Site Builder for Direct Admin

alex2k said:
Too bad license is user bases.
$10/user still too expensive for me :(
Click to expand...

The price is $150/server for unlimited use of Instant Zen. Instant Zen is the baseline version that is comparable to most other site builders. The Pro upgrade at $10/users is really only for advanced users. We see upgrade rates in the single digits at present. The point is simply that you have that option for those who outgrow the baseline version.
 
CrazyLane said:
I've used SPAW Editor in several applications and they now support gecko. It seems like the figured it out.

http://www.solmetra.com/en/disp.php/en_products/en_spaw/en_spaw_intro
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We are working on a white paper that provides further details on browser technology that may help customers better understand the browser issue.

Here is an excerpt …..

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Browsers were originally meant to view HTML and not to edit it. In version 5.0 of Internet Explorer, Microsoft introduced an API that allowed HTML to be edited. The API, known as ‘design mode’ allows an entire document to be put in an editable mode where text can be changed. A Javascript interface, known as ExecCommand, provides for basic formatting such as bold, indent, font changes and most of what one needs to implement a basic editor. These features made it possible for Microsoft to support its Hotmail product.

In version 6.0 of Internet Explorer Microsoft extended editing in a way that did not require the entire document to be editable. A contenteditable property was added to most HTML elements making it possible to selectively edit text in multiple places on a web page. These features are incorporated into siteZen. siteZen allows text to be edited anywhere on the page without exposing the complex table structure of a web page to the user. siteZen uses very little of the built in “ExecCommand” formatting in Internet Explorer because it does not provide for CSS based font sizing and had other serious limitations. Most of the siteZen editor is written in Javascript. Still siteZen absolutely relies on the basic editing that comes with the contenteditable property.

The Mozilla team realized that not being able to edit HTML was putting the browser at a competitive disadvantage with Internet Explorer. Therefore they added the ‘design mode’ API starting in version 1.3b of Mozilla. Essentially they copied the Microsoft API but unfortunately only the IE 5.0 version of the interface. This means that it is only possible to do HTML formatting on entire documents which means using iFrames in practical implementations . While this is fine for an email editor it is not sufficient for a site builder such as siteZen that allows the user to edit “in place” on multiple parts of a document while maintaining text flow over the whole page. For this reason siteZen continues to be incompatible with Mozilla based browsers (Netscape, Gecko, Firefox).

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So the bottom line is that if we wanted to change the interface of siteZen so that you had to pop up to edit each block in siteZen we could support Mozilla based browsers. Unfortunately this would make our product less convenient for the majority of users. It also would not help us much on macs since mac users consider Safari to be the standard browser and most would not like the idea of downloading and installing Firefox.

Therefore we decided that deprecating functionality to allow site editing with a browser that has a 5-6% market share that might grow to 10% by the end of 2005 just does not make sense at this time. Since most Firefox users have IE this is more of a public relations issue. The majority of our customers feel comfortable managing this issue and agree with our design trade offs.

As I have said before coming up with a fully W3C compliant solution is our goal but is not something to be expected in the immediate future.

I realize this may not meet everyone's needs but I wanted to make clear that this was not an arbitrary descision on our part or due to a lack of understanding of the issues. I hope this helps.
 
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Until there is drag and drop ecommerce like soholaunch, it doesnt matter to me.
 
Update on Browser Support

I wanted to update everyone on the status of our direction with regard to support for Firefox. As I have stated before we will not attempt to use the IE extensions that Mozilla has built into their product in order to have our software run with Firefox.

Instead we have been busy working on technology that allows WYSIWYG editing of text in a way that is 100% standards-compliant. We made this available for demonstration recently at HostingCon. We will incorporate this into siteZen over the next few months.

The advantage of this approach is that we will be able to support a wider variety of browsers than Firefox alone. I will keep everyone posted as this progresses.
 
Upgrades

Maybe this was/is covered in the site. But I thought that I'd ask it here since Firefox support IS a big issue.

If I purchase a license now and use the current system as is, will the proposed update that is 100% Firefox compliant be a free upgrade?

Looks like a cool product and I've defintely got intereseted customers. But Firefox support must atleast be coming. Even for Macs, which I support in an office everyday alongside Windoze, Safari is being left in the dust.

Cheers;)
 
Just to make sure

HI all,

Read the whole thread, phew~!

Right, so to make sure I get this correct, if I buy the 250 dollar license, I will never have to pau a penny again, neither me or my users?

Now on the basis that is true, the only costs would be when I add more servers!?

Apart from that, cant wait to get it installed :)

Chris

ps. no doubt once installed I will start moaning about something :)
 
netearth,

Feel free to moan. We listen :-)

motobrandt,

Yes upgrades are free and when the new editor is released that works natviely compliant browsers that will be a free upgrade.

I should point out that while we are working on that we now provide a link to the the Mozilla 'IE View' install. Once installed, Windows users can run siteZen from Firefox and it simply starts siteZen in an IE window rather than a Firefox widow. This is makes it easier for those Windows users who prefer Firefox. I agree it does not help those on a mac or on Linux.

An interesting stat. While Firefox has less that a 10% market share overall it accounts for almost 50% of the visitors to sitemagix.com.
 
I have a question. siteZen has a contact form that is disabled if you don't have a form mailer program. It requires a form mailer that is "Matt Wright compatible" and that the form mailer be installed somewhere that is universally accessable (e.g. from all end-user domains). After that there is a config file setting in /etc/zen/conf to tell siteZen the URL of the form mailer and support for the feedback form is then enabled.

Do any of you use and/or recommend a form mailer that works well with Direct Admin?

Thanks
 
You can find a free (as in beer, as in speech) version of FormMail here.

(I'm not sure whether or not SiteZen would consider it "Matt Wright Compatible" but we do; it's based on Matt's FormMail.pl, but has been rewritten to be secure against abuse by spammers.

Be sure to read both README files; it's called the same way as Matt's program, but it requires some internal settings (changes to the .pl code) that are slightly different than the ones Matt's original requires.

Jeff
 
magixman said:
netearth,

Feel free to moan. We listen :-)
Click to expand...

Thats good then :)

I have installed the demo version on my system, however the machine name is different than the site Zen is ment for.

The problem I am having is that (and this could be internal to me) when I go to www.netearth.net/zen I go to some other server completly diffferent. Also do you have /zeni as well cause that has appeared a couple of times?

Many thanks,
Chris
 
The problem I am having is that (and this could be internal to me) when I go to www.netearth.net/zen I go to some other server completly diffferent. Also do you have /zeni as well cause that has appeared a couple of times?

Many thanks,
Chris
Click to expand...

That is normal. Because of suexec we need to keep our software executable from any domain so we redirect the login screen to a URL based on your server. This way we are sure to match the ownership of the executable files with the domain. When you launch siteZen from the DA plug-in, this becomes more transparent as no address bar is generated.
 
jlasman said:
You can find a free (as in beer, as in speech) version of FormMail here.

(I'm not sure whether or not SiteZen would consider it "Matt Wright Compatible" but we do; it's based on Matt's FormMail.pl, but has been rewritten to be secure against abuse by spammers.

Be sure to read both README files; it's called the same way as Matt's program, but it requires some internal settings (changes to the .pl code) that are slightly different than the ones Matt's original requires.

Jeff
Click to expand...

Jeff,

Thanks for the tip on the form mail script. We were able to get this script to work with siteZen by doing the following:

1) Copy the FormMail.pl file to /var/www/cgi-bin/

2) Chmod it to 755

3) Uncomment the cgi-sbin reference in httpd.conf and restart httpd

4) Set form_mail_script in /etc/zen/conf to point to http://myhostname/cgi-sbin/FormMail.pl. This gets around the suexec issues for common use of a script. (restart zendaemon).

As long as recipient_domains is set to point to the domain in the test case it works fine. Obviously this is not a practical way to share a script. cPanel provides a formmail script that anyone can use from a common url suffix and it only allows emails to be sent to a domain on the server. They wrote their own script to do this. Has anyone found a way to share a 'standard' form-mail script server-wide or does each user have to have their own script in the cgi-bin directory, configured for their own domain?

I must be missing something obvious here.

Thanks for your help.
 
Sharing a formmail script server wide opens up a huge spamhole in that allows anyone to use it to create a dictionary spam attack (a possible DOS attack) against the server.

That's why won't do it, that's why we won't allow such a script to run on our servers.

It's our opinion that anyone who needs to use a form-to-mail script should be able to learn how to change a few lines in it so it'll work securely.

I can understand why you want that script to be automatic, but once you suffer a dictionary attack against all possible logins on all the domains on your server, you'll see why we don't.

We get two or three attempts per month per server; which our version of FormMail.pl reports to us.

Jeff
 
jlasman said:
Sharing a formmail script server wide opens up a huge spamhole in that allows anyone to use it to create a dictionary spam attack (a possible DOS attack) against the server.

That's why won't do it, that's why we won't allow such a script to run on our servers.

It's our opinion that anyone who needs to use a form-to-mail script should be able to learn how to change a few lines in it so it'll work securely.

I can understand why you want that script to be automatic, but once you suffer a dictionary attack against all possible logins on all the domains on your server, you'll see why we don't.

We get two or three attempts per month per server; which our version of FormMail.pl reports to us.

Jeff
Click to expand...

Well that confirms in my mind that the standard formmail scripts are really not suitable for server wide usage. Our cPanel boxes running the standard cPanel shared formmail script also gets attacks from time to time though none have been successful.

I guess the only 'safe' alternative would be to provide our own code that 'glued' down the recipient rather than dealing with a recipient field in a form and then trying to check it. We are looking for a solution that does not require configuration knowledge on the part of the user which could potentially open up more holes if they did not configure their 'personal' formmail script correctly.
 
The right solution would be to create an installer that the user could run, which would create a custom php script in his public_html directory.

Go ahead and write it :) .

Jeff
 
DA

Hi,

Are you still offering the server license at a reduced price? Do you have a reseller option such as DA; I telehouse servers and sell servers to my clients with DA.

Thanks
Barry
 
We have an unlimited ‘everything’ license for a one-time fee of $250. Existing customers may upgrade to this license and get full credit for their curent license. In addition we have lowered the entry price for the ‘pay-by-user’ licenses so that you can buy a 100 user Instant Zen license for $100. You can upgrade the license to an unlimited license when you grow out of it. For those who prefer to pay by the month, we have a monthly unlimited ‘everything’ license for $25/month.

Unlimited licenses can be in the name of the reseller for resellers of dedicated servers. There are arrangements that can be made for quantity purchases. Please contact [email protected] for more information on this.
 
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