robinson, one of the Diaspora* project contributors, was kind enough to answer some questions for those of you who may not be familiar with the project.

1. What is the goal of the Diaspora* application?

The goal of the Diaspora* application is to allow people to control their own social network. A lot of people distrust the large centralized social networks, especially now after all the Prism revelations. With Diaspora*, users can host their own data and only share around the network parts of that data. We call these servers "pods". When a user installs a pod (for example using the BitNami packages), that pod will be able to communicate with users on other pods just like you can communicate with other users on Facebook for example. The difference is that the user hosts their own data and thus has more control.

The purpose does not end in privacy. An important thing to note is of course that Diaspora* is open source. Got coding skills and miss a feature in your favourite social network? With Diaspora* you can make that feature - just talk to the project first if you also want it merged into the main code base https://wiki.diasporafoundation.org/How_we_communicate

Of course you don't need to host a pod to join Diaspora*. Just go to http://podupti.me which is a good pod list, select a pod near you and sign up!

Diaspora* dashboard

2. What are some of the features of Diaspora*?


The most awesome feature that sets Diaspora* apart from the other social networks is the flexibility when composing posts. Posts support full markdown syntax, which means you can even use it for blogging (like Tumblr). Another distinctive feature is that there are different kind of streams that you can view - and by default all the streams are combined for easy of use. Streams can be posts from people you follow, posts with followed hashtags, posts with interactions (like mentions), and you can also group people into Aspects (like Circles in G+) and view only one or more streams at a time. Image uploads in posts are supported with a nice lightbox style picture viewer.

All in all the UI is very modern and nice to use for a user with any technical level. Unlike Facebook for example, it is more minimal, since Diaspora* doesn't make you "spy" on your friends activities in real time, we don't have a gazillion of apps posting in your feed, and of course there are no ads or promoted posts, only stuff you really want to see.

3. Which projects or organizations are using Diaspora* currently? What kind of projects do they use it for?


Since Diaspora* is decentralized, which means that there is no central pod and no central authority to govern the network, the project does not and cannot be aware of all Diaspora* installations. I've heard of and seen some company internal pods that the rest of the network never becomes aware of since the users on the pod don't (or cannot due to firewalls) share data outside their own pod. One list of pods, built from interactions by the pod maintainer, lists currently 101 Diaspora* pods https://diapod.net/active, of which over half are open for sign ups.

Some notable organizations having official Diaspora* accounts are Mozilla (fr), KDE community, Jolla, FairPhone, Loomio, LibreOffice Design, ownCloud and Kolab, to name a few.

4. What do you expect will be the main benefits of having BitNami packages available for Diaspora*?

Diaspora* is kind of tricky to install at the moment - well, before BitNami that is. We have well documented installation instructions for all major Linux platforms, but unfortunately following those still requires you are familiar with web applications and servers. With BitNami users who want to host their pod can do so easily without hassle, and that is great indeed. The best thing is that users have more choice now, and we will be striving to increase those choices.

We are glad Diaspora* is now part of BitNami. Would you like your favorite app to be part of BitNami? Be sure to suggest and vote for it in our contest!

Meet DreamFactory CEO Bill Appleton and Learn About the First Mobile Development Platform on BitNami

Last week, we added the first mobile development platform to BitNami, DreamFactory. As with all BitNami apps, you can now download free, ready to run native installers for OS X and Linux, virtual machines and Azure and Amazon EC2 images for DreamFactory. You can also now launch a free cloud demo server with the BitNami Cloud Launchpad by clicking the launch button below.

Bill Appleton, CEO of DreamFactory, was kind enough to answer some questions for us:

1. Tell us a little about DreamFactory and how you got started with service platforms.

I wrote some of the very first service-based applications back in 1999 with XML-RPC and services from XMethods. After that, in 2002 we built client applications with SOAP on the Hailstorm platform from Microsoft. The Salesforce.com API was available by 2004, and I wrote some of the first AppExchange applications, many of which are still popular today. When AWS and Azure came out our engineering team started to write custom service platforms for various customers.

The use of REST APIs was clearly a critical technology for mobile, and so about three or four years ago we decided to take all of this experience and build the world’s best cloud service platform as an open source project. We launched earlier this summer and are really encouraged by the large number of developers who have adopted DreamFactory.

2. Will you please tell us about the DreamFactory Services Platform and how it enables mobile application development?

The DreamFactory Services Platform is an open source software package that provides everything an enterprise developer needs on the backend to develop HTML5 or native mobile applications, and to deploy those apps into production. We provide a complete set of services for SQL data, NoSQL data, and file storage. There are comprehensive user management capabilities, including roles and permissions, single sign-on, password management, OAuth, and LDAP support. DreamFactory also allows you to quickly and securely connect to external services like MongoDB, DynamoDB, S3, Azure Tables, Box and Salesforce.

We have an HTML5 Admin Console that makes it easy to set up the backend server. All of the various services are exposed through a comprehensive REST API that delivers JSON or XML documents. These services can be called directly from HTML5 or a native mobile application. Developers can focus on building great mobile experiences instead of writing a bunch of server-side code to expose data and files, handle security, authenticate users, and so forth. We’re super excited about this new development paradigm for mobile, where the backend consists of easily configurable services that are automatically exposed to mobile apps with REST.

3. What are some of your favorite features of DreamFactory?

Whenever you hook up a new service on the backend some pretty amazing things happen. First, the new service automatically appears on the Live API interface. This lets you see the various URL parameters and interact with the request and response. Next, the service is added to the SDK Documentation, which provides a hard copy for reference. Lastly, the service shows up in a dynamically generated JavaScript object at runtime. An HTML5 developer can just use this object to write an application, the REST interface is handled automatically. You can literally hook up a new service like MongoDB and start making calls to the database moments later.

Another thing people like is that this is an open source software package. You can manage your own applications with your own cloud server or on premises. You can use the management, deployment, and security practices that you are already using. We make it easy to move from our Free Hosting to your own cloud, or from dev to test to production. You don’t have to trust us to host your application, or worry about how we manage our data center, etc. And if a developer needs to do something extraordinary on the backend, they can customize our open source package as a starting point.

4. Which projects or organizations are using DreamFactory currently?  What kind of projects do they use it for?

The great thing about services is that you can use them in so many different ways. The rapid shift to mobile apps in the enterprise is the biggest driver of a services approach to app development. We believe that backend services exposed with REST and JSON is really the only good way to develop world-class mobile applications. And services are like building blocks -- highly configurable and easy to selectively expose to different applications and users. This reusability is key because it lets developers spend their time building apps, not dealing with complex backend development.

So we have a diverse group of customers using DreamFactory. For example, we have a large enterprise customer that uses DreamFactory to communicate between headquarters and retail. This is a global implementation in different data centers where DreamFactory is installed in their regional data centers.

We have seen some successful engagements using Sencha that work on desktop, tablet, and phone. That really demonstrates the “any device” promise of HTML5.

We also work great for native applications. One customer built a really nice bug tracking application for use on iOS devices. For that app, DreamFactory provides user management and a collaborative database for bug tracking.

You can use services in unique ways beyond mobile applications too. One of our customers is using DreamFactory as a backend for industrial process control devices for cloud storage, control, and monitoring.

Lastly, we work very nicely just for plain old website building. We have seen some nice desktop apps that also use services.

5. What do you expect will be the main benefits of having BitNami packages available for DreamFactory?

We started out trying to build all the various packages for different marketplaces. Some of our best engineers were spending lots of time on this work. Ultimately we decided that we didn’t want to be in the business of managing marketplaces and creating installers. We wanted to focus on our platform.

So working with BitNami makes perfect sense. You can go to the AWS, Azure, or VMware marketplaces and find our BitNami package, or you can just go to the BitNami website and see everything. They make the install easy for desktop or cloud. BitNami is a trusted source for these IaaS packages.

6. Can you share any of the DreamFactory roadmap? Which features can users look forward to over the coming year?

On the open source platform, we have some nice capabilities in the works. You will see the ability to add custom business logic with server-side scripting for situations that are not covered by the standard services. We are packaging our HTML5 client for use with PhoneGap. This will allow an enterprise to brand the wrapped client and instantly deploy applications right there. The applications will share platform data, and everything is controlled with user roles and permissions.

Our Enterprise Version will be available early next year. This will include the ability to run and manage multiple instances of DreamFactory on a single VM. We will have some important features like Active Directory support. The Enterprise Version will provide reporting on usage statistics by device as well as uptime monitoring and alerts.

Thanks to Bill for sharing his vision and plans for the DreamFactory Services Platform!