How-To: Deploy Bitnami’s LAMP Appliance to VMware Environments Directly via VMware Marketplace!

If you are a developer, there is a high chance that you’ve utilized the LAMP stack in the past 24 hours. The LAMP stack, consisting of Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP/Perl/Python, is a web service tool used to quickly build websites and applications through a reliable coding framework. 

For developers who work with VMware environments, the easiest way to deploy the LAMP stack is through the Bitnami-packaged appliance that’s available on the VMware Marketplace – VMware’s one-stop-shop to discover, try and deploy open-source and third-party ecosystem solutions for all VMware products.  

Why use the Bitnami LAMP Appliance? 

LAMP is an extremely popular package of fully open-source services. So - what’s so special about the Bitnami-packaged version? And why use it via the VMware Marketplace, instead of just downloading and configuring it on your own? 

The Bitnami LAMP Appliance provides developers with standalone project directories where they can store their applications. Thus, they can start deploying their PHP applications without the need to set up the entire infrastructure.  This image bundles together the most up-to-date releases of PHP, Apache, and MySQL Linux, as well as phpMyAdmin, PHP modules, and Composer. Apache is configured with the 'event' Multi-Processing Module and PHP-FPM, which is an ideal configuration for high-traffic websites that serve a lot of simultaneous requests.  

Most importantly, the Bitnami LAMP solution is ready for production environments. That means that it includes SSL auto-configuration with Let’s Encrypt certificates and HTTPS/HTTP2 support, all of which allow developers to build more secure sites and applications as quickly as possible.  

The complete Bitnami catalog – including the LAMP appliance – is accessible from the VMware Marketplace, allowing users to easily deploy a wide range of highly secure, industry standardized, and open-source applications across all VMware environments. 

By deploying the Bitnami LAMP Appliance from the VMware Marketplace, developers only need to focus on building applications, without having to worry about governance, security, and so on.  It can be deployed to environments such as VMware Cloud on AWS, VMware Cloud Director, and VMware vSphere. Developers can save time, effort, and resources. 

So how does it really work? 

To consume LAMP directly from VMware Marketplace, you would just need to browse the catalog, find the LAMP solution, and hit ‘Subscribe’. From there, just input the deployment configuration parameters. Within seconds, your application will be running in the infrastructure of your choice -whether it is in a public, private or hybrid environment. 

To see the process step-by-step, watch the demo video below, where Bitnami engineer Michiel D’Hont subscribes to the LAMP appliance via the VMware Marketplace! 

Next steps 

Interested in using the VMware Marketplace? Sign up today on our catalog page – it’s free! For more information, refer to our Docs and learn more on our marketing page or blogs page.  

For more information on Bitnami, please refer to the Bitnami and Bitnami documentation websites. 

To get started with subscribing to the Bitnami LAMP, click here!  

 

Subscribe to Bitnami LAMP Now

Php 7.2 is now available on Bitnami

PHP, one of the most popular programming languages, has just released a new major version. And now, we are thrilled to announce that PHP 7.2 is available in the Bitnami catalogue!

We have released WAMP, LAMP, LAPP, MAMP, MAPP installers, virtual machines, and AWS cloud images to support the new version of PHP in all platforms.


As a developer, some changes that might interest you are:

• Convert numeric keys in object/array casts
• Counting of non-countable objects
• Object typehint
• HashContext as Object
• Argon2 in password hash
• Improve TLS constants to sane values
• Mcrypt extension removed
• New sodium extension

Visit the PHP 7 change-log web page for more information about this release.

If you are interested in deploying PHP 7.2 in the AWS cloud, you can do it following this link:

Launch PHP 7.2 stack now

PWNScriptum Security Issue

[ UPDATE 2017-01-16 ]

The Magento team has published a new blog post about this security issue. They recommend to turn off the "Set Return-Path" setting (switch to "No") at "Stores-> Configuration-> Advanced-> System-> Mail Sending Settings-> Set Return-Path"

We also want to inform you that the standard Bitnami Magento deployments are not affected as that field is set to "No" by default.

https://magento.com/security/news/new-zend-framework-1-security-vulnerability

----

During the past couple of weeks, vulnerabilities were discovered in the most widely used PHP Mailing Libraries: PHPMailer (CVE-2016-10033 and CVE-2016-10045), Swiftmailer (CVE-2016-10074) and ZendMail (CVE-2016-10034). There are several stacks in the Bitnami library that could be potentially affected. Because this issue is related to the implementation of the applications themselves, it must be addressed by their original developers.

From the moment this issue was reported, our security team started a very thorough review of all our PHP applications (including contacting developers directly in several cases.) We will release fixed versions of all affected apps as soon as they are available.

Note that in several cases, the application was developed in a way that made it impossible for the vulnerability to be exploited. Examples include:

• WordPress: “Presently, WordPress Core (and as a result, anything utilising wp_mail()) are unaffected by the recent disclosures, the vulnerabilities require the usage of a PHPMailer feature which WordPress & wp_mail() does not use. This applies to WordPress 4.7, 4.6.x, and all previous secure versions.” [more info]
• Drupal: “The SMTP module has a modified third party PHPMailer library in its codebase. The modified version of the library is not affected.” [more info]
• Joomla: “After analysis [..] there are additional validations in place which make executing this vulnerability impractical within the Joomla environment.” [more info]
• Moodle: “So my current conclusion is that Moodle sites are not affected by the Sender vulnerability discovered in phpmailer < 5.2.18.” [more info]
• Phabricator: “No immediate action is necessary because we don't expose any way to get at these vulnerabilities.” [more info] 

Affected Bitnami PHP applications with recently released fixes: Akeneo, Dreamfactory, Mahara, Mantis, Mautic, ModX, Owncloud, OroCRM, TinyTinyRSS, PHPList. Please make sure you update your stacks by following the documentation in docs.bitnami.com.

Unaffected Bitnami PHP applications: SEO Panel, CMS Made Simple, Piwik, Magento, Prestashop, EspoCRM, Pimcore, Shopware and Oxid.

Please stay tuned if you are using a Bitnami PHP application, as we will continue releasing apps as soon as a fix is available.

PHP Security Issue: libgd CVE-2016-3074

A PHP security issue that affects previous versions of PHP was recently announced. A signedness vulnerability (CVE-2016-3074) exists in libgd 2.1.1, which may result in a heap overflow when processing compressed gd2 data.

[Update: 2016/05/11]

We want to let you know that the Bitnami Team worked on updating all the native installers, virtual machines and the cloud providers images of all the affected applications and all of them are already available. We will continue working on updating the Bitnami Cloud Hosting base image.

If for any reason you are not able to update your application, follow the instructions below:

• Deactivate the following PHP functions (imagecreatefromgd2, imagecreatefromgd2part, imagegd2) in the php.ini file.

disable_functions = imagecreatefromgd2, imagecreatefromgd2part, imagegd2

• In Windows systems, the gd extension can be deactivated easily. Comment out this line in the php.ini file:

;extension=php_gd2.dll

More information about the fixed version can be found on the GD Graphics GitHub page: https://github.com/libgd/libgd/commit/2bb97f407c1145c850416a3bfbcc8cf124e68a19

Do you have questions about the security issue? Post to our community forum, and we will be happy to help you.

[Update: 2016/05/12]

The Bitnami Cloud Hosting base image was released today so all of the new servers launched using our platform will include the latest security update.

Bitnami Welcomes Our Newest Commercial Partner: WebMail Pro PHP!

Tired of using the same old user interface for your enterprise email system? With the Bitnami WebMail Pro PHP stack, you can quickly launch a modern front-end for your existing email system that is simple yet full-featured and powerful. It is optimized for large numbers of mailboxes and looks great on any desktop or mobile browser. With features like CalDAV/CardDAV mobile sync, mail filtering and threading, message auto-response and auto-forward, PGP encryption, and much more, WebMail Pro PHP will take emailing with your enterprise system from cumbersome to awesome!



Key features include: 

• Modern, responsive user interface 
• Support for IMAP, SMTP, SSL and LDAP 
• Support for IMAP quotas, multiple accounts per user and multiple domains 
• Drag-and-drop support for images and other attachments 
• Thumbnail preview for images and PDF files 
• Support for OpenPGP encryption 
• Import and export of contacts via CSV or VCF files 
• Internationalized and UTF8-compliant; right-to-left support for Hebrew and Arabic 
• Extensive set of HTTP and PHP APIs for developers 
• Integration with external cloud storage providers like Dropbox and Google Drive 
• Compatible with Microsoft Exchange, Exim, Postfix, Dovecot, Sendmail, Qmail and many others Fully customizable via templates and included source code 
• Professional support

Interested in WebMail Pro PHP? Deploy a one-hour free demo of the Bitnami WebMail Pro PHP Stack! We make it easy to run WebMail Pro PHP in the cloud, virtually, or locally in minutes. Try it out now!

Try out the first RC of PHP 7 right now on Bitnami!

The first release candidate of PHP has been released and we just included it in our library. You can now download the new installers for Unix and Windows systems.

This version includes a lot of bug fixes, changes, various stability improvements for database, array, assert, streams and other functionality. that you can try right now with our installers in a few clicks.

PHP 7.0.0 comes with new version of the Zend Engine with features such as:

• Improved performance: PHP 7 is up to twice as fast as PHP 5.6
• Consistent 64-bit support
• Many fatal errors are now Exceptions
• Removal of old and unsupported SAPIs and extensions
• The null coalescing operator (??)
• Combined comparison Operator (<=>)
• Return Type Declarations
• Scalar Type Declarations
• Anonymous Classes

We'd love to hear how you like PHP 7 and what improvements or problems you've seen so far. Sound off in the comments below or connect to us on Twitter with your feedback.

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!

HHVM joins the Bitnami Library!

We are happy to announce that the Bitnami HHVM Stack is now available on our Bitnami Library. HHVM is an open-source virtual machine that is able to execute PHP programs, in addition to its own programming language, Hack. It has been developed since it's origins by Facebook and is said to be a competitor with PHP itself. With that in mind, a large number of PHP applications are working to become compatible with HHVM.

The Bitnami HHVM Stack includes HHVM along with Apache, MySQL and PHP, so you will be able to switch between both engines and compare them.

As an example, we have configured WordPress on top of HHVM and ran some tests facing our WordPress cloud images running PHP-FPM 5.6. One of the conclusion that we came to is that HHVM allows about 170% concurrent users versus PHP-FPM 5.6, which is a significant advantage.

The following tests show the results of running a T2 AWS micro instance with WordPress configured with PHP-FPM v5.6 and HHVM v3.6.5. The first test shows that with the PHP-FPM configuration the users start getting timeout errors when there are 42 concurrent users in the server. The second one shows that WordPress configured with HHVM could serve the requests without timeout errors until the server has 80 concurrent users.

Get HHVM running in just a few clicks with the Bitnami HHVM Stack installers, Virtual Machine images (VMs), and cloud images.

We cannot wait to hear your thoughts about this stack, and we invite you to leave your comments and reviews on our stack page.

You can find more information about how to manage your installation on our wiki. Still have questions? We would be happy to answer them on our community forum.

Dive into PHP 7 on Bitnami today

PHP 7 is here! There's been lots of buzz around it over the past few weeks, with the latest beta being released just days ago. We've been tracking PHP 7 development with excitement as well, with the huge speed improvements and language features that will make building and scaling PHP apps much better than before.

To help the PHP Group and development team get more people trying out this new version, we're adding PHP 7 versions of our popular LAMP and MAMP stacks. You can download them below:

For those of you haven't tried our developer stacks for PHP before, they are ready to go, full featured stacks, with everything you'd need to get going to start with PHP development. This is a great way to try your PHP app on PHP 7 without having to spin up a new machine or environment; just cloud launch the Bitnami stack and pull in your code over Git and you can be up and going in minutes with seeing how your app runs on this upcoming major version of PHP.

We'd love to hear how you like PHP 7 and what improvements or problems you've seen so far. Sound off in the comments below or connect to us on Twitter with your feedback.

X-Cart joins the Bitnami Library with a free trial!

We would like to introduce our newest partner application, X-Cart. X-Cart is a user-friendly e-commerce solution that includes everything you need to create an online store out-of-the-box.

With X-Cart’s wide range of customizable features, you will have all the tools necessary to create and maintain a well-designed, secure, and efficient online store.

• Responsive user interface that automatically adapts to tablet and mobile devices
• Multilingual product catalog and search
• Built-in inventory tracking, support of variants and e-goods
• Other powerful add-ons including auctions and booking
• Support for social sign-on and shareable product ratings and reviews
• SEO-friendly URLs, sitemaps and rich snippets
• 100% PCI-DSS compliance, HTTPS/SSL support and XSS/CSRF attack protection
• Easy to integrate with popular payment gateways, including Stripe, Skrill, Paypal and others
• Seamless e-commerce accounting with Intuit Quickbooks and Xero integration
• Maximum flexibility with open source code

These features will enhance your existing customers’ shopping experience in addition to attracting new buyers. Along with all the features of X-Cart’s Open Source Edition, Bitnami is also offering X-Cart’s Business Edition to try for free!

The Bitnami X-Cart package is a free 30-day trial of X-Cart 5 Business Edition. Additionally, X-Cart is offering a 15% discount with coupon code BITNAMI if you purchase the Business Edition license after the trial ends.

Try the Bitnami X-Cart application below, 

and see how easy it is to get started on your store in just a few clicks!

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

New Bitnami ownCloud Stack 8.1 released

The new version of ownCloud 8.1 has been released and we're happy to announce that this version is already available in Bitnami.

This version contains significant improvements for users, administrators and developers. You can find the complete list of new features in the official release notes.

ownCloud is a flexible, open source file sync and share solution. Whether you're using a mobile device, workstation, or a web client, ownCloud provides your employees complete ease of use and accessibility to the right files on any device in one simple, secure and controlled solution.

Bitnami ownCloud is available as native installers (for Linux and OS X). Unfortunately, the ownCloud team will no longer support Windows as a native platform (you can read more information about it here). If you are planning to continue using ownCloud on Windows you can use one of our virtual machines. Finally you have also available cloud images for Amazon EC2, Azure and Google Cloud Platform.

You can find more information about how to manage your installation on our wiki. Still have questions? We would be happy to answer them on our community forum.

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?

Grow your business with OroCRM – now available on Bitnami

Today, OroCRM joins the Bitnami Library of CRM apps!

OroCRM is a flexible open-source CRM application. OroCRM supports your business no matter the vertical. If you are a traditional B2B company, franchise, sell online only or are managing multiple sales channels – OroCRM will help you grow.

OroCRM is easier than ever to install. Use the Bitnami OroCRM installers (available for Linux, Windows and Mac OS X), Virtual Machine images (VMs), cloud images for the Amazon EC2, Google Compute Engine and Azure cloud platforms, and be up and running in just a few clicks.

To explore OroCRM simply launch a free cloud demo server. Click the button below to create your own OroCRM instance running for 1 hour, free!

Or, learn more about the OroCRM project in our interview with Motti Danino, Vice President of Operations at Oro.

What is the goal of the OroCRM application?

No two business are alike, each facing unique challenges and opportunities. In creating OroCRM, our guiding principle was to build a flexible, open- source CRM application that could be customized to fit any business need. We also recognized that businesses are becoming increasingly multi-channel selling and communicating across multiple channels. We built from the ground up, a truly multi-channel CRM, allowing businesses of all sizes to have a single view of their customers.

What are some of the features of OroCRM?

OroCRM is an extremely flexible and extendible application. Some customers use the robust features OroCRM offers out of the box. Others extend and customize the features to meet their exact business needs. OroCRM’s unique capabilities include: ease of integration with other systems such as eCommerce, ERP, POS, email management PIM etc, robust multi-channel support allowing organizations to obtain a single 360° view of their customers, productivity tools for sales people and sales managers, and comprehensive marketing capabilities allowing marketers to customize marketing campaigns to the specific interests of their customers.

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

Many organizations around the world use OroCRM. Traditional B2B, multi–channel and online retailers realized that OroCRM, with its unique set of tools and flexibility, will fit their business needs. We have customers in every vertical, retail, financial services, pharmaceutical, franchises, eCommerce, and B2B are just a few of the types of companies that are gaining value from OroCRM’s unique set of capabilities.

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

Bitnami’s packaged solution will allow the organization and user to easily gain access and test OroCRM. The users will be able to quickly install OroCRM and appreciate it’s performance, capabilities, features and most of all its flexibility and the ability to customize it to fit their business needs.

Want your favorite app to be part of the Bitnami Library? Enter it in our monthly contest! Ready to try OroCRM now? Get started!

Welcome Codiad to the Bitnami Library!

We are happy to announce that Codiad is now available on the Bitnami Library!

Codiad is a web-based IDE that lets you develop code fast and from wherever you want, with minimal requirements. You will only need a browser on the client side, and Apache and PHP on the server side. Also, you will not have to worry about database maintenance.

Codiad comes with almost the same features you would find in the most common desktop IDEs:

• Support for 40+ languages 
• Plugin library 
• Error checking and notifications 
• Multiple user support 
• Advanced searching tools 
• Smart auto-complete 
• Real-time collaborative editing 
• 20 syntax color themes 

If you want to quickly check out Codiad, you can launch a free cloud demo server. By clicking the button below, you will have your own Codiad instance running for 1 hour, for free!

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

Simple Invoices joins the Bitnami Library!

Today Simple Invoices joins the Bitnami Library!

Simple Invoices is a web-based invoicing system designed with simplicity and functionality in mind. Catering to the needs of small organizations and home users, Simple Invoices does much more than managing invoicing. It also tracks inventory, creates receipts, estimates, and quotes. 

For people on a budget, Simple Invoices eases the process of managing accounting, and simply getting paid while running and managing a business. Other important features include:

• Multiple invoice types: total invoices, itemized invoices
• Save invoices as PDF, Word, Excel, or plain text files
• Invoice templates, be able to select(or create) different layouts for your invoices
• Invoice preferences, enables you to define and customize all the wordings on the invoices
• PayPal payment gateway support
• Recurring invoices
• Alternate invoice numbering based on Invoice preference
• Basic inventory support

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

If you want to try Simple Invoices, you can launch a free cloud demo server. Click the button below to create your own Simple Invoices instance to run for 1 hour -- free!

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

SilverStripe added to Bitnami Library!

Today, SilverStripe joins the Bitnami Library of CMS apps!

SilverStripe CMS & Framework is an open source platform of web development tools. The platform, curated by SilverStripe, is an international web development company that is supported by a vibrant online community.

SilverStripe is now ready to install in a few clicks using the Bitnami SilverStripe installers (available for Linux, Windows and Mac OS X), Virtual Machine images (VMs), cloud images for the Amazon EC2, Google Compute Engine and Azure cloud platforms.

If you want to explore SilverStripe you can launch a free cloud demo server. Clicking the button below will create your own SilverStripe instance running for 1 hour, for free!

We also had the opportunity to interview Cam Findlay, Community Manager of SilverStripe, about the application's key features:

What is the goal of the SilverStripe application?

SilverStripe is both a CMS and PHP web framework. SilverStripe CMS makes day-to-day content updates awesomely simple. It’s flexibility makes SilverStripe CMS ideal for managing websites, intranets, and sophisticated web applications with stunning interactive design, social and transactional features for your users. The SilverStripe Framework is a PHP web application framework that can be used standalone, or in harmony with the SilverStripe CMS. Modern best practices include object-oriented MVC/ORM architecture to cut the overhead associated with common programming tasks, and enable developers to quickly write and maintain code that powers complex web applications. Put simply, CMS users love SilverStripe’s easy to use and powerful CMS and developers love the power and flexibility of the framework. With SilverStripe, everyone get’s to do what they do best.

What are some of the features of SilverStripe?

SilverStripe is both PHP framework and CMS. For developers, we define customisations of the CMS for users in the code along with any configuration which makes your applications highly portable across environments without having to rely on the database. Content is treated as content, code is kept and code, environment configuration is handled as configuration so there is a clear understanding of what is required when deploying websites and separation layers for a more maintainable codebase.

The CMS also is highly customisable to a clients needs, rather than enforcing a way of working, so it works in well with customers existing business processes and allows CMS users to easily integrate SilverStripe as part of how they currently delver their services or run operations.

We also have a great Open Source community!

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

SilverStripe has been used by projects large and small. Of note are sites such as the Democratic National Convention website during Obama’s electoral race, Westpac bank New Zealand, Skinny Mobile (a large mobile telecommunications site) and the the New Zealand Government Common Web Platform which is promoting open source and SilverStripe use in the New Zealand public sector. There are also a host of other showcases that give you an idea of the types of sites powered by SilverStripe at our showcase at http://www.silverstripe.org/community/showcase/

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

We are looking forward to having an easy to install local environment, as well as a cloud deployable image to help developers and users try out the CMS and get started quickly learning SilverStripe.

You can follow SilverStripe on Twitter and participate in discussions on SilverStripe.org.

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

Mahara added to Bitnami Library!

We are happy to announce that Mahara is now available on the Bitnami library.

Mahara is an open source ePortfolio and social networking web application created by the government of New Zealand. It provides users with tools to create and maintain a digital portfolio of their learning, and social networking features to allow users to interact with each other. 

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

We also had the opportunity to interview Aaron Wells (Technical Lead) and Kristina Hoeppner (Community Facilitator) who were kind enough to answer some of our questions:

What is the goal of the Mahara application?

Mahara is an ePortfolio designed for use in education. It gives users an easy way to set up individual or group portfolios, allowing them to showcase and reflect on their learning and achievements. It can also be used to support assessment processes.

Functionally, Mahara is a lot like a multi-user content management system. It allows users to create mini web pages for their portfolios, and it includes some social network functionality to make it easier for users to share content with each other and the rest of the world.

Mahara is open source and has a lively user and developer community who contribute to improving Mahara continuously.

What are some of the features of Mahara?

Mahara can be used by one individual, but it unfolds its true power when used with others as it allows for collaboration and engagement of other users.
 
With Mahara you can for example:

• Set up media-rich portfolios by uploading different files, embedding social media content from other websites, creating journals (blogs).
• Create multiple portfolios for different purposes, e.g. one for your personal development, one for finding a job, one for course assessment.
• Personalize your portfolio with built-in themes or create your own skins. You can also share your skins with other users on the site.
• Have others leave comments on your portfolios and support you in your learning.
• Export your portfolios as stand-alone HTML sites or for import into an ePortfolio system that supports the Leap2A standard. For example, you can start your portfolio on your school's Mahara site, import it into the university's Mahara site when you start your university career, refine it and change it there, and then move it to a different site after graduating university so you can continue your lifelong learning journey. As your portfolios are always portable and accessible to you, you will be able to make changes along the way, remove things, update others and add new content keeping your portfolios fresh.
• Submit your portfolio for assessment directly within Mahara or to the popular learning management system Moodle for integration into coursework.
• Collaborate with groups of users in forum discussions and create portfolios or group projects together.
• Extend Mahara with a range of community-contributed plugins.

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

Mahara is used around the world by schools, higher education institutions, associations and organizations with accreditation/certification requirements, and also by individuals who want to harness the power of keeping a portfolio for professional purposes.
 
Common use cases include:

• Presenting project work
• Showcasing a year's work on a particular subject matter
• Outlining a learning journey with its ups and downs
• Reflecting on professional development
• Supporting a job application with actual evidence of previous work experiences
• Submitting a professional development portfolio to an association for re-accreditation
• Setting up an online community of practice
• Submitting a project assignment for a class

For example, Pace University in New York uses Mahara with existing and incoming students to get started on their learning journey. The University of the Arts, London, uses Mahara with its design students to present their work and also submit assignments. Southampton Solent University in the UK uses Mahara for employ ability purposes where students can create an online job application. The university also uses Mahara with its sea-faring students to document their learning while at sea on their mobile devices, and then upload the content to their Mahara site when they are back on land. The University of Canberra employs Mahara in its teaching program for students to work on assignments. New Zealand nurses use Mahara to speed up their re-certification process by having taken it online. Schools in New Zealand and around the world use Mahara with their students for assignments, lifelong learning and also teacher portfolios.

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

As an automated installer, Bitnami can be especially helpful for users and institutions who only have limited tech support available. Bitnami can help them get up and running with a standard Mahara install and stay up to date with the latest version of Mahara. For more advanced users, running Mahara in a virtual machine can also be helpful as a quick way to set up a "sandbox" site to test new updates, configuration options, and plugins.

You can follow the Mahara project on Twitter and participate in discussions on Mahara.org.  

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

New RubyStack version in Bitnami Library

We are happy to announce that we have updated our Bitnami RubyStacks (2.0.0-20 and 2.1.2-3) to the latest versions of Passenger, Node.js, PHP and Nginx, among others.

If you are not familiar with it, Bitnami RubyStack provides a fully-configured and ready to run Ruby on Rails development environment. You can download or deploy it to the cloud free of charge with our ready-to-run installers, virtual machine images (VMs), Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) or Azure Images

In addition to the base Ruby runtime and libraries, the stack includes the most popular gems for building Rails applications: Passenger, Nokogiri, Rake, RMagick, Mongrel, Thin and more. It also includes the latest stable release of Ruby, RVM, Rails, Apache, NGinx, MySQL, SQLite, Git, Varnish, Sphinx, PHP and phpMyAdmin.

All updates to this development stack are listed in it's changelog, but below are the main components:

• Updated Passenger to 4.0.50
• Updated Node.js to 0.10.31
• Updated PHP to 5.4.32
• Updated Nginx to 1.6.1

If you have any question about Bitnami RubyStack you can check our quick start guide or you can create a new thread in our community forums .

New Nginx stack with PHP and MySQL (LEMP)

We are happy to announce that the Bitnami Nginx Stack has been released. Also known as LEMP, WEMP and MEMP for Linux, Windows and OSX respectively, it provides a ready to run environment with the Nginx Web Server, PHP and MySQL.


The stack includes the following primary components:

• Nginx Web server (1.6.1)
• MySQL database server (5.5.38)
• PHP-FPM (5.4.31)
• phpMyAdmin web application management tool for the MySQL database (4.2.7.1)

In addition to these components, it includes:

• Varnish proxy cache server (optional)
• ImageMagick tool
• SQLite database
• XDebug module
• Memcache module
• APC module
• GD library
• OpenSSL library
• CURL library
• OpenLDAP library
• PEAR and PECL package manager tools

Nginx is a small but very powerful and efficient web server and mail proxy. It is trusted but many of the busiest sites on internet, such as WordPress, Facebook and Dropbox. It is an asynchronous server and its main advantage is scalability. In a process-based server, each simultaneous connection requires a thread. This incurs significant overhead. An asynchronous server, on the other hand, is event-driven and handles requests in a single (or at least, very few) threads, consuming less RAM in busy environments.

The Bitnami Nginx Stack is also configured with PHP-FPM (FastCGI Process Manager), an alternative PHP FastCGI implementation with some additional features useful for sites of any size, especially busier sites.

The Bitnami Nginx Stack is available for free from the Bitnami app store as a native installer or virtual machine for local development, or as a cloud template for the Amazon and Windows Azure cloud computing platforms.

Once the installation process has been completed, you can access the welcome page from your browser at http://localhost on Windows or http://localhost:8080 on OS X or Linux.

We documented more details and more features of the Bitnami Nginx Stack in our Quick Start Guide. You can also check here how to install WordPress on an Nginx Cloud Image.

Do you have questions? We will be happy to help you at our community forum!

Try Bitnami Nginx Now