Python still the most popular coding language and growing

Tendenci, the Open Source Membership Management Software, is written in in a programming language named Python. (Named after Monty Python of course!)

python ranks 1 for popular coding languages
Python – the most popular coding language of 2015

And Python is the most Popular Coding Language of 2015. A nice winning streak! This matters to people choosing membership software because open source means it can’t be taken away from you. Lots of options to export from Tendenci as well if a better solution for your particular needs comes up.

The more people who know a given programming language means you have lots of resources to support, extend, upgrade and hopefully also contribute to the tendenci software and get involved.

So let’s be honest, we all like playing on the winning team. We bet on Python very early. We used Python even on the windows platform in the early 2000s. Python has truly hit a critical-mass among developers.

Given the Django web framework behind Open Source Tendenci is written in Python, and all of Tendenci’s apps are written in Python, we feel pretty good about the future stability of our technology stack.

In other words, the future looks bright and we welcome more developers to join the Tendenci community!

(source: http://blog.codeeval.com/codeevalblog/2015#.VohU45MrLeQ= )

10 Million NGOs Worldwide (who just might want open source multilingual software)

Let’s start 2016 off with some great news. NGOs are growing internationally and their role in our society is becoming more important.  From the post:
https://www.ongood.ngo/portal/facts-and-stats-about-ngos-worldwide

NGO Facts - 10 Million#NGOfacts is an ongoing campaign that highlights statistical data about NGOs, nonprofits and charities worldwide. Committed to building a comprehensive list of facts and stats about the NGO sector, please check back regularly for updates.

1. There are an estimated 10 million (non-governmental organizations) NGOs worldwide.
Source: The Global Journal

2. The number of people worldwide donating money to NGOs increased from 1.2 billion in 2011 to 1.4 billion in 2014. By 2030, the number is expected to grow to 2.5 billion.
Source: Charities Aid Foundation

(those are the first two points of 14 – go read the full post here!)

And yes, we are pretty happy to see greater adoption of Tendenci – an open source software solution for NGOs that is already multilingual. Join us!

RIP Ian Murdock

ian-murdockRIP Ian Murdock,the  founder of Debian Linux. Without Ian’s work in the Open Source Community there could be no Tendenci. This is a sad way to end 2015.

News links below:

#RIP

Why Use Open Source Software: The Benefits – LinuxIT Europe

This video is one of the best explanations of why people are switching to Open Source solutions like Tendenci,

The video is from LinuxIT Europe so go check them out.

And if you’d like to learn more about Tendenci functionality for non-profits here is a video from us.

Example: Our web site is at www.tendenci.com with membership management software functionality in addition to high end cms capabilities.

But what about the code? It’s right on github for you to peruse right now https://github.com/tendenci/tendenci because …. well, just watch this video to understand how differentiated open source is!

Django 1.49 EOL drives Tendenci 5 EOL date – time to upgrade

Tendenci 5.x or earlier clients should upgrade to Tendenci 7+ now.

If you are on Tendenci 5 or earlier, you need to upgrade. For open source self installed users the instructions to upgrade tendenci are on readthedocs. For hosted clients please contact us.

Why? What is driving this notice?

Primarily as a safety precaution even if there are no known issues at this time because Django has declared EOL for Django 1.49 which is behind Tendenci 5. (Note: Tendenci 7 uses Django 1.8+ and is not impacted.)

What happens if we don’t upgrade to a newer version of Tendenci?

First – it’s in your best interest because of changes in search engine technology and user’s browsing behavior. But…

In the short term, probably nothing will happen as there are no known issues that I am aware of as I type this. But if the community is not maintaining Django 1.49 then that means nobody is watching on a daily basis and opens the door to possible security issues being undiscovered.

Is there a cost to upgrade from Tendenci 5 to Tendenci 7? Yes.

Earlier this year google changed it’s ranking system to strongly favor mobile web sites. As a result Tendenci 6 and Tendenci 7 use a significantly different template theming based on Bootstrap 3. In the industry this was referred to as “Google’s Mobilegedon”

http://money.cnn.com/2015/04/21/technology/google-mobilegeddon/index.html

Is there a cost to upgrade from Tendenci 6 to 7?

No. There is no cost to upgrade from T6 to T7.

It is redoing the layouts to be mobile responsive that causes the need for human intervention to do the upgrades from T5. And this was driven by google and by you, the user, who now browses the web more on their mobile device than their computer.

More mobile web than desktop or mobile apps
How you browse the web now

We strongly recommend you upgrade with the team at Tendenci or with your own developer. The full upgrade instructions are posted on readthedocs.

The good news is we expect future upgrades to be less painful now that we are bootstrap3+ and mobile compatible. Which is why the T6 to T7 upgrade is free for our hosted clients.

We can’t guarantee that all future upgrades after T7 will be free because you never know what Apple, Google, Microsoft, or Samsung are going to do. But we are doing our best to help you control costs and stay safe on this whole crazy Internet thing.

Software Lifecycles and End of Life Version Dates

What is this whole “End of Life” thing?

Software evolves and is developed with the ever constant changing technology. From a clients perspective this looks like this:

Software Product Lifecycle
Software Product Lifecycle

ProductEndOfLifeCycle” by ArkrishnaOwn work.
Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Commons.

Tendenci is based on Django which has a stated release cycle methodology. Django is the web framework that handles much of the heavy lifting. Therefore Tendenci which depends on Django is tied to their release and support cycles,

To a developer software development cycles look like this:

Software Development Cycles
Software Development Cycles

Software dev2” by HeyinsunOwn work.
Licensed under CC BY 3.0 via Commons.

Like a cell phone, your web site needs to be upgraded every few years as technology changes. Your old flip phone might still work, but it might also have a security vulnerability that was discovered a year or two after EOL and nobody is there to catch it.

More on that in a follow up post.

Cloud Server Upgrades in Progress

Clouds from a trip a long time ago...
Clouds from a trip a long time ago…

For the few night owls out there, you may have noticed your sites going offline for 5 to 10 minutes at some point in the middle of the night. Well, some good news! We are in the process of upgrading the Tendenci cloud servers to further increase response time to serve you better.

If you notice anything unusual please contact us at https://helpdesk.tendenci.com

Follow along on this blog, the Tendenci forums or on github. We’d love your input as we set the milestones for Tendenci 8 even while we are still working on Tendenci 7.1.x.  Your voice matters, you are the ones who we are listening to. And it is your input that sets the roadmap for Tendenci.

We appreciate you. And we believe you will appreciate the performance upgrades as we finish the night-shift updates throughout the week and wrapping up next weekend.

Thank You!

web site quality utilities and ideas

Checking your web site for quality is an ongoing task given the number of authors on a given web site. In this post I’m going to link a few of the tools we use to check up on ourselves. And on clients as they author on their sites as well, right? So here goes:

Pingdom Site Speed Checker
http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/

Broken Link Checker because the web changes daily
https://validator.w3.org/checklink

Ninja Online Spell Checker – free for up to 5 scans per day
http://www.internetmarketingninjas.com/online-spell-checker.php

Web Accessibility Measurement Tool
http://wave.webaim.org/

View your site like google sees it using “Fetch as Google”
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6066468?hl=en&rd=2

SEO tests are numerous so you can view this post on hubspot and pick your poison
http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/33164/6-SEO-Tools-to-Analyze-Your-Site-Like-Google-Does.aspx

Analyze your site offline by making a static copy and searching the folder. We explained this process here:
https://blog.tendenci.com/tag/make-a-static-copy-of-your-website/

Once you have your site in one folder you can use explorer, or finder, or I use sublime text editor to search for content in the files of the entire folder.

find in files with sublime

I do realize there are too many tools out there to list so please google for more. And feel free to comment in the forums if you know of some site evaluation tools that you like. You can register at https://www.tendenci.com/accounts/register/ and post in the forums at https://www.tendenci.com/forums/

Refactoring Tendenci 7.1

Tendenci-Logo

The time has come for us to refactor Tendenci, the fully Open Source Solution for Nonprofits and Associations.

Why?

The current version of Tendenci (7.x) has significant changes which are not compatible with Tendenci 5. This has prevented us from publishing the new code to make it easier for new users to install.

When?

We will begin publishing Tendenci 7 as a package possibly as soon as October 1, less than two weeks from now. It may not get pushed out on October 1, but people who are using the open source version and are on the 5.x release need to be prepared. The actual date Tendenci 7 will be pushed out as a package is when it is ready. But please plan on October 1.

Who?

Well, if you are hosted on tendenci.com’s servers and we manage your web site then you don’t have to change a thing and it will all just happen in the background. Clients on version 5 will remain on version 5 because of the theme changes made between version 5 and 6. Clients on version 6 will be upgraded to Tendenci 7.1

If you have your own developer or you are a developer, maybe jump over to github and the docs and keep an eye on things for the next couple of weeks. Maybe even submit issue requests for features.

Why are you telling us if there is nothing for us to worry about?

Because not everyone hosts with us and we need to try to make sure their IT team knows the upgrades are possible, but will require your technical team to do them. This is important to us even if they aren’t hosting because they are part of the community.

In fact growing the open source community of people using Tendenci is the biggest driver pushing us to refactor Tendenci. We’re geeks and collaborate on github.

tendenci-github

Wait, what does “Refactor” mean again?

It means making it easier for programmers to work on the code. Technically from wikipedia they define it as “Code refactoring is the process of restructuring existing computer code – changing the factoring – without changing its external behavior.”

It’s time to refactor so we have more happy programmers. Tendenci is just too hard to install in the wild right now. That isn’t right. Plus Happy programmers means more contributors and it builds on the virtuous cycle that is what makes FOSS (Free Open Source Software) so cool. It truly takes a village.

Can’t you just contact every one who self hosts?

Unfortunately we don’t have a list and Tendenci doesn’t “phone home” so we really don’t know how many people are using it by self installing. But we care about them and we’re doing everything we can to get the word out. Everyone should be backing up their sites of course, but still, if you click “upgrade” and your layout goes wonky that isn’t fun. No data will be lost, but what a hassle.

If you self host we are working hard on these documents so you can smoothly upgrade your site (after running backups of course)
https://tendenci.readthedocs.org/en/latest/

Where is everything documented?

Over at readthedocs. Click the image below and you’ll be on your way.

tendenci-readthedocs

What if I self host and I don’t want to upgrade?

You should be fine as long as you don’t try to do an automatic upgrade. And of course you will need to keep an eye on the django project LTS timelines. https://www.djangoproject.com/download/

If you are on Tendenci 5, because of the changes with the django project itself you will need to upgrade from T5 to T6 and then to T7.1. This is all documented at https://tendenci.readthedocs.org

If you need legacy files they are linked at the bottom of this post.

OK, tell me the biggest benefit of refactoring again?

A programmer will be able to type “sudo pip install tendenci” and make a few server configuration changes and they’ll have a site up and running quickly. This matters because ease-of-use changes behavior. If you want to move forward, we have to take care of our programmers first! They care about you, so it is a virtuous cycle.

Wait, I want more technical info!

We’re gonna be pushing the technical details to https://tendenci.readthedocs.org/en/latest/ as soon as we get it all tested. We’ll be able to push the master branch to pypi again and life will be grand!

Wait, this stuff is too technical! (the opposite of above question)

I apologize for the technical stuff, but sometimes when working with software it can be technical. Just know that if you self host, talk to your local programmer and they will take care of you with the documentation we are posting at https://tendenci.readthedocs.org/en/latest/

So if I self host, and my webmaster clicks “update tendenci” and I’m on version 5 my site will break?

Yes. You’ll be able to fix it and you won’t lose any data, but you’d probably want to just restore a backup. And then go to https://tendenci.readthedocs.org/en/latest/ for the technical info.

What if I don’t wanna upgrade ever and my server is completely isolated on a ship in the middle of the ocean? 

OK, well, we like an occasional steak so you have our sympathy for a diet of 100% fish. But secondarily we have all of the historic zip files, that are still on github but will be removed, available for download for some time at https://www.tendenci.com/download/release-archive/