Peter Vatistas

Come and get it! Beta 1 of Community Server 2008 is now available:

* Web Installer: http://get.communityserver.org/download/cs2008b1web
* Windows Installer: http://get.communityserver.org/download/cs2008b1msi
* Upgrade Tool: http://get.communityserver.org/download/cs2008b1up

Below is a brief list of what you’ll find in this Beta:

* Groups. We’ve added support for private and public groups that support their own membership, blog, forum, gallery, and pages. You can now easily create mini-communities for friends or for your team.

* Web Services APIs. Community Server 2008 includes a complete Web Services layer for working with Community Server. This makes it even easier to share data from within Community Server with other applications or tools. The Web Services implementation is a RESTful implementation and we also include a client library to include within applications that need to talk to Community Server.

* Friends. We’ve completely overhauled the friends functionality to make it easier to both manage and add friends. You’ll find the friends behavior much more like FaceBook’s friend functionality.

* Media Gallery. We’ve merged the Photo/File Galleries into a single Media Gallery application. The Media Gallery includes viewers for rendering images, audio, video making it even easier to share content in your community.

* Message Streams. New to Community Server is a message stream application that enables multi-user conversations (formerly private messages), social streams (similar to FaceBook), profile comments, and more.

* Enterprise File Storage. We’ve completely overhauled file storage so all files are in a Centralized File Store (includes both a File System and Amazon S3 provider).

* Widgets. Community Server now support shareable widgets in all sidebars.

* Simplified Permissions. We’ve tried to simplify the rich permissions functionality that Community Server has always been known for. All the previous permissions capabilities still exist, but we’ve added some tools to make it even easier to manage and apply permissions.

* User Experience. We’ve started to introduce some new user experiences in both the Control Panel and other aspects of the site. When Community Server 2008 ships you’ll find a much friendly and beautiful experience for both running and managing your community.

Many, many additional new features, performance improvements, and bug fixes.

I am in the process of building a social site using Drupal and realized I didn’t have GD support for PHP5 installed on my server. I’m sure this is a common roadblock for people new to installing Drupal or even just PHP so here is what you need to do:

Open terminal and type in the following command:

$ sudo apt-get install php5-gd

Now restart Apache

# sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

There you go, you now have GD Support for PHP5 in Ubuntu. Get your Drupal on!

Facebook set to overtake MySpace? by ZDNet’s Dion Hinchcliffe — Mainstream social networks continue to grow at a staggering pace in 2007 as they offer users compelling ways to manage and leverage their relationships with each other online. MySpace and Facebook continue to lead the pack as the two most popular social networking sites but for the first time, it also seems fairly clear that Facebook will soon overtake MySpace in overall usage, particularly as it offers a richer overall platform powered by a large and vibrant community of 3rd party application developers.