New Soholaunch v4.9.3 r9 update released

Special release notes:
Big PayPal patch in this build. PayPal is changing their standards on the 29th of this month, and this version includes the updated code. If you are currently using PayPal to process payments through the shopping cart feature then you must upgrade to this version to prevent the PayPal functionality from breaking on your website.

v4.9.3 r9 CHANGE LOG…
KEY: +New feature, *Change or tweak, -Fix
———————————–

v4.9.3 r9
———————————–
*Shopping Cart > Paypal Payflow Link > Updated the Paypal payflow link to post to new url. Note that if PayPal payments will stop working on the 29th of this month (August 2008) unless you upgrade to this version.

(h)Several new hook locations (for plugin developers) added throughout website-side shopping cart files. Especially: pgm-add_cart.php and pgm-more_information.php

Our offering of Soholaunch Pro was very much an accident - one day, it showed up in Fantastico. We had assumed that all software in Fantastico would be open source (and free to use), and it was not actually open source or free to use if you wanted to make the most of it so upon install, our clients were a little confused. It was relatively inexpensive at the time, and after a client asked about it, we licensed it for the servers.

Over the last few years, we’ve gone from just having it as a side offering to one of our featured offerings, and it went from a really tiny part of our business to the content management system of 7% of all sites hosted at DrakNet. (Currently, the number stands at 131 sites and is steadily rising.) In addition to bringing in new clients, we have converted a number of our current clients over to the system.

If you want to know what it does, we have a plethora of information available on the site for you to peruse. If you want to know why people are using it, you can visit the Soholaunch forums and find some very passionate people about the software (including yours truly, who is an opinionated volunteer moderator). If you want to know what the sales and marketing information doesn’t tell you, read on…

Soholaunch Pro is used to run your entire site, and essentially takes it over. If you have a current site and think you might want to switch, it will take some planning on your part and our part to do it - we recommend downloading your current site, installing Soholaunch Pro, and then re-uploading your old site over the Soholaunch installation as long as they are straight HTML pages, as this will allow both to exist simultaneously OR installing another full account to built it on and then switching the site over. All activity to manage your site for the most part is done through your browser, and its compatible with the most popular ones on Windows, Macs, and Linux Desktops (though I am not sure the Linux Desktop support is official - we have been able to manage the site on a Mint install).

So, why choose it? Well, for one, its commercial software - as much as we support open source software, the fact is the “newbies” just entering into the market may not have time for the “do it yourself” approach to web site technology and support, and we simply don’t have the time (or the inclination) to become familiar with every single open source solution out there and since we can’t, the help that we can give you is limited. Having a company actually stand behind the software is beneficial for those that want a quicker response than some open source CMS’s are capable of, and Soholaunch has it. Since we have a guaranteed direct line of support to the company with our license, we support the software and it is, in fact, the only CMS that we do directly support fully.

Two, it really is a two-sided machine. One of the most brilliant aspects of the Soholaunch product is that it is expandable and customizable if you are a programmer, and if you’re not, it’s expandable and customizable (though you may pay a small fee for that by way of a plugin). It is rapidly improved on both by the company itself, and the developers that favor it in the form of plugins.

The drawback, of course, is that its $149 for a license and that license is assigned to one domain name. The plus of hosting here is that we pay that licensing fee for you - there are an awful lot of hosting companies that claim they offer Soholaunch, but they simply have the free trial in Fantastico that everybody, their dog, and their Aunt Sally gets. Not for nothing, but any schmuck with Fantastico can offer that - here at DrakNet, Soholaunch, Inc. yanks a few thousand dollars out of our bank account a year so that no one here pays for the software as long as they’re here. Period. Ever. The end.

As a bonus, you get some Viastep templates because we snagged ‘em way back when, before server licensing templates became prohibitively expensive.

You really can get up and running in an hour, and if you use one of the templates names above, you can get a pretty slick looking site in that time - and that’s really the draw. Up, fast, configurable, and slick looking without having to go through the twists and turns of learning how to do all this “design stuff”.

This past week we’ve made a few changes on the DrakNet site, as well as launched a few new programs that we wanted to let you know about.

The first thing we want to announce probably isn’t of great interest to our current customers, but our potential customers may be fairly interested in it. We’ve gotten a lot of inquiries from people about moving here who have prepaid somewhere else and wish to be “bought out” of their contract for a variety of reasons, and to be quite honest with you we’ve never been all that impressed with the concept. I mean, let’s be honest - if your current hosting company sucks, it’s not a great idea to ask your future hosting company (who you presumably think doesn’t suck) to take financial responsibility for your old hosting company, and your choice to pre-pay before knowing whether or not they suck. So even when asked, our answer has always been no.

We’ve found that we have a little bit of a different attitude when it comes to Soholaunch folks. Years ago, we were a pretty techno-geek focused company. One day, Soholaunch popped up in Fantastico, someone installed it and complained that it needed a license, we checked into it, and decided to give it a go. In the intervening years, Soholaunch has grown to become a large chunk of our hosting company - 7.4% of all the sites on DrakNet now run on Soholaunch Pro, and that number is definitely growing. We have a good and familiar relationship with Soholaunch themselves, and are extremely active in the Soholaunch forums as well. We like the software, and we like when people are happy running it.

Recently, we’ve noticed other hosting companies advertising the software even though they don’t, in fact, “have it” - at least not in the way we do. The fact is any host that has Fantastico can offer Soholaunch, however, if they don’t pay to license their servers, and their client doesn’t pay $149 to license the software, they’ll see their site go from lovely and cool to covered with ads in 15 days with limited functionality. Sometimes, they don’t expect it to happen - in some cases, they simply license the software for $149 and are happy with that. In other cases, they are infuriated, and they feel duped, and they simply don’t have $149 to spend.

It’s the “other cases” that we wanted to address with our new Soholaunch Rescue Program. It’s difficult to watch people create something that they really love, and watch some of them feel as if they are being manipulated into a fee by extortion. There is something of a lack of clarity in Fantastico’s installation message, and there is something of a lack of either knowledge or deliberate misrepresentation on the part of some hosts regarding whether they actually offer Soholaunch Pro with all abilities, and no advertisements. We can understand how people can be mislead, and we wanted to create an option for people to be able to maintain their site and, should they not be able to afford to purchase the software, to move here and have it included even if (and especially if) they committed to a hosting company that represented that they offered it only to find out it was the trial and ad-enabled version.

Details of the Soholaunch Rescue Program are available here.

We’ve also discontinued Lifetime Hosting. Obviously, those who have already purchased their Lifetime Accounts are still going to be maintained the same as they ever were, and we have left the page up so that everyone can still look up the terms. With the software that we’re adding that does cost monthly recurring licensing fees for us (like Soholaunch) we’ve just found that Lifetime accounts are not longer terribly practical - as if they ever were.

We’ve moved the DrakNet News Blog to it’s new location, and have also changed the Network Status Page so that it, also, has an RSS Feed. You can now comment on both pages if you have something to say about anything we have to say. We’ve also created a new, simplified order form for current clients so that you don’t have to submit your address and telephone number and card information to get a domain on a current account, as well as added fields on the form for cPanel transfers so that you don’t have to fill out two forms.

We hope you like the changes - as always, we’re sure you’ll let us know if you don’t!