New installer for Plone 4

Posted Sep 2 at 10:20 CDT by Daniel in Plone  - 0 comment(s)

After many months of hard work, the Plone team has released Plone 4 and we've already whipped up a new one-click installer which you can use on the control panel right now:

Plone one-click installer


Plone 4, an open source CMS product for Zope, comes with a bunch of improvements but perhaps the most prominent new feature is the beautiful new default "Sunburst" theme:

New Sunburst Theme


In addition to the new theme, the latest version of Plone features numerous other improvements, like faster performance, better searching, more efficient attachment storage, and the TinyMCE WYSIWYG HTML editor:

TinyMCE content editor


The Plone site has complete coverage of all the new features. So give Plone 4 a try today and if you have any questions, join us in the forum.

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Announcing the one-click Git installer

Posted Aug 12 at 02:50 CDT by Daniel in Git  - 7 comment(s)

Today, we're pleased to announce what many of you may have already found on your own: we've added shiny, new Git one-click installers to the control panel! Check it out:

WebFaction Git installer


If you've never heard of Git, it is what's known as a distributed version control system or DVCS. Like it's older cousin, Subversion, Git records a file change history and makes it easy to coordinate the work of many editors. Git---and its DVCS siblings, Mercurial, and Bazaar---stand apart from Subversion in that each working copy is a complete repository, with a full offline history and the ability to push and pull changes with any other repository.

The Git installers are loaded with features that make it quick and easy to work with Git repositories. For example, while many Git users are accustomed to git://- and ssh://-style URLs, the new Git applications let you serve Git repositories over HTTP (or HTTPs for maximum security). In the past, Git over HTTP was considered inefficient, but our installers use a relatively new feature of Git, "Smart" HTTP. Smart HTTP minimizes the amount of data that a Git client and server need to exchange, so clones, pushes, and pulls over HTTP are about as quick as the same operations over SSH without having to deal with SSH keys and hard-to-remember URL schemes.

Using HTTP also makes it easy to control who has access to your repositories. You're just one .htaccess file away from anonymous read access or a few keystrokes from granting push privileges to your collaborators.

As a bonus, you get a slick web interface for your all your repositories, complete with history browsing and syntax highlighting:

WebFaction Gitweb browser


To top it all off, the Git applications don't require any long-running processes, so they won't count towards your account's memory limit. So install a Git application with the control panel and check out our latest Git documentation today.

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Introducing Passenger

Posted Feb 8 at 09:28 CDT by Daniel in Rails, Software  - 7 comment(s)

Recently, we quietly added an important pair of new apps to our complement of one-click installers based on Phusion Passenger. Passenger’s also known as mod_rails or mod_rack, but in the time I’ve spent playing with it, I’ve come to call it nifty.

Passenger is a module which works with nginx to make it easy to setup and run a wide variety of web applications, but Passenger shines while running Ruby and Ruby on Rails applications. But as you’re about to find out, it’s capable of a lot more.

In the control panel you’ll find two new application types available for installation:

  • Passenger 2.2.8 (nginx 0.7.64/Ruby Enterprise Edition 1.8.7)
  • Rails 2.3.5 (nginx 0.7.64/Passenger 2.2.8/Ruby Enterprise Edition 1.8.7)

The Rails application is a new (and, in many respects, improved) way of setting up your Rails applications; the Passenger application is a more generalized tool for deploying other kinds of applications.

Gems, Rack, and You

One of the great things about both new applications is how easy it is to install Ruby Gems. For example, here’s how I installed Sinatra, a light-weight web application framework:

[ddbeck@web100 ~]$ cd webapps/passenger_app/
[ddbeck@web100 passenger_app]$ export GEM_HOME=$PWD/gems
[ddbeck@web100 passenger_app]$ export PATH=$PWD/bin:$PATH
[ddbeck@web100 passenger_app]$ gem install sinatra
Successfully installed sinatra-0.9.4
1 gem installed
Installing ri documentation for sinatra-0.9.4...
Installing RDoc documentation for sinatra-0.9.4...
[ddbeck@web100 passenger_app]$

Another great feature of Passenger is that it supports the Rack interface which allows Ruby and Ruby frameworks to easily work with web servers. For example, I can use the Sinatra framework I just installed to create a simple web application:

[ddbeck@web100 passenger_app]$ mkdir frank
[ddbeck@web100 passenger_app]$ mkdir frank/public
[ddbeck@web100 passenger_app]$ mkdir frank/tmp
[ddbeck@web100 passenger_app]$ touch frank/config.ru
[ddbeck@web100 passenger_app]$ touch frank/myapp.rb

Then I paste the following code (from Sinatra’s Getting Started guide) into myapp.rb:

require 'rubygems'
require 'sinatra'
get '/' do
  'Hello WebFactioneers!'
end

Next, I put these lines into my config.ru:

require 'rubygems'
require 'sinatra'
require 'myapp'
run Sinatra.application

Finally, I update this line in ~/webapps/passenger_app/nginx/conf/nginx.conf:

root /home/ddbeck/webapps/passenger_app/hello_world/public;

to:

root /home/ddbeck/webapps/passenger_app/frank/public;

and reboot my application with ./bin/restart and voila!

[ddbeck@web100 passenger_app]$ curl ddbeck.webfactional.com
Hello, WebFactioneers!

With the flexibility and other improvements that Passenger provides, we invite you to give the new apps a try. We can’t wait to see what uses you find.

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Happy new year!

Posted Jan 6 at 03:45 CDT by Remi in Rails, WordPress  - 3 comment(s)

Happy new year everyone! To kick-off the new year we've added two new installers to our system:

Enjoy! Read the full article and comments


New WordPress screencast

Posted Nov 25 at 10:29 CDT by Remi in WordPress  - 0 comment(s)

We've made a new "Getting started with WordPress" screencast. It is available at http://docs.webfaction.com/software/wordpress.html#getting-started-screencast

The screencast shows how to install WordPress, how to customize it, optimize it and how to keep it secure by upgrading it when new versions come out.

Enjoy!

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New Django screencast

Updated Jul 8 at 23:22 CDT (first posted Oct 1 at 11:07 CDT) by Remi in Django  - 4 comment(s)

We've made a new "Getting started with Django" screencast. It is available at http://docs.webfaction.com/software/django/getting-started.html#getting-started-screencast

The video is available in HD and with subtitles. Enjoy while it's hot!

*Update*: Fixed the link location.

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New "WebFaction tour" 2min video

Posted Sep 24 at 05:38 CDT by Remi in General  - 0 comment(s)

We just finished a new "WebFaction tour" video showing why WebFaction might be a good fit for your hosting needs.

If you're considering WebFaction and would like to know a bit more about our service make sure you check it out, it's only 2min long: http://www.webfaction.com/demos/tour

Thanks a lot to Ian and his team from Procasts for making the video.

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Latest news

Posted Sep 3 at 10:39 CDT by Remi in Django, Documentation  - 4 comment(s)

Here is what's been happening lately:

New software-specific documentation

We've started writing some new documentation about specific software. This new documentation will eventually replace and surpass all of our knowledge base. The two latest guides that we wrote are:


WSGI SSL middleware no longer needed

Our mod_wsgi and django on mod_wsgi apps now come with the following line in their apache configuration:

SetEnvIf X-Forwarded-SSL on HTTPS=1


This means that mod_wsgi will set the right wsgi.url_scheme, removing the need for SSL middlewares such as http://www.djangosnippets.org/snippets/240/

Support for email extensions

Email extensions are now fully supported. This means that you can configure an email such as email@domain.com in the control panel and people can send emails to email+anything@domain.com and it'll work.

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System administrator position available

Posted Sep 1 at 10:18 CDT by Remi in General  - 0 comment(s)

We have a new position available for a system administrator. Details at http://www.webfaction.com/jobs

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New documentation available

Posted Aug 25 at 12:13 CDT by Remi in Documentation  - 2 comment(s)

We've just made some new documentation available at http://docs.webfaction.com .

Right now it contains an extensive user guide, which cover all aspects of the services we offer and an API reference and tutorial for people wanting to use our API. Each document can also be downloaded as a PDF file.

Soon we will be adding a lot of application-specific documentation (right now that documentation is only available in our knowledge base but we will migrate it to http://docs.webfaction.com).

As a side note, the documentation was built with Sphinx (the documentation tool) and the search was implemented with Sphinx (the search tool), both of which we highly recommend... except for the confusing name clash :)

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