Community Server 2008 Express is now available for FREE to Appliedi Innovation’s web hosting customers in a few easy clicks from the control panel. Community Server 2008 is a premium content management system (CMS) and Social Networking application from Telligent, the people who made the application that powers myspace, Microsoft’s xbox website and other major sites. Some of the major built-in features include blogs & forums (with integrated Search), photo, file, and media galleries, and a control panel. There is also a built-in email server that can make the forums work more like an email discussion where email replies are automatically generated on the forum. Community Server 2008 is a CMS similar to Dotnetnuke, Kentico, or Joomla, etc.

Our Community Server 2008 application pack has been custom coded into the control panel to make the process as painless as possible. It literally takes less than 5 minutes to install. Please see our support article that explains the process. This express edition can also easily be upgraded to other versions of Community Server 2008.

New SSL certificates (or renewals) ordered through Applied Innovations web hosting, will now have slightly more functionality. Our e-commerce hosting customers will now be able to call their websites securely from either www.acme-hosting.net or just acme-hosting.net. This is more convenient, because it used to be that you would have to call your website securely usually with “www” in the url. If a customer came to your page without a “www”, then your shopping cart would have to redirect to “https://www”   In some cases this would be a headache to the web developer. Well, with this new feature, that will be a thing of the past!

Applied Innovations is always trying to bring more value to our e-commerce web hosting customers. We often will find a popular product that our customers find useful, and we will see if we can get our customers a discount. Revolver Commerce makes many useful add-ons to the ASPDotNetStorefront e-commerce app, and they also provide design and development services.

Revolver Commerce brings some much needed add-on applications to the already wonderful ASPDNSF product. These apps can save you a lot of time, and potentially increase sales. I was able to ask Chris McKellar, one of the lead developers at Revolver Commerce about their products. Here’s a couple of the questions I asked:

From customer feedback you’ve received, what might be the most important add-on if someone had to choose just one?

“Product Attributes. Search is a great add-on, but there are a couple others out there as well. Attributes is something that was desperately needed in the ASPDNSF community and we’re thrilled to have had the opportunity to be able to provide a solution there.”

I see that my purchase of an add-on includes a year of upgrades. Can you tell me about how often they are updated? For example, if ASPDNSF releases a new version, if there’s any compatibility issues, will there be an update to the add-on?

“Add-ons will be updated shortly after ASPDNSF releases new versions. As we add features to the add-ons, we’ll also update our clients with those features. We have no specific roadmap for feature development since it’s highly demand driven from our client base.”

AppliedI customers can log into the control panel  and check out the market place to redeem a 10% off coupon from Revolver Commerce for add-ons to your ASPdotnetstorefront website.

A great deal of our e-commerce web hosting customers choose to order Instant SSL certificates from Applied Innovations. For the $99 price tag we install the highly secure 256-bit encryption SSL certificate for you, you get $100,000 warranty from Comodo, and you also get the Trust Logo free. 

Today, Applied Innovations has been informed before the official news release, that Comodo will be updating their Trust Logo. The Trust logo is getting a much needed aesthetic facelift, and becoming more useful by allowing a customer to hover their mouse over the graphic to activate a Java Script that tells them more about who you are. This equals more trust, which potentially equals more sales. You can see the demo of the new graphic here. 

Here’s the Old Trust Logo:

Here’s the New Trust Logo (To see how the Javascript works, please click the above link to the demo): 

Comodo has also had the scrolling “CornerTrust” logo for a while now that essentially has the same Javascript mouse-over feature as the new logo, but the CornerTrust required a graphic to hover on the corner of the customers browser. This new logo is a stationary option.

For instructions on how to install the new logo, please see this Support page.

Remember those SSL certificates called Extended Validation certificates? Well, one of their major drawbacks was that they only worked when your customer was using IE7 to browse your website. Now, with Firefox version 3, you have more than 8 million more browsers on the internet able to see an EV certificate. Upon entering a site using a EV SSL certificate, Firefox will display a green button, much like IE7’s green bar. A blue button means an SSL certificate is installed, but it’s not an EV cert, and a grey button means the  page you’re on is not using SSL. The worst buttons to see are red (a known malicious website) or yellow (an invalid SSL certificate). You can read more about this new feature here.

Firefox 3 has many other new features. Among them is a better handling on your computers resources (memory) which equals a quicker more efficient browsing experience.  Other features include a new URL discovery designed to allow you to quickly navigate to the website you want to get to. The address bar will try to find an address you’re typing based on your browsing history.

As always, our customers can purchase a Comodo EV SSL certificate from Applied Innovations at a greatly discounted rate ($349.95 as of the date of this writing).