Security Release: Joomla! 3.7.3

Joomla!'s newest version, 3.7.3, is now published and available to address the following security vulnerabilities and bug issues:

    * Information Disclosure (affecting Joomla 1.7.3-3.7.2)
    * XSS Vulnerability (affecting Joomla 1.7.3-3.7.2)
    * XSS Vulnerability (affecting Joomla 1.5.0-3.6.5)

You can find more information in regards to version 3.7.3 and the recent security issues this version addresses within in this Joomla! blog post.

The Joomla! team strongly encourages all the users to update their Joomla! site(s) to the new version 3.7.3. Bitnami has released Bitnami Joomla! 3.7.3 installers, virtual machines and cloud images for all platforms. You can find instructions on how to upgrade your Bitnami Joomla! application here.

Have questions about Bitnami Joomla! or the Joomla! security vulnerability? Post to our Community Forum, and we will be happy to help you.

Joomla! 3.6.5 Security Release (CVE-2016-9838)

The Joomla! project has just released a new version that fixes three security vulnerabilities.

This is a security release for the 3.x series and it only contains the security fixes, no other changes have been made. It is strongly suggested that you update your Joomla! website to the latest version.

You can find more info about these issue at the Joomla! release news page.

We have released Bitnami Joomla! 3.6.5 Docker image, cloud images, installers and virtual machines that fix these issues.

Do you already have a Joomla! installation? You can follow our guide about how to upgrade your application and you won't have to worry about these vulnerabilities.

If you have further questions about Bitnami Joomla! or this security issue, please post to our community forum, and we would be happy to help you.

Joomla! 3.4.6 security issue

The Joomla! project has just released a new version that fixes multiple vulnerabilities including one that is considered a high priority. You can find more information about these issues on the Joomla! blog post.

Due to these security issues, we have released Bitnami Joomla! 3.4.6 installers, virtual machines and Amazon EC2, Google, Windows Azure, Oracle, Digital Ocean and VMware Air cloud images that fix these issues. If you already have a running version of Bitnami Joomla!, you can update it from the administration panel.

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

Introducing BitNami Cloud Launchpad: Demo Your Favorite Apps in the Cloud for Free

We started BitNami with the goal of making open source server software easier to discover and install. Many BitNami users come to our website to test and compare different projects: wikis, content management systems, bug trackers and so on. We help them select the best one for them because our stacks make it easy to install and run multiple applications side by side. For others, BitNami is a great way to test the very latest release of their favorite application or language framework . Our stacks are self-contained, so they can be installed and removed without interfering with their existing setups.

Today, we are happy to announce the BitNami Cloud Launchpad, a service that allows you to test BitNami applications in the Cloud, for free.

To launch a server, just select an application from our library and click on the 'launch server now' button, as shown below:

After logging in to BitNami, you will be able to launch up to 10 apps with the click of a button. After you click to launch an app, it takes just a couple of minutes to get your server up and running. When the process is complete, you will receive an email with information on how to access the application. Each server will stay up for one hour so you have plenty of time to experiment and play with it.

We have been beta-testing this functionality for the past week and the feedback has been extremely positive. We hope that you will find the BitNami Cloud Launchpad useful for quickly testing new versions of your favorite apps or for exploring new applications.

We have plans to extend and improve this new service, so stay tuned! In the mean time, if you are looking to host your BitNami applications in the cloud, consider BitNami Cloud Hosting.  It provides the same ease of deployment as the Cloud Launchpad but adds monitoring, automatic backups and the ability to resize servers as needed.

BitNami Makes it Easy to Try Infoworld's BOSSIE-Award Winning Apps

At BitNami, we carefully select what we believe to be the best open source applications across a range of categories, so you know that any app that you get from BitNami will be of the highest quality. It seems that Infoworld agrees with our selections - out of 25 applications selected for the 2012 Infoworld Bossie Awards (Best of Open Source Software,) 10 are available on BitNami and an 11th is already in the works!

We would like to congratulate the teams building the following BitNami-packaged applications for earning Bossie Awards:

• WordPress
• Joomla!
• Drupal
• Typo3
• Alfresco
• Gallery
• SugarCRM
• Magento
• Spree
• Liferay

As with all BitNami Stacks, all of the above applications are available free of charge as native installers, virtual appliances (VMs) and AMIs for the Amazon Cloud. In particular, the VMs and AMIs make it incredibly easy to test these best-of-breed applications in minutes without actually installing them in your system. Even if you choose to use the native installers, you will see that they are completely self-contained and install all of their dependencies in their own directory, so they won't interfere with other software installed on your system.

Do you agree with Infoworld's list? If you think there is a great open source business application that isn't available in the BitNami library, let us know in the comments.

BitNami is Coming to Windows Azure!

In connection with Microsoft’s release of new Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) capabilities to its cloud platform, we are very happy to announce that we are bringing your favorite BitNami apps to Windows Azure! In the very near future, we will be publishing two free images for Windows Azure, one focused on web development platforms and another with development environments.

The first image, BitNami DevPack,  provides an instant development environment for some of the most popular web development runtimes and servers, including PHP, Django, Ruby on Rails, Tomcat, MySQL, PostgreSQL and dozens of others. Everything you need to get started developing and hosting your own applications on Windows Azure is included in BitNami DevPack.

The other image, BitNami WebPack, includes ready to run versions of three of the most popular open source blog and CMS engines: WordPress, Drupal and Joomla!. It allows you to deploy full-featured websites in minutes which you can later customize with thousands of plugins and addons available for these platforms.

As with all BitNami Stacks, BitNami WebPack and DevPack for Azure are completely configured and ready-to-run, so you can have them up and running in minutes.

Sign up to be the among the first to know when these new images are available at: http://bitnami.org/azure. 

Why your next web app should be hosted in the Cloud

The emergence of Cloud Computing is changing how web applications are created, deployed and managed. A dedicated hosted server may no longer be the best option. Whether you are developing basic WordPress or Joomla! sites or building complex e-commerce sites with Magento and SugarCRM, there are multiple ways you can leverage the cloud to your benefit.

This article will cover several of the advantages of moving your customers to a cloud platform. It will also explain how BitNami Cloud Hosting (BCH) can reduce the time you must devote to maintenance chores and help you concentrate on your core competency: web development.

The biggest advantage that the cloud offers is flexibility, a new cost-capacity tradeoff. The acquisition of operative capacity traditionally requires meticulous planning, and it requires investment … at least it used to. The cloud offers the possibility of instantly expanding or reducing the size of your servers, with an immediate impact on your cost structure. You don't have to pre-commit resources for a possible sudden surge in visitors, nor scramble to increase capacity before an unexpected surge drowns your site in a sea of un-responded requests, nor lament costly idle resources when the surge did not (yet?) happen. It's the just-in-time revolution, this time in the server room instead of the factory.
The above said, a cloud environment requires a new set of skills, both in setup and ongoing management of your servers, which can be a time and/or money drain, directly impacting your productivity – just as it was before. BCH significantly reduces the non-core complexity of developing and hosting for web developers – it is a gentle on-ramp to the Amazon Cloud. It is more time available for development. It's the cloud made simple and cost-effective with:

• Ready-to-run, consistent, fully configured application environments. No more configuration and version nightmares, such as“which library version is required for this app version?” Your WordPress server is fully configured, up and running in a few clicks. Or SugarCRM, or any of our many full-stack offerings.
• On-demand servers that can be started with one click, stopped with another click – and are essentially free when stopped.
• Simple server cloning – servers can be cloned in a few clicks to test updates or setup new development servers. Delete them when you are done.
• A familiar environment, where things work the same as they do now: you do not have to port or adapt your application to the peculiarities of a PaaS provider. You are still in full control.
• Instant rescaling of your servers, up or down, in a few clicks with the instant rescaling of your hosting costs. Scale up to a monster server, or down to a mite. With a traditional hosted server, you typically need to purchase a machine . That means you either need to purchase a big server that will be underutilized during development or purchase a smaller server initially and migrate to a bigger one when moving to production, and spend time and effort recreating the environment in the new server. As your application becomes popular, you will need to manually repeat the same process to migrate to bigger servers as needed. You can bypass this completely by using BitNami Cloud Hosting to dynamically resize your server as needed without any upfront investment.
• The ability to run multiple applications on one server. Launch a single server to handle several customers, as you probably did with your hosting solution. Or launch one server for each, gain flexibility, simplify your accounting, and forget all about protecting your customers from each other in order to maintain their service level.
• Cost-effective access to development servers on a pay-as-you-go basis. Launch a cheap micro server for development and testing, grow it in one click for deployment. Or develop locally on your own servers, physical or virtual, and easily move to an identically configured server in the cloud when ready.
• Full-server, automatic, incremental backups with the ability to restore the server to any of the snapshots that you have configured. Restoring to a server snapshot guarantees that everything runs just at it did, no more version incompatibility nightmares.
• Automatic server monitoring. BCH automatically monitors all launched servers and provides CPU, disk, memory utilization and other information so you can keep an eye on your infrastructure

Putting your servers in the cloud gives you more flexibility to manage your cost-capacity tradeoffs: more bang for your buck.

BitNami Cloud Hosting gives you the ability to do so with no effort, significantly reduces your sysadmin time, and frees you to devote your full energy to your core tasks.
Give it a whirl at http://bitnami.org/cloud

New BitNami Joomla! 2.5.0 released

We are happy to announce the recently released Joomla! 2.5.0 version is now available as a BitNami stack. This Joomla! version is a security and long-term-support (LTS) release that will be supported for at least 18 months. You can download a native installer, a virtual machine or deploy it directly to the Amazon cloud. BitNami stacks simplify the deployment and testing of open source web apps and are an ideal method to test the latest releases of your favorite projects, including Joomla!

There are a lot of improvements in this release. Some highlights include:

• Support for additional databases, including Microsoft SQL server.
• Notifications for Joomla! and module updates.
• New much improved search engine

We will work on adding support for multiple languages in future releases. Enjoy!

How to Install and Run Multiple Joomla! Sites on one BitNami Stack

Article explaining a method to run several Joomla! sites on one BitNami Stack.