Robin Majumdar 2.0

Whew, that was one lengthy title. Well as you may have read here in the past, I really have enjoyed working with phpFoX on a few client sites. It sells itself a bit too much as an easy way to build your own MySpace or FaceBook type of social network site … while that is true, any seasoned veteran of building communities will know that the tool itself is the easy part.

The last time Konsort announced a discount coupon offer was around this time a year ago, and it was 30% off the regular price of about $299 - a pretty nice instant savings. I’ve been keeping my eyes open but haven’t seen any announcements about a discount yet.

That being said, phpFoX is definitely a mature product and has a serious community around the development of 3rd party add-ons. The Konsort group announced the final version of phpFoX 1.6.20 release back in February and there has been only one significant patch since then. That’s a pretty impressive track record given that so many companies rush new versions to RTM and then bury us helpless site managers with a bevy of bug fixes in days and weeks after. Not so with phpFoX consort… nice work guys.

As always, if you have any available licenses, leave a comment below (with your email in the comments form which is never revealed on this site) and I’ll be in touch.

Final note: Konsort offers an excellent affiliate program for phpFox.

It’s been almost 3 months since the release of phpFoX 1.6.20 and now there is the 1st significant security patch which affects all 1.5 and 1.6 versions of phpFoX. It works to fix a Moz Binding issue and can be installed by visiting the patch information and download thread (available to registered owners only).

Great support for a great product… as always if you have a license you longer need, I’m always interested in discussing a purchase of it. Please leave your email (never revealed) in a comment and I’ll be in touch.

For those interested in doing the patch, to fix the Moz Binding vulnerability, here are the instructions (thanks Porter for the tip!):

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PHPizabi, makers of one of the more feature-packed and popular social networking systems, announced earlier this afternoon a fix for a critical security flaw which could allow a malicious user to intercept the site owners MD5 password by exploiting a weakness in the usercomments.php script.

Although MD5 passwords are indeed encrypted, a commited cracker could decrypt the password using a powerful enough compute cluster and appropriate software.

Update: The final download PHPFoX 1.6 was released in February 2008 and there were 2 important patches.

phpFoX announced the release of RC3 of phpFoX 1.6. Raymond Benc of phpFoX also confirmed once again that they have Dec. 17, 2007 as a release date for the stable build of 1.6

This release candidate of phpFoX has numerous bug fixes and some slight enhancements, but the following announcements stood out:

Php121 Instant Messenger and FlashChat Chat modules replaced by internal Konsort IM and Chat functions. One of the reasons for this is to avoid many of the user session problems people were encountering. By using integrated chat and IM functionality it doesn’t rely as much on interfacing with the 3rd party user management schemes of php121 and FlashChat. This is yet another reason to migrate to these RC versions of 1.6 since phpFoX will no longer formually support these two modules!

Of even more significance is the dropping of vBulletin from the list of officially supported plug-ins – Once the 1.6 stable release is out, that will be the end of the roadmap for phpFoX and vB integration. At least as far as it receiving any sort of official support from phpFoX.

Why? Simple: vBulletin are realising the wave of social networking craze that has swept the web and are implementing more and more Web 2.0 (ugh) social interaction features into their well-established forum software system. As a result, they are quickly becoming a direct competitor to phpFoX … So from 1.6 onwards, phpFoX will be working hard on their very own forum module to compete with the established forum players such as vB, Invision Power Board and phpBB.

I am a great fan of vB as a best-of-class forum and community suite… but I wonder about these players spreading their core expertise a bit too wide and thin – I’m generally for the integration of multiple leading systems than investing it all in one monolithic design and supplier.

Download phpFoX 1.6 RC3.

PHPFox Konsort is one of the best, and most established, social networking community scripts currently on the market. I’ve developped a few sites already and it’s reached that rare goal of marrying visual appeal on the UI side along with clean and robust code on the backend. It’s based on PHP and MySQL and is worth looking into for either an Intranet or public-facing web site that wishes to foster community collaboration and exchange… it’s a an excellent framework to build a sticky site!

I just got a notice that they’ve launched a summer sale with $100 of Konsort - $198 instead of $298! A bargain and a sound investment. Remember though… content is what counts! Use the discount voucher code “summersale” (without quotes) during the purchase.