AKIS

Advance Notice: Phasing out revisions service to pre-2010 sites

This news post applies to all AKIS clients with websites built prior to 2010 – i.e. those with ‘static’ websites rather than a CubeCart ecommerce site or our new WordPress database driven websites.  Please  note that we are phasing out the provision of our update/revision services to these old style static sites at the end of 2010. From 2011 we will only be offering to carry out minor edits such as text changes or photo swaps – not the addition of new pages, major layout changes, etc.  But we are now offering a 25% discount to clients with existing AKIS websites built prior to 2010 if they wish to upgrade to a new website from our current range during 2010 – see separate announcement on this.

RoundCube Webmail Operation Help & Info

RoundCube Webmail is a 3rd party interface system we provide to let you manage your email via the web from any internet pc (ie for when you don’t use or don’t have access to a pc based email program such as Outlook, thunderbird, etc.) It’s very easy to use but if you’re looking for some help and guidance on the basics of using it then have a look at RoundCube’s help page.

AKIS Client Management / Billing Changes

Just a heads up to clients that we have decided to move and integrate our client management, billing and ticket support systems from the current ClientExec + Comdev Helpdesk, over to the industry acclaimed “FreshBooks“.  We are beginning the migration process this week and hope to have the new system active in the next couple of weeks.

Transition to suPHP (Advance Notice/Schedule)

NB: Also see the initial advance notice announcement on this subject.

This announcement is related to our upcoming work on all servers to enable suPHP. suPHP is a tool for executing PHP scripts with the permissions of their owners. It consists of an Apache module (mod_suphp) and a setuid root binary (suphp) that is called by the Apache module to change the uid of the process executing the PHP interpreter. In more general terms, enabling suphp will add an additional layer of security and remove issues related to file ownership permissions when using popular PHP based applications such as WordPress and Joomla.

The schedule for carrying out the change to servers is as follows:

US BAKER - April 26 2010 @ 12:00 AM EST  [ now completed ]
UK BELLAMY – April 26 2010 – 10:00 PM GMT  [ now completed ]
UK RICHARDS - April 30 2010 – 10:00 PM GMT [ now completed ]

Click “read more” below for the full details of this important announcment…

read more

WordPress 3.0 – Coming Soon!

Just a quick heads up that WordPress 3.0 is scheduled to launch on 1st May – we will be upgrading all client’s site to this new version when it arrives.

UPDATE:  WordPress 3.0 should have been released on 1st May, but now, the core developers of WordPress have removed the release date because of bugs that still need to be fixed. There are expectations that the production version will be released in the last week of May or in the early start of June 2010.

New AKIS Ecommerce Package for 2010

We’re happy to announce the launch of our new ecommerce package deal. This brings our ecommerce package into line with all other new packages by using WordPress at the site’s core.  This ecommerce website package uses a combination of WordPress and the commercial “Shopp” ecommerce plugin to produce store with better visual design options (per all our other sites) and a better more easily managed admin area for store owners.  Read more on our ecommerce page.