From now on, you can get a lot more done with comments in activeCollab.
What was earlier only available in acGarage Plus – our premium housekeeping, backup and auto update extension for activeCollab, is now available to everyone… And is even free!!
This was a tough call for us. A big reason for people to buy acGarage Plus was the auto update functionality.
activeCollab’s release frequency has increased, and we too have to update and release our modules accordingly.
Everyone wants to stay with the latest versions and they can easily download available updates from our My Account area.
Anyone who does not want to waste time downloading, unzipping and uploading all these modules, will certainly buy the acGarage Plus module.
So if we made it free, it would hurt our business.
We still made it free!!
We don’t want customers to waste their time. They’d better use that working on their projects!
With that ideal, we took the auto update functionality from acGarage Plus and brought it in acGarage Lite. Then we renamed the product to “Apps Magnet Auto Updater”.
The Auto Updater is a free download, and works with both activeCollab 3 and 4.
Download it, unzip and install it to your activeCollab. And that’s the only module you need to manually install.
All new products you purchase from Apps Magnet, and all future updates (assuming the support / update license is valid), can be installed with just one click after this.
Try it today and let us know your reactions!!
We are happy to announce our latest activeCollab module – Job Number Generator!!
activeCollab users have asked for a way to automatically generate job numbers many times on the forums. And we are happy we have a solution now! This module can automatically generate unique identification numbers for your activeCollab projects. You can choose a suffix and prefix, and how many digits should the job number have. Whenever a new project is created, the module will automatically pick up the next available number and assign it to the new project.
Project Job Numbers show up everywhere – easy to reference and recall
We updated Tasks Plus, acGarage Plus, Communications, Planning and Reports Plus modules in last two days.
You may download the latest versions from our My Account area, or automatically upgrade using acGarage Plus.
Here are the changelogs.
Enhancement: + Added "Direct" method for auto upgrade (no need of FTP/SFTP, but via PHP) Known Issue: + When user switches from SFTP to Direct and then back to SFTP, there may be permission issues. Please ensure "owner" for "custom/modules", "custom/auth_providers", "work" and "work/backup_modules" folders is changed to SFTP user if doing so.
Enhancements: + Compatible with activecollab 3.3.10 + Filter Communications based on user and time period + Activity logs on Communication created + Email notifications to participants on communication creation + Status bar badge updates when communication is replied to Fix: - "New Communication" button needs to be clicked twice - Strip HTML characters in communication reply - Communication was not showing updated details after editing
Enhancement: + Support ticket notifications are sent from mailbox name and email address now Fixe: - Completing a task while commenting properly changes the workflow label now
Enhancements: +Add Estimted and Actual time in assignments list.
Enhancements: + CSS changes to avoid style conflict with other modules. + Flash version removed. Fixes: - Filters were visible to the user regardless of the permissions. - Time Reports Plus date filter was not showing today's date. - Time records were not properly aligned while grouping. - Canceled invoices were not updated in the finance report. - Only assigned projects will be displayed as legends in people leader board. - Projects were not accessible when tracking modules is not installed.
Update 26th April, 6:40PM GMT
Reports Plus module is also compatible with aC 3.3.6.
PS: Use our acGarage Plus module to get updates about new version of our modules and also do automatic update of our modules and stay up to date.
Limited Time 15% Discount on acGarage Plus… Buy it now and save yourself from upgrade hassels!
Update: 25th April, 5:30PM GMT
Reports Plus update is being tested, and will be released soon. Please stay tuned.
Update: 24th April, 9:25PM GMT
Excited about the latest activeCollab 3.3? We are too!!
But hold on to upgrading to 3.3.6 just yet. We are completing compatibility check with the latest versions and will announce about compatibility / updates soon. We have tested our modules with developer previews of activeCollab 3.3, but there have been changes with each incremental version, and we are still to complete full testing.
We will update this post with the latest information.
Till then we recommend you do not upgrade to activeCollab 3.3.6 if you are using our modules actively.
Life isn’t about waiting for the storm to pass, it’s about learning to dance in the rain!
Anonymous
Guys, sorry about the recent server slow downs. Many of you even reported you couldn’t make your purchases because the shopping cart was broken. We have finally found – and fixed – the problem. And even extended the 4th anniversary 40% discount offer till 22nd February.
They say when it rains, it rains cats and dogs. We had a number of difficulties with our site in the last two weeks.
This is how I felt initially!
When everything was going wrong…
We kept discovering these problems while the 4th anniversary promotion was going on, and you can understand how stressful it can be if you billing counter does not work when people are lined up with their wallets open and credit cards in their hands…
We tried a few solutions. Without much success.
I replaced the Tasks Plus page with a new page and that started working. Disabled a caching mechanism we use to improve performance and that did not seem to cure the problem as well.
Then I “blamed” it on the Putler PayPal Proxy API… (Putler is our ecommerce analytics tool, that supports PayPal, 2Checkout, Shopify etc) Basically, we host Putler APIs on the same server and process 100,000 requests on an average day. I thought that must be slowing down things.
Putler must be slowing down the server…
Then I did some code optimizations on that – like connecting to MySQL database only when there is a query to perform etc, and while that gave some relief, the troubles did not go away.
We’d had enough by yesterday. So the first thing I did was buy additional dedicated MySQL instance from MediaTemple (our hosting provider). Hoping that would take off the database load. That helped, yet problems persisted.
I then rewrote the Putler API code to not use databases at all. That gave superb performance improvement to Putler users (doubled the transaction import speed), but still did not solve the Apps Magnet website issues.
Nothing’s working…
Late in the evening, I got response on our support ticket from MediaTemple that the internal server errors are due to PHP memory limits. Three minutes after that, Rahul Bansal emailed me a PHP error message on the site – and suggested turning off displaying errors – because it can expose the actual file path.
Rahul was spot on, so I turned off error display. But now I had two confirmed reports of memory exhaustion, and 100mb ought to be enough for any request that comes our way. So there was certainly something going wrong….
My experience bringing down servers (with my code) and getting them back again told me there had to be an infinite loop somewhere.
2 + 2 = 4. I knew where the problem was….
We use WooCommerce, and our own Chained Products plugin to automatically provide access to products when you buy a bundle. So when you buy a combo pack, there is a chain of products that automatically get added to your order. I had updated to the latest version of Chained Products two weeks ago. And a recent version added support for “nested” chained products.
Tasks Plus chains Tickets Plus. And Tickets Plus chains Tasks Plus. There you have it… A circular, infinite loop that would exhaust RAM and could bring the server down.
What a silly reason for all the mess
Rolled back to the earlier version of Chained Products, and the cart started working again…
Talked to my team mates who built the Chained Products plugin and they told me: “yes, we’d thought of that test case. But we didn’t think anyone would chain products like that, so omitted handling it from the first release…”. There you have it.. I was the dumb store owner who configured my products exactly like that!!
This is how Chained Products team felt when I explained the problem
We finally recalled Murphy’s Law and I asked them to “fix” the issue and release an update.
At this time, the server is responding swiftly, the new MySQL instance is taking care of the heavy lifting, Putler is serving double the requests every second, Apps Magnet cart is working, Tasks Plus and other pages are back to life… And the 2Checkout automatic order completion is working too (it was my mistake.. the latest version required slight change in the way 2Checkout sends back order confirmation data to us. I had done one change, but not the other.. didn’t read the fine print in the manual… 😉
To compensate for the troubles you’ve had over the last week or two, we have extended the 40% off 4th anniversary offer till 22nd Feb.
So go ahead and get all the activeCollab modules you need. You won’t get this huge discount for another year (when we turn 5 and consider giving 50% off)!!
Yay!! Everything is working now!
Thanks Rahul for the nudge. That led to the whole solution 
I owe you a coffee when we meet!
Hopefully this is not how you feel now ;-)
PS: Images courtesy Educational Colours.
If you’ve been waiting for tactical financial reporting within activeCollab, your wait is now over!
Reports Plus v3.3 adds super useful financial reports! Yes, that’s right. Financial reports are part of Reports Plus itself – so if you are already using Reports Plus you don’t even need a new purchase 😉
An image speaks a thousand words, so here’s how financial / invoice reporting looks within Reports Plus…
NEW: Invoices and Financial Reporting for activeCollab
Interested?
If you already have Reports Plus, download the latest version from our My Account area.
Otherwise, click here to learn more and buy Reports Plus to get an up to date picture of your billing, invoices and clients…
BTW, we have a store wide 40% discount on occasion of our 4th anniversary. Buy before 18th February 2013 to avail the discount as well!!
And don’t forget to post your feedback in comments section below.
12th February 2013 will mark Apps Magnet’s 4th Anniversary. Four years of awesome solutions for activeCollab (and Basecamp, and PayPal…). Four years of cherished relationships with customers. Four years of writing, tweaking, debugging and optimizing code. Four years of challenges and triumphs.
Yes, it’s our anniversary, but you get the gift.. On our anniversaries so far, we have given our customers 10X discounts. It was 10% on first, 20% on second, 30% on third. I don’t know if we will do 100% discount on our 10th anniversary; but for the 4th, we certainly have 40% discounts for you!!
From now, till 18th Feb 2013, you get a flat 40% off on our products. We’ve already discounted the prices, so you don’t have to worry about coupon codes!
Apps Magnet was the first professional grade, commercial extension developer for activeCollab. We’d been using activeCollab for a while and developed a reporting solution for our own needs. That was later released as Reports module for activeCollab on Feb 12, 2009. A month later, we launched PlannerX for Basecamp – based off a planning system we used in activeCollab ourselves. PlannerX was soon ported to activeCollab, and we kept moving forward from there on.
On our second anniversary, we released a series of videos. The first – “2 years of Apps Magnet: from zero to six figures” instantly became a hit – not just in activeCollab community, but also in other startup / tech circles.
The 4 Essential Skills for Entrepreneurship video too was termed “inspiring” by many viewers.
Do watch these videos if you haven’t already!
We shared our 2013 Roadmap with you last month. And we are very much working on it. We released 5 product updates last week and are working on a lot more!
Time Reports Plus will soon merge with Reports Plus. Financial reporting will be added to Reports Plus too. Resource management work for Planning module is underway and we are getting closer to the kind of workflow we want from it.
The team is growing, support response time is coming down, and we are looking forward to a bright 2013!!
Many of you have been with us for a good part of these four years. How’s been your experience? How have these four years been for you?
We’d love to hear your comments! Post them below!!
2012 was a bad year for us. It forced us to change strategies.
Watch the webinar recording above or click through slides below to discover our lessons from 2012 and strategies / roadmap for 2013.
Your feedback welcome!
Recent Comments