We’ve shown you a fair amount of the staff interface, but I want to show you the staff login page today. Overall this video touches on three things..

1. Staff Login Page: This is a first, no one outside our team has seen this login page before now.
2. Two-Factor Authentication: This was originally developed for v3, then back-ported to 2.5.
3. Resource Preservation: Session expire? Blesta remembers where you were headed.

The staff login page has previously never been shown, although I designed it before much of the interface. Two-Factor Authentication was originally developed early on for v3, and then back-ported to 2.5. As far as we know, no one else supports two-factor authentication, making Blesta uniquely secure. We don’t blame them though, it took plenty of R&D and most solutions are proprietary. Resource preservation is just a fancy term we coined to say that Blesta remembers where you were going, and takes you back there if your session expires and you get logged out and login again.

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

Note: Cody tells me, and I realized after that OATH is pronounced “oath”, not “oh-auth”, which is something completely different.

So, let’s keep it real. I didn’t have the time to make a video this week. I’ve been doing a lot of graphic design work on Blesta, some awesome stuff you’ll get to see soon. But that doesn’t mean I can’t share something, right?

Plugins. Are. Amazing. Plugins can do a lot, we’ve talked about them before in passing while describing other features. Plugins can register widgets on the Dashboard, on the Billing Overview, on the Client Profile. Plugins can create entirely new pages, with new functionality, with their own nav links. Plugins can register themselves into the ACL. Plugins can create their own email templates. Plugins are mini-applications. Plugins are POWERFUL.

I know people are going to shock us with what they develop for Blesta using the plugin system. I can’t wait to be blown away.

This post is the tip of the tip of the iceburg, we will have a lot more to say about plugins as we get closer to release.

Oh yeah, plugins can be installed, and uninstalled, upgraded and managed. Here’s what the installed plugins window looks like. These are all plugins that will come pre-installed with Blesta (there will be more too, don’t worry). These ones create widgets on the Dashboard.. and since we wrote them, they got slapped with the Blesta logo. Slap your logo on your own plugin!

Maybe a video next week? We’ll see!

I hope you’ve had a chance to check out the Blesta Translator that I posted about and that we released last week. The previous week Cody posted a developer commentary video on our RESTful API that you may want to check out as well.

This week’s video is about themes. We mentioned themes briefly a while back, but here it is in action. You can do the following with themes:

1. Select from different color themes that are included with Blesta.
2. Create and save your own color themes, and fine tune colors to match your brand.
3. Use your own logo, rather than the Blesta logo.

In the future we may add additional options that affect the direction and style of gradients, add additional options, and provide a way to share themes.

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

Blesta is in use in well more than 50 countries, and our friends abroad speak many different and wonderful languages. Blesta has always supported multi-language and some of our users have made their translations available to the community, but it has only ever shipped with English support and translations have been spotty at best. That’s all about to change.

Today we announce the availability of Blesta Translator, a collaborative, community driven effort to provide full, accurate, and up to date translations in as many languages as possible.

The success of this project depends on you. If you are fluent in another language and would like to contribute to the translation of Blesta into your language all you need to do is sign up and start. Contribute as little or as much as you like as often as you like. New and updated language will be added to the translator in advance of software releases and it’s our hope that the new language will be translated in advance of and ship with official releases.

While this is still a beta version, we will be adding a few new features in the coming weeks. Ultimately a daily snapshot of translations will be available for download. We realize this is a continual effort and nobody should have to wait for the next Blesta release to take advantage of the latest translations. Partial translations will fallback to English. Additional stats, graphs, and context for translations will come as well.

So, what are you waiting for? Head on over to translate.blesta.com and get started! You’ll be translating version 3.0.0_dev. While it’s not complete, now’s a good time to get a head start! Contributors are given credit for their efforts.

And, of course, if you have a suggestion to make this tool better please let us know.

Here are the languages currently available for translation:

1. العربية, SA (ar_sa)
2. Deutsch, DE (de_de)
3. Ελληνικά, GR (el_gr)
4. English, UK (en_uk)
5. Español, ES (es_es)
6. français, FR (fr_fr)
7. עברית, IL (he_il)
8. italiano, IT (it_it)
9. 日本語, JP (ja_jp)
10. polski, PL (pl_pl)
11. português, PT (pt_pt)
12. Română, RO (ro_ro)
13. svenska, SE (sv_se)
14. 中文, CN (zh_cn)

In this developer commentary, I give a behind the scenes look at the API in version 3.

What we’ve done is create a controller to make available all of the various models in a RESTful manner, using the four primary HTTP verbs (GET, POST, PUT, DELETE). All this controller needs to do is handle parameter passing and output formatting, which we’ve done here in just 342 lines. Available output formats are JSON, XML, and PHP serialization, but more may be added in the future.

The API supports an unlimited number of users, so you can delegate users for specific tasks. In addition, the API may be extended by plugins. The format for those requests is /api/pluginName.modelName/method.format.

Currently the API supports HTTP Basic authentication, but we’re looking to add Digest authentication in the future as well. In addition, we’ve added command line interface (CLI) support which is bound to make API development easier for you programmers out there.

Click the icon in the bottom right of the video player to go full screen.