We’re excited to announce that the Blesta v3 beta 1 has been released. If you didn’t receive the announcement email, you can view it online here.

If you are participating in the beta, we look forward to your feedback!

If you have a paid license and want to get started with the beta, go to https://account.blesta.com/order and enter your v2 license key. On step 2 click “Continue” not “Checkout”. Then, create a new account and follow the steps to complete checkout. Your beta license will be sent to you via email within a few minutes. Email support if you run into any trouble.

If you don’t have a paid license and want in on the beta, you can purchase Blesta v2.5 today for the promo price of $99, and then follow the directions above to request your beta key.

So far the response to the beta has been pretty huge, and we are very thankful for all of the support and words of encouragement! Together, we can make Blesta the best, most trusted billing software available!

We are excited to announce that the beta for blesta version 3 is scheduled to start in less than three weeks, on Wednesday, May 15th.

The beta marks a major milestone in the development of version 3, and is the culmination of thousands of hours of planning, design, and development. The beta will be available to everyone with a paid license in good standing. We will be posting something here, and sending out an email on the 15th with more details on how to get a beta key. Sign up for our newsletter if you aren’t already.

Although the beta is about to start, we feel like this is just the beginning. There’s a lot on our roadmap, especially in terms of additional modules and gateways and we will be prioritizing continued development based on your feedback.

How about a contest?

Next Thursday I’ll be posting a video about a major new feature that is part of version 3. It’s actually one of the first features we built for version 3, and none of our competitors have it. Can you guess what it is? (No purchase necessary. Alpha developers do not qualify!)

We have a free owned license for the first person to guess correctly. Email your guess to sales. One guess per person. I’ll announce the winner (if someone guesses correctly) and what the feature is next Thursday.

Financial advisory firm, Deloitte, recently published an article detailing the ever expanding need for two-factor authentication. They predict that, “a number of technology and telecommunication companies will likely implement some form of multifactor authentication with their services, software and/or devices in 2013.” I see this less as a prediction and more of an advanced report of the facts, since we had the same notion back in 2010 when we announced two-factor authentication for Blesta.

Deloitte’s predictions go even further, stating that passwords that were previously considered secure (8-characters of mixed case, numbers, letters, and symbols) are now vulnerable to hackers, primarily due to password reuse and the use of graphics cards (GPUs) to perform dictionary attacks. Personally, I’ve never found those types of passwords to be very secure. After all, we know that password security is derived from entropy (randomness) and entropy increases with length. So rather than trying to remember 8 to 10 character passwords with letters, numbers, and symbols that have no meaning, why not simply use a long natural password? Bonus points if your language of choice is not typical of the application’s audience. Extra bonus points if it’s a dead/non-existent language. Anata no o pasuwado wa nan desu ka?

Comic by xkcd / CC BY 2.5

Of course, what’s more secure than a secure password? How about a password that changes every time you use it? “How could I possibly keep track of that,” you might ask? That’s where two-factor authentication takes over.

Time-Based One-Time Passwords (TOTP) are generated using an algorithm that produces a pseudo-random value based on any given moment in time (remember, randomness = good). The benefit of using two-factor authentication is that you need not put all your trust into the security of your password. Random token generators (or apps for your smart phone) can produce a one-time password that’s used in combination with your standard password, and as the name suggests are used only once. That means that even an attacker that knows your password and knows the token you just used to login to your account still can’t use the information to login as you.

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)