Besides the hundreds of code improvements they have made (a full list is available on the WordPress website, the following are some of the key enhancements handled in WordPress 2.9 Carmen release:

- Upgrade all plugins at once using a bulk upgrade option

- Built in Image Editing: Images can be edited in line as soon as they are uploaded using the image editing tool, that is now built in

- Media Embedding: Just paste the URL in the blog and oEmbed feature with

- Trash Feature: Instead of delete, a trash feature has been introduced. This will move the trashed blogs to a Trash can where it will remain for 30 days. You can also manually restore or permanently delete the contents from the Trash.

Overall it appears to be a good set of features which were not directly available earlier.

You can download WordPress v2.9 CARMEN directly from WordPress download site.

For all our clients at Auro, we will upgrade your blog to WordPress 2.9 – just open a support request with our support team and they will take care of it right away.

If you have a blog through our Blogs Plugin platform, which is built using the WPMU architecture, you do not have to do anything as our support team will take care of upgrading your blogs as soon as this version is available on WPMU.

At Auro Infotech, we have been using OpenX for over three years during which it has evolved from phpAdsNew to OpenAds to OpenX. We also have an internal advertising platform called Auro Ads which aims to solve a long pending need in the online advertising platform in India ie. the lack of a reliable ad network that will do justice both to the publishers and advertisers. During this process, we learnt a lot about this open source product, its strengths, its limitations and workarounds.

Typically in an ad network you would expect the ability for advertisers and publishers to be able to register automatically and login. OpenX (as of today – 31-Jul-2009) does not have this functionality integrated into it. We came up with a way to build our own advertiser registration page and a publisher registration page, which will store information separately, validate it and then add it to the master ad network so that they can access the system easily.

For one of our clients, we added a new banner type (not available in OpenX) to be available for their publishers and advertisers.

Another requirement is the ability to manage the background color of the campaign and the banner. While we have been able to successfully integrate the feature to manage background colour of a campaign, we have not yet been able to give the same feature for managing background colour of the banner. We hope to be able to accomplish this within the next week or so.

We are looking forward to wrapping up this version and also work on the next features which be quite challenging (such as integrating video ads in OpenX, etc). Will keep you updated on these exciting changes happening in August 2009.

If you have any OpenX related requirement or any question about OpenX, please feel free to ask.

Regards

We successfully used the Youtube API to generate the latest videos for albums and artists from Youtube within Music Plugin.

If you visit the site and go to any artist or album page, you can see this in the site as a AJAX badge.

You can see it here: Aishwarya Rai’s Videos from You Tube on Music Plugin

Orkut presents a series of APIs that helps developers build applications within Orkut and publish it within Orkut. Any user to Orkut can then add the application to their home page and also share it with their friends and groups.

Based on this experience, Purushothaman is now trying to take this concept to the next level as a part of his April 2009 project in the ATRP.

He is attempting to make Music Plugin itself as a portal where other websites can build their own applications and publish it. He is trying out using OpenSocial for this so that any one with a OpenSocial id can easily publish their applications in Music Plugin.

Will keep you updated on how it goes.

Elgg is a social networking website tool that allows developers to customize it and integrate it into their web sites. The power of it is that it brings in existing features required for social networking website such as member login, groups, comments, activity dashboard, admin tool, etc.

Mugunthan studied the flow of the web application model for Elgg and integrated a new admin feature to manage various political parties in MPMLA, a India based website that allows people to interact with their elected representatives.

During this study, we found out the smart organization of the database elements in Elgg and came up our own custom scripts to correctly write into the right tables to duplicate the functionality of creating default groups for each party, when a new political party is added into the Elgg based System.