Can this be installed by a noob on to a computer and not to a server? Can I run this from a USB stick or just from my computer ?

Back on Urban Workbench similar question:

This software looks great, what do I need to get it running? Can I run it on my home PC?

Here are the instructions how to set everything up and running on your home computer. We'll use XAMPP Lite to set up that environment (it can be run even from USB):

• Go to Apache Friends and download XAMPP Lite. It's a 43MB ZIP file (whats lite about that!?)
• Extract the content of downloaded archive on your local disk. In the readme file it is recommended to extract it on root of some drive (C:, D:, W: or whatever) so you'll end up with something like: C:/xampplite
• Open C:/xampplite/mysql/bin/my.cnf in any text editor (Notepad will do). Find this:

  skip-innodb 
  # Uncomment the following if you are using InnoDB tables 
  #innodb_data_home_dir = /xampplite/mysql/data/
  #innodb_data_file_path = ibdata1:10M:autoextend 
  #innodb_log_group_home_dir = /xampplite/mysql/data/
  #innodb_log_arch_dir = /xampplite/mysql/data/
  # You can set .._buffer_pool_size up to 50 - 80 % 
  # of RAM but beware of setting memory usage too high 
  #set-variable = innodb_buffer_pool_size=16M 
  #set-variable = innodb_additional_mem_pool_size=2M 
  # Set .._log_file_size to 25 % of buffer pool size 
  #set-variable = innodb_log_file_size=5M 
  #set-variable = innodb_log_buffer_size=8M 
  #innodb_flush_log_at_trx_commit=1 
  #set-variable = innodb_lock_wait_timeout=50

And replace it with:

  #skip-innodb 
  # Uncomment the following if you are using InnoDB tables 
  innodb_data_home_dir = C:/xampplite/mysql/data/
  innodb_data_file_path = ibdata1:10M:autoextend 
  innodb_log_group_home_dir = C:/xampplite/mysql/data/
  innodb_log_arch_dir = C:/xampplite/mysql/data/
  # You can set .._buffer_pool_size up to 50 - 80 % 
  # of RAM but beware of setting memory usage too high 
  set-variable = innodb_buffer_pool_size=16M 
  set-variable = innodb_additional_mem_pool_size=2M 
  #Set .._log_file_size to 25 % of buffer pool size 
  set-variable = innodb_log_file_size=5M 
  set-variable = innodb_log_buffer_size=8M 
  innodb_flush_log_at_trx_commit=1 
  set-variable = innodb_lock_wait_timeout=50

• If you are not installing on USB you should also run setup_xampp.bat file.
• To actually run environment execute apache_start.bat and mysql_start.bat files. They will open console windows. Don't close them, that are servers you need to run activeCollab.
• Download activeCollab 0.7 RC1 (or any other activeCollab version, it should work the same). Extract its content to C:/xampplite/htdocs/. You'll end up with folder like C:/xampplite/htdocs/activecollab/. Fell free to rename activeCollab folder to anything you like (I prefer collab for instance).
• Open http://localhost/phpmyadmin/ and create a new database - activecollab. You'll find a small form in phpMyAdmin that lets you do this (Craete new database form).
• Go with your browser to http://localhost/activecollab/public/install/ and follow the installation steps. Setup will require some info from you. This will do the trick:

  Host name: localhost
  Username: root
  Password: (leave empty)
  Database name: activecollab
  Absolute URL: http://localhost/activecollab/

• Submit. Installer should set up activeCollab and let you know that everything went well.
• Go to http://localhost/activecollab/. You will get a dialog that will let you create administrator user and insert your company name. When your done with this you'll be able to login to activeCollab and start managing your projects.

That should be it. You can find more information about setting up XAMPP Lite on XAMPP website. Please note that XAMPP is built to be development environment, not production environment. Don't for get to read a Security section of readme file!

Similar instructions apply to installation on any other platform, just use Apache + PHP + MySQL package made for your operating system (for Mac you’d us MAMP or XAMPP for Mac for instance).

Thanks to whooven for mentioning XAMPP Lite on the forum.

Its been two and a half months since activeCollab 0.6 was released. Its been a successful release because it solved some pretty nasty problems that activeCollab alpha had and provided pretty much stable platform for whole two months.

Now is time to move on and introduce activeCollab 0.7. For start it's just a release candidate, but it will be replaced with full 0.7 during next week if everything goes as planned (nothing major should change in the meantime so simple file rewrite will be enough to upgrade).

0.7 is really important release and it includes some pretty exciting new features, enhancements of existing features based on user feedback and a ton of bug fixes. Highlighted features:

• Document section is replaced with Files section that features file versioning, comments, folders, thumbnails for images and more.
• RSS and iCalendar support is added.
• Administration is much richer now with some pretty handy tools such as mass mailer and configuration panel. Permission management is also improved.
• A lot of improvements under the hood including better upload handling, improved mailing and date time management, error handling and a lot of other minor or major improvements.

This is pretty short list of new features. You can find more details on What's new page and if you are interested you can see the list of closed bugs in 0.7 milestone on our development site (~70 tickets).

Important links:

• System requirements
• Installation guide
• Upgrade instructions

Download:

• .zip (740kb)
• .tar.gz (450kb)

If you find any problems don't forget to report them on activeCollab forum.

Let me note that this switch does not change anything for regular users, it change things only to those who would like to use activeCollab code to provide a web service.

GPL is really nice license because it enforces sharing. If you take the code and change it you can use that changes internally inside your company without ever releasing the changes. When you go public you need to share the code you modified. Pretty simple. If you still want to keep changes closed you can come with an agreement with copyright owner (usually it means paying for keeping the modified version closed when it is distributed). GPL works pretty well here - you contribute the code or you financially support the project.

There is one major problem - back in 1991 when GPL v2 has been written software was distributed on floppies and there was no web services. Today we have a Software as a Service type of distribution (web services like Basecamp, Flickr, GMail etc) where you don't actually get the code of application, but you use it and it is publicly available. That scenario is not covered with GPL v2 as a distribution so rules of GPL can not be applied. Someone can just take the source, make a set of modifications, run a service and project can't do anything about that - no code contribution, no money.

GPL v3 should fix this problem, but until then we have Honest Public License, thanks to people at Funambol. Read more about HPL here.

Bottom line: nothing has changed except that if you provide a web service to the public based on activeCollab you need to provide the full source and changes.

I know that recent activities logs are pretty bad – if you have many projects dashboard gets too big, they don’t use available space as they should and in many cases they display information that is not relevant to the viewer. Because all of that and repetitive user requests asking to improve this part of the interface I’ve made some small tweaks to make things just a bit better. Changes:

• There is overall application log on dashboard, instead of per project log. This should keep dashboard under control.
• Today and Yesterday entries are marked with different background color.
• Log types now have nice icons, as seen in Basecamp (and many other scripts inspired by Basecamp). I didn’t wanted to add them previously because they would look too much like BC, but I changed my mind and added them. This will be good for the users and that is what matters the most. It is really great way to show the difference between the log entries related with different object types and users are already familiar with it.
• Log entries can be marked as “silent”. That means that they will be logged, but they will not show up in logs for most of the users. Administrators are able to see silent log entries!

What activities would you like to be silent (not show up in activity log)?

I think (and hope) that this will make things a bit more usable and improve overall quality of activeCollab 0.7. Changes are currently available only in SVN (REV0.7 branch).

Update: second iteration. Thanks to Lankitha for suggestions.

1. Open /public/assets/themes/
2. Create a new folder in it for your new theme
3. Copy stylesheet and image files from default theme
4. Update stylesheets and images to best feed to your needs
5. Go to Administration -> Configuration -> General and select your theme

Theme support will not change between 0.7 beta and 0.7.

The decision was made to put only stylesheets and images in themes, but not the templates (views). In the near future, views will not be in one folder as they are now. Every plugin will have its own set of views. If we put views in themes than every theme will need to ship with views for every plugin that user might need or we should enable plugin installation process to put views in every theme and theme installation process to get views from every plugin. That is really bad application design IMO.

So, we will go with good old rule of development: keep content/construction and presentation separated (basically it means that view will not be part of the themes in the future).

If you have any ideas how to improve markup to make it more flexible just shoot!