Simple Machines Forum joins the Bitnami Library!

Simple Machines Forum is now part of the Bitnami App Catalog!

Simple Machines Forum is a web forum that allows you to have your own community in a really simple way. 

It gives you every feature you need as a forum admin and also is a very easily customizable software. It is written in PHP and used the MySQL database, all included in the Bitnami Stack. Simple Machines Forum also offers the the following features:

• Package Manager to apply hundred of modifications you will find online

• Changeable themes

• Easily integrated with other CMS as Mambo

• Supports more than 40 different languages

• Upgrade by the web interface

Liroy van Hoewijk, the President/CEO of the org and the server administrator the website, has kindly answered some questions about the project and the integration with Bitnami.

What is the goal of the Simple Machines Forum application?

Simple Machines Forum is designed for ease of setup and use for the beginning site admin, but highly customizable by the more advanced admins. With a lot of handy features, it can be used by anyone for a large variety of communities that the site owner wishes to run.

We want to make good, fast, stable and secure software available to everyone: free of charge. Hence our slogan: "Elegant, effective, powerful, free. It's that simple."

What are some of the features of Simple Machines Forum?

SMF will give you a powerful opensource tool to create an online community, that gives you full control.

- Posting is very easy thanks to a powerful post system, which includes a WYSIWYG editor, a quote option and a quick-reply feature.

- Modifying the appearance of SMF is easy to do, with the built-in theme editor and a large scale of themes available for free on our website.

- Adding functionality is as easy as downloading a free modification package in to the package manager that comes with SMF, which makes it as easy as adding functionality with a single click! 

- The SMF permission system is very strong and can, for example, work with groups so that some users can, or cannot, access/see and/or participate in specific areas of your community; you can limit what users can do, set access control, et cetera.

- The personal message system allows your users to community in private, if they want to.

- A powerful search system allows your users to look through posts/topics to find what they're looking for.

- The language system allows you to install pretty much any language there is, so that your users can use the functions of our software in their own language. This includes a spell check if the server supports it! 

- The warning system can, rather than instantly banning someone which is also an option, ensure you can give users limitations for a few days or keep them on close watch

- The large variety of caching systems that are supported can reduce the resources SMF needs even further.

... Etcetera. You will have a full and powerful community suite in your hands by using SMF.

For a full overview of our features, and to learn about using SMF whilst you're discovering just what SMF can do, I'd like to refer to our extensive online documentation:

http://wiki.simplemachines.org/smf/Main_Page

Which projects or organizations are using Simple Machines Forum currently?  What kind of projects do they use it for?

From scientific NASA forums to fantasy WarriorcatsRPG, from security firms like COMODO to hacker forums, from bitcointalk to communities of banks: you name it! 

SMF is deployed on many different types of websites/projects as it can be used for just about any subject the user wants to start a community for. The software is very powerful, secure, stable and last but not least: very easy to use and customize, which makes it an easy choice. And hence why it should also be your choice! ;)

The userbase of SMF originates from many different countries, cultures and backgrounds. We pride ourselves in having a multi-cultural team from all corners of the world to cater to the wishes of our users, and produce one of the best products on the market with support in nearly all languages spoken on earth. Support that's not only given by our own team, but also by SMF users that love to help out other/new users! The (support) community on our website is not only staffed by our own team of experts, but is in a large part also driven by our users in a "for users, by users” fashion so that you can get very quick responses. For which we are very thankful!

SMF is not only used by companies, organizations or project websites: but also on a large scale by individuals who simply wish to add an awesome community to their website, in order to enable communication and/or discussions with their users on the subject their website is about. It greatly enhances the social interaction with, and among, the visitors of your website. 

SMF is light-weight, so it doesn't need significant amounts of resources to function: but it can scale as big as you need to as long as the hardware supports it. From a few hits to millions of hits, SMF can do it.

What do you expect will be the main benefits of having Bitnami packages available for Simple Machines Forum?

Whilst we do not endorse any specific vendor, for all the Bitnami users I'm very happy to hear that SMF will now be available to them in a pre-packaged system! It will of course lower the hurdle to get started even further. Making SMF even easier to use and install than it already is will hopefully be a welcome addition for Bitnami users, and therefore we hope that you'll give our software a try and start using SMF on your website! You will not regret it.

_______

Simple Machines Forum is now ready to install in a few clicks with the Bitnami Simple Machines Forum Installers (available for Linux, Windows and Mac OS X), Virtual Machine images(VMs), cloud images for Amazon EC2,Azure and Google Cloud Platform.

You can try Simple Machines Forum launching a free cloud demo server. If you are interested you just have to click on the following button to create a 1 hour free server:


Want your favorite app to be part of the Bitnami Library? Vote for it in our monthly contest!

Bitnami Open Source Leaders Interview Series: Eli White from php[architect]

We recently interviewed, Eli White, co-owner of the popular tech journal, php[architect] and key influencer in the PHP world. php[architect] is the only magazine exclusively dedicated to the world of PHP offering books, web training, and conferences aimed at spreading knowledge and unifying the community.

From PHP’s early beginnings to running 82% of the web today, learn about the creation and resurgence of this popular language.

Listen and Learn:

• How did PHP, with a seemingly “bad” reputation, became a fully featured object-oriented language? 
• What does movement towards cloud deployment mean for PHP? 
• How to get involved in your local PHP community/meetup group

Interested in learning more about PHP and popular applications such as LAMP and Wordpress? Check out our library of Bitnami packaged apps that use PHP (plus exclusive training from php[architect])!

Stuart Langridge:       These are the Bitnami Open Source Leaders Series and Interviews.  I'm Stuart Langridge, and I'm talking to Eli White, who's one of the co-owners of php[architect] and a pretty big noise in the PHP world generally.  How's it going, Eli?

Eli White:                    All right. It's going well.

Stuart Langridge:       One of the things I want to talk about here is that PHP has something of a bad reputation, but it has a bad reputation among people who don't know anything about it. Specifically, the language as well as the structures have changed quite dramatically since a whole bunch of people wrote PHP in about 1999.  Can you talk a little bit about what's changed and how?

New to Bitnami: ProcessMaker Enterprise

We are pleased to announce that ProcessMaker Enterprise Edition is now available in the Bitnami Library!

ProcessMaker Enterprise Edition is a workflow and business process management (BPM) platform designed to automate workflows and improve business efficiency. Technology leaders looking for a way to replace paper forms, cumbersome excel spreadsheets, and scattered email approval trails can now automate a wide variety of approval request forms and workflows quickly and easily through Bitnami and ProcessMaker Enterprise edition. If you are a Business Analyst or IT Director in search of a solution, this is a tool that should not be missed.

The Bitnami ProcessMaker Enterprise Edition comes with a 30 day trial license, so you are welcome to try it out for yourself. You can now install a few clicks with the Bitnami ProcessMaker Enterprise installers, Virtual Machines, and cloud images for Amazon EC2 and Google Cloud Platform. If you want to check out ProcessMaker Enterprise Edition, simply launch a free cloud demo server. Click the button below to get your own instance running for 1 hour, free!

Information on how to manage your installation can be found on our wiki. Still have questions? We would be happy to answer them on our community forum.

Vote for Bitnami's session at VMworld 2015

Attending VMworld this fall? The VMworld 2015 Conference for Virtualization and Cloud Computing is open to public voting now through May 26th. You can now vote for Bitnami session #4867, Zero to App Awesomeness in 10 Minutes with vCloud Air.  

In this session we will demo how to deploy and configure complex, real-world applications to VMware vCloud Air. 

Led by VMware Cloud Architect, Massimo Re Ferrè and Bitnami VP of Product, Simon Bennett, you will learn how to combine Bitnami’s application stacks with vCloud Air’s per-minute pricing, and leave the session ready to roll-out new solutions in minutes. 

Key concepts such as networking and firewall setup, working across regions, and migrating between the cloud and the datacenter will be covered. In addition to addressing infrastructure considerations, we’ll also demonstrate popular applications available for vCloud Air and show you how they can help business users and software developers within your organization.

63% of businesses say that cloud computing improves agility. Learn how to move fast and not break things. Vote early, vote often, vote here! 

ProcessWire added to Bitnami Library!

ProcessWire, our last contest winner, is now part of the Bitnami Library!

ProcessWire is a free PHP5 content management system and framework (open source CMS/CMF) built to save you time and work the way you do. ProcessWire gives simpler and stronger control over your pages, fields, templates and markup at any scale. And it provides a powerful template system that works the way you already do.
 

Thanks to the amazing community votes, ProcessWire is now ready to install in a few clicks with the Bitnami ProcessWire installers, available for Linux, Windows and Mac OS X, Virtual Machine images (VMs) and cloud images for the Amazon EC2 and Azure clouds.

ProcessWire administration Panel

If you just want to check out ProcessWire, you can launch a free cloud demo server in minutes with the Bitnami Cloud Launchpad by clicking the button below. The default admin user is "user" and the password is "bitnami".

Ryan Cramer, lead developer of the ProcessWire open source project, was kind enough to answer a few questions, to let us know more about the project.

1. What is the goal of the ProcessWire application?

ProcessWire brings joy and fun back to web development. It is both a content management framework (CMF) and a content management system (CMS). ProcessWire is an incredibly powerful tool and foundation from which to manage content both interactively and from the API. It is well suited to power web sites, applications, services, and more... at any scale. It is a tool that web developers/designers and content editors/publishers will fall in love with. The goal: enable you to build bigger, faster, stronger and easier, while saving you huge amounts of time.
 

2. What are some of the features of ProcessWire?   

For developers: It empowers developers with a truly solid and powerful framework to build bigger, faster and easier. It's highly flexible and suitable for almost any project: whether a blog, a web-application or a content-heavy corporate portal. It can be easily extended and integrated with other modern web technologies due to its powerful and intuitive API, hook system and modular structure. It's created for those who like to make things the proper way rather then hack them. It has a unique system of fields and templates that lets you build content types of almost any complexity with little effort.

For designers: Creativity without barriers! ProcessWire enables full control of the creative process. Everything you can design in HTML and CSS you can realize in ProcessWire. You don't need to re-design or re-code anything for ProcessWire. It adapts to your workflow rather than the other way around. It is delightfully simple and fun to populate content in your design with ProcessWire.

For content-managers: ProcessWire has a beautifully minimal and easy-to-use backend. But don't be fooled by the simplicity-there's incredible power and flexibility here. ProcessWire makes your content management tasks a joy, regardless of scale. Focused on ensuring the portability, semantics and accessibility of your content, ProcessWire is a breath of fresh air for content managers and editors.

For enthusiasts: ProcessWire has something to offer for those who just need a ready-to-use blog or website. It already has several website profiles that can just be installed and used immediately, or serve as a starting point to build a more personalized project on top. After you download ProcessWire, you can literally have a website up and running in under 5 minutes (and even less thanks to Bitnami). 

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

ProcessWire is equally adept at powering both small and large sites. But it was designed specifically to grow with you and work at the large scale while maintaining the same speed and simplicity. ProcessWire is especially well suited for single or multi-language sites needing to manage large inventories of custom data. As a result, it is widely used by the travel industry, the research and information provider industries, and the design, education and science industries. However, these are just examples as actual usage is far broader than that. For fresh examples of organizations and sites running ProcessWire, visit our Showcase board/.

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

ProcessWire is an able, flexible and highly intuitive package both as a CMS/CMF and site creation tool. It is also a powerful, enterprise ready development environment. Bringing ProcessWire to Bitnami users will not only introduce them to the benefits and shear enjoyment of working with ProcessWire, but will also in return help build further the already strong and enterprising ProcessWire community.


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

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