Quick links are basically bookmarks. In the grand scheme of things, they may not be the most powerful of features, but don’t write them off so easily. Quick links are simple, unobtrusive, and very useful for getting back to where you need to be.

If there’s a client you frequently access, or a package, setting, or email template you aren’t quite happy with, just quick link it! Quick links appear on the dashboard and are staff member unique.. that means you are the only one that will see your quick links.

Add and remove quick links with a simple click directly from the page you’re on. Get back to where you need to be quickly and easily. Just another way you can customize your dashboard.

The video is below, as usual you can make the video full screen and be sure to turn on your sound.

We like to do everything in house, and we work best together as a team. From idea, to design, to implementation we’re all involved to one degree or another in every part of development. Granted, we each have our strong points, but the unique ideas of every member of our team can be found in every stage of development.

I was feeling a little nostalgic and thought I’d share a bit of the evolution of the v3 design. The video below shows how the design for v3 came along, from the first hour as a static image in Photoshop to how it looks and works today.

It’s incredibly satisfying to create.. and to see something static come alive.

The video is below, as usual you can make the video full screen. (No sound this time)

This one is from BlestaLabs.. that dark little corner of the office where we do R&D.

Watch the video first, and then scroll down for some details.

The video is below, as usual you can make the video full screen, and be sure to turn on your sound! (If you like music, no narration this time)

Let’s face it, we’re nerds, and we like to push the limits. We spend a lot of time making things run properly, you know, in the back-end. Nice and efficient like. So, what a better way to test Blesta v3 than on a credit card sized computer, right? So, we ordered some Raspberry Pi’s and waited 6 months for them to arrive.

I took one of them, and installed Debian Wheezy, Apache 2, PHP 5.4, and MySQL server 5.5 and slapped an alpha copy of Blesta v3 on it.

The Raspberry people were nice enough to ship ones with 512MB of RAM (upgraded from previous 256MB versions) but it’s obvious that the bottle neck with running a web server on a Pi is the ARM processor. As recommended, I installed php-apc, and that improved things noticeably along with some other tweaks. To improve things further I might try lighttpd, or another light weight web server, but overall performance is pretty good!

And there you have it, the next-gen Blesta on a Raspberry Pi. Hey, if it’ll run on a Pi with a tiny processor and an SD card for a hard drive, it’ll run on your web server.

Don’t fall for the lie, PI is better than cake anyway.. and it’s real! Some of you gamer nerds know what I’m talking about.

It’s incredible how quickly this year has gone by. It’s been productive, but I’m looking forward to what 2013 has in store. I think it’s going to be an amazing year for Blesta!

The v3 alpha is in its third release and is going great, the feedback we’re getting from developers is incredibly valuable and reassuring. We’re working towards the beta release now, resolving issues, and finishing up some critical features while pushing out regular alpha updates.

This week I wanted to show you custom client fields. Not an incredibly exciting feature, but it’s a really useful one.

1. Custom Client Fields are Client Group specific, create different fields for different groups.
2. Field labels can be language defines, so that they are available in many languages.
3. Text box, check box, drop down, and text area fields are supported.
4. Fields can be hidden from clients, or displayed as read-only to clients.
5. Fields can be required, and custom regular expressions can be used for validation.
6. Fields can optionally be encrypted in the database with 256-bit AES cipher.
7. And of course, custom client fields can be created and fetched through the API.

The video is below, as usual you can make the video full screen, and be sure to turn on your sound!

Whoa, it has been a busy week! If you didn’t hear, we released v3 alpha on Wednesday, which is a huge milestone. We’re excited and gearing up for the next phase, which I think will be a lot of fun.

Part of prepping for the alpha was building an installer and handling licensing. We opted to do a CLI installer for now, but you’ll have the option of installing via CLI or your browser at release. Once installed, the rest is handled in the browser — entering your license key and creating your first staff member.

The video is below, as usual you can make the video full screen, and be sure to turn on your sound!