dadabik.org news http://www.dadabik.org/ Latest news from dadabik.org en Security Alert, DaDaBIK 5.1.1 is out, please upgrade Wed, 20 Mar 2013 23:50:00 +0100 Dear DaDaBIK users,
we have found a security hole and DaDaBIK 5.1.1 has been published to fix it.

If two DaDaBIK applications were installed under the same domain (e.g. http://mysite.com/dadabik_one/ and http://mysite.com/dadabik_two/) and another page X set a PHPSESSID cookie valid in the whole domain (i.e. having path / ), a user who visited X and login into one of the DaDaBIK application could access the other DaDaBIK application without logging in. X could be for example a normal php page having a session_start() statement.

While this bug is related to a known bug, already documented:
"Malicious users could use PHP scripts for setting session variables to particular values in order to bypass the login procedure and get unauthorized access to DaDaBIK. These scripts must be hosted on the same domain where the DaDaBIK target installation is hosted." the fact that it may occur even without the presence of a malicious script made it even worst.

A new parameters ($secret_key) is now available and required in config.php; its value, which must be secret and different for each DaDaBIK application you create, fixes this known bug, including the case explained above.

The Wordpress plugin has also been upgraded and requires to set a $secret_key variable as well (see installation instructions for details).

DaDaBIK 5 PRO and ENTERPRISE users can request DaDaBIK 5.1.1 for free writing to payments at dadabik dot org; DaDaBIK 5 Basic users who have purchased DaDaBIK in the last two months are eligible to do the same.

All the other users, even if they are not anymore eligible for a free upgrade, can apply the security patch manually by following these instructions. Please note that the instructions cannot be used for DaDaBIK 5 PRO and ENTERPRISE.

Eugenio

]]> Another big step forward: DaDaBIK now provides Wordpress integration and LDAP authentication Wed, 23 Jan 2013 19:14:00 +0100 Hi everbody,
we are glad to announce that dadabik 5.1 is out with Two big improvements:

1) Wordpress integration (PRO and ENTERPRISE versions): a DaDaBIK application can now be integrated into a Wordpress site through a dedicated wrapper plug-in. Users authenticated through Wordpress can also be automatically authenticated into DaDaBIK too, without doing the log-in again.
This allows for an unbelievable number of new scenarios where dadabik can be used. We also have a new demo showing Wordpress integration, see the demo page.


2) LDAP authentication (ENTERPRISE version)
This is a long-awaited feature, especially in enterprise environments where the same user accounts list needs to be shared across several applications. Both OpenLDAP and Microsoft Active Directory are supported.

DaDabik 5.1 also comes with a long list of bug fixes: to see the complete list of new features, changes and fixes see the change log.

Last note: The survey about the next dadabik features is still open and will be open until mid February: if the votes trend will be confirmed, the next dadabik feature will probably be the Multi-select listboxes and checkboxes

Thanks to everybody who took the time to vote and to send us feedback and possible enhancement for DaDaBIK.

Have fun!

Eugenio

]]> Thanks and vote for the next features! Wed, 12 Dec 2012 01:21:00 +0100 Hi all,

about two weeks ago we released DaDaBIK 5; we are very happy to say that so far it has been a great success, even beyond expectations.Thanks a lot for your support and for all the positive messages I have received in my personal mailbox!

While developing DaDaBIK 5, we took into serious consideration user requests, suggestions and needs.

We want to continue on this path for the next releases, asking which is the feature you consider the most important for the future DaDaBIK. Please take a few seconds to
vote in the poll

If your favourite feature is not in the list you can also add it.


Ciao,

Eugenio

]]> DaDaBIK 5 is here Sat, 24 Nov 2012 16:47:00 +0100 Hi all,
I am glad to announce that DaDaBIK 5 is finally here.

DaDaBIK 5 comes with a new GUI and tons of new features, including a completely new granular permissions manager, PHP hooks and HTML templates for data grids. I am sure it will bring its users to a new level in terms of Web Database Application Rapid Development

You can find all the (20+) new features, changes, security and other fixes reviewing the change log. As you can see, also the Website has been completely re-designed.

There are now three versions of DaDaBIK: BASIC, PRO and ENTERPRISE.

All the customers who bought DaDaBIK in the last two months can upgrade to DaDaBIK 5 PRO for free and to DaDaBIK enterprise paying €50.

All Supporters and Patrons (customers who bought DaDaBIK paying €50/€100, at any time) can upgrade to DaDaBIK 5 ENTERPRISE for free.

Write to payments at dadabik dot org if you want to use your upgrade option.

Enjoy,

Eugenio

]]> 4.6 stable is out and security alert. Sat, 3 Nov 2012 13:24:00 +0100 Hi all,
version 4.6 stable is now available. It provides several bug fixes, you can find the complete list in the change log.

The security alert is about the documentation:

"The documentation section about multiple instances of DaDaBIK has been (at least for the moment) removed. That section was not up-to-date and referred to a version of DaDaBIK which still didn't have the authentication feature: the result is that if users followed those instructions having authentication ON, a user authenticated on the first (not admin) instance could also access the /admin instance without authentication. This is not a proper bug but could lead to a false sense of security."

DaDaBIK 5 will be available in about two weeks; having about twenty new features, it will bring users to a new level in terms of Web Database Application Rapid Development

Stay tuned.


Eugenio

]]> 4.6 beta is out with UTF-8 support! 5.0 alpha: feature list. Thu, 27 Sep 2012 10:53:00 +0100 DaDaBIK v. 4.6 beta is out!
The first big, long awaited news is that DaDaBIK now officially supports UTF-8, allowing the correct handling of content in almost any known language and writing system. While some hacks for adding UTF-8 support have been posted on the forum during the last years, this feature has never been officially introduced because of the drawbacks involved: PHP doesn't offer a complete support for multibyte encoding and using DaDaBIK with UTF-8 content could lead to unexpected and bad results such as content corruption.
The new version of DaDaBIK has been completely revised in order to work well with UTF-8 content; furthermore, in order to reduce dependencies with external libraries, which can make the UTF-8 support implementation even trickier, the use of ADOdb has been discontinued and the PDO extension is now used for all the DBMSs.

The move to PDO also means less software footprint, theoretically better performances (they were not tested in details though) and changes in minimum requirement: the new ones are PHP >= 5.1 with mbstring extension enabled and one of the following MySQL >= 5.0 or PostgreSQL >= 7.4 or SQLite >= 3. The database default charset must be UTF-8 if you need to handle UTF-8 content.

There are still some cases in which the correct handling of UTF-8 is not guaranteed, see http://www.dadabik.org/index.php?function=show_documentation#bugs for further details.

Version 4.6 beta comes with a long list of fixed bugs, a couple of them about security, you can find it as usual reading the change log ; a new known bug about field and table names has also been added to the documentation, again, all the details in the change log.

The second big news is about version 5.0 alpha, which will be probably available in two months with an impressive number of new features, most of them already implemented, including:

  • A completely new permissions manager which allows to set, for each user or group, which operations (read, delete, update, create and details) are allowed on each form and field.

  • Customizable data grid: the sytle of the data grid will be completely customizable using an HTML template, for example it will be possible to get a google-style results view instead of the classical results data grid very easily just by working on the template.

  • Filter feature: a quick, customizable, search form a the top of the results data grid.

  • Static pages: the possibility to add static, custom, pages to the DaDaBIK application (e.g. an help page).

  • SQL-filled fields: a new field type whose value during insertion is specified by a custom SQL query.

  • Form desing customization: the possibility to choose if a form field has to be positioned close to the previous one in the same form row or in a new one (current behaviour).

  • Master/details view available not ony with the edit function but also with the details function.

  • A brand new graphic interface (maybe, this is not sure!)


Yes, a lot of work has been done, but I am satisfied because the messages of appreciation I am receiveing from the customers are beginning to repay all the efforts :)

Ciao,

Eugenio

]]> DaDaBIK 4.5 pl1 is out - security enhancement Wed, 15 Aug 2012 11:37:00 +0100 Dear users,
a new version of DaDaBIK, 4.5 patch level 1, is available. This is mainly a security enhancement/maintenance release and, as usual, all the users who purchased v. 4.5 beta or v. 4.5 can have v. 4.5 pl1 for free writing an e-mail to payments @ dadabik.org having "free upgrade" as subject and forwarding the invoice or the payment receipt.

This version introduce quite a big change about passwords storage security: DaDaBIK used to store users' passwords using the encryption provided by md5(); while this approach allows for a first level of security, because passwords are not stored in clear text into the database, it does not prevent some type of attacks which a malicious user can do after having obtained the encrypted passwords, such as attacks based on pre-hashed lists or rainbow tables.

For this reason, DaDaBIK, as other popular Web applications such as WordPress did, moves to phpass for managing the password storage. phpass is a framework which supports three password hashing methods (CRYPT_BLOWFISH, CRYPT_EXT_DES and an md5-based method) and chooses the best one according to what the current system can provide. All three employ salting, stretching, and variable iteration counts. This change makes the attacks much more difficult to be successfully executed.

All the user are strongly encouraged to upgrade.

For the complete list of the bugs fixed you can check the Change log.

In the next few weeks I will post about version 5.0, which is probably going to be released in Fall 2012 and will contain an impressive number of new features, including a highly granular permissions manager. Stay tuned!

Ciao,

Eugenio

]]> DaDaBIK 4.5 final version is out! Tue, 26 Jun 2012 13:21:00 +0100 Hi all,
after almost one month of beta testing, I announce the availability of DaDaBIK 4.5 final version.

It is essentially a bug-fix version (6 bugs have been fixed), together with some improvements in the documentation. All the changes are available in the Changelog.

As usual, people who bought the beta version can upgrade to this final version for free, writing an email to payments @ dadabik.org having "free upgrade" as subject and forwarding the invoice or the payment receipt. Furthermore, if you buy version 4.5, two months of free upgrades are included!

Ciao,

Eugenio

]]> Version 4.5 beta is OUT with new features and bug fixes! Plus license change and Host1Plus Promo code! Fri, 1 Jun 2012 09:56:00 +0100 Dear all,
I'm proud to announce the version 4.5 beta of DaDaBIK.

Three big changes:

1) Records locking: this long awaited feature (one of the features proposed by the DaDaBIK community, through the “Like, disLike & Propose” Wiki) is now available. Basically, when a user U1 enter a record in edit mode, the record is locked and other users can't modify it. The record is unlocked if U1 exits the edit mode or after a certain (customizable) amount of time. The feature still works even if two users log into the system using the same username and even if authentication is disabled.
This new feature allows DaDaBIK to avoid unexpected data overwriting and therefore provide a more secure application, especially considering environments where data is important.

2) DaDaBIK now uses just ONE internal table to keep all the information about the form settings. Previous versions used one internal table for each form, which resulted in some cases in an annoying number of items per database. Another change users asked me several times.

3) A unique upgrade script (upgrade.php) to upgrade to the last version from any version >= 4.3 final. So now DaDaBIK recognizes the version you have installed and if it's >= 4.3 final, upgrade it to the last version. YES, NO MORE nightmare-like upgrade procedures which required upgrading through all the intermediate releases :-)

Together with these three new features, several bug fixes, including important SECURITY FIXES. All the details in the changelog . People who download version 4.5 beta will have free access to the 4.5 final, when available.

Second big news: license change. I decided, after having thought a lot, to leave the GPL for a new, custom, license, the DaDaBIK license. As you can see, I'm trying to make DaDaBIK as a big part of my daily job, I have a lot of passion for what I'm doing but combining this with the GPL is not an easy task. Not only because of the nature of the license, but also because there are a lot of people who actually don't know the legal implication of the GPL and just think it means “free as in a free beer”. There are people who just don't care about the content of the GPL and just do what they want, there were also people who accused me because, since I asked a minimum of few euros to download the software, I couldn't use the term “Open Source”. Crazy, probably they have never visited the GNU Web site (From the site:“Actually, we encourage people who redistribute free software to charge as much as they wish or can.“). Development of software NEEDS TO BE REWARDED.
To be honest, it seems to me that the vast majority of the users understood my approach, many people actually download DaDaBIK giving more than the minimum required, people also wrote to thank me for having kept the minimum entry cost so low. I really, really, appreciated all your messages.
I feel, however, this is the right moment to leave the GPL, even because of some contradictions of the license itself. From the point of view of most of the users, nothing changes: DaDaBIK is still open source in the sense you have access to the source code of the program. When you download DaDaBIK from this site, you get a non-exclusive and non-transferrable right to use the program, to modify the program for you or for other people, even your customers, but you cannot redistribute DaDaBIK, for example you cannot upload the DaDaBIK source code on a Web site for downloading but you can of course upload it for EXECUTING.

Last, (but not least!): I (virtually) met Jonas, lead business developer at Host1Plus.com, who was interested in arrange a partnership with DaDaBIK. Host1Plus.com is a Web hosting company having offices in London (UK), Kaunas (Lithuania) and Frankfurt om Maine (Germany); they offer both Shared hosting and Cloud Vps Hosting. I had a good talk with Jonas and I appreciated his approach, which seemed to me serious. The result of the talk, from your point of view, is an interesting “trial period” offered by Host1Plus.com to DaDaBIK users. Using the promo code DADABIK99 you can get 99% discount for any Host1Plus.com Cloud VPS for 1 month. The offer is valid until 14th of June and for the first 2,000 users.

Yes, long post, thanks for having read until the end :-)

Ciao

Eugenio

]]> DaDaBIK professional services Mon, 7 May 2012 10:48:00 +0100 A new section of the site, services, has been added; the page contains information about DaDaBIK-related professional services which I can provide, for example installation, customization or new features development.

]]> New version available, upgrade! Sat, 5 May 2012 18:50:00 +0100 Hi,
a new version, 4.4 patch level 1, is available.
The main reason of this release is fixing two bugs which can cause errors and insert/update of wrong data in the database.

Look at the changelog for all the details.

User who already downloaded version 4.4 can ask for the patch level 1 writing to eugenio at favoriti dot it.

All the users are encouraged to upgrade.

Cheers

Eugenio

]]> New stable version (4.4), new distribution model and a video tutorial! Tue, 3 Apr 2012 12:31:00 +0100

Hi all,
DaDaBIK 4.4 final version is out! A lot of bugs have been fixed (thanks to all the guys who reported them through the forum!) and this can be considered the new stable version of DaDaBIK, which officially supports MySQL, PostgreSQL and SQLite. Since some bugs are critical and affect not only the previous release, all the users are strongly encouraged to upgrade.

As you could have noticed, I removed the official support to Oracle and MS Sql Server; the percentage of Oracle and MS SQL Sever users is very small and I prefer, for the moment, to focus my effort on the other DBMSs.

This new version also added three new features: the official support for Views management, in addition to tables (this can help a lot in creating more flexible database applications); the possibility to hide the NULL checkboxes in forms (a change which a lot of users requested) and a new language translation: Russian (thanks Eugeniy!).

As always, you can find all the changes in the changelog (http://www.dadabik.org/index.php?function=show_changelog).

Many users asked me a simple tutorial to start with DaDaBIK (in addition to the documentation) so I decided to record a video tutorial which, in less than 15 minutes, explains how to create a very basic DaDaBIK database application without coding. The video is available on Youtube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uPmXoep91Vk). This is the first of a serie of episodes, please let me know your feedback!

Since I want DaDaBIK to be part of my daily Job, I also decided to change the distribution model; now a donation (or, if you prefer, a variable price) is required to download DaDaBIK. You can download DaDaBIK starting from 3 euros including VAT, less than a beer, but if you can afford it you can also pay more. A regular invoice is produced and sent.

I hope that everyone will understand this new approach, which also means a personal commitment to the development of the software, and realize that DaDaBIK actually worths much more than 3 euros. To give some examples, two other applications having similar purposes cost respectively US$159.95 and US$79.

Ciao,

Eugenio

]]> Which DBMS do you use DaDaBIK with? Survey! Mon, 12 Mar 2012 11:15:00 +0100 Hi all,
I would like to understand which are the DBMSs DaDaBIK is mostly used with, in order to understand where to focus the implementation efforts on.

Here is a one-question-survery http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/RCPS5WD, could you take 5 seconds to answer?

Thanks!

Eugenio

]]> $65 discount on Web hosting for DaDaBIK users Sun, 19 Feb 2012 23:55:00 +0100 Hi all,
thanks to the rewards program of Dreamhost, I can provide a $65.00 discount for a year of Web hosting; the normal price for a year is $119.40, using the promo code DADABIK you'll pay just $54.40 if you are a new customer.

I tried several Web hosting services during my career of Web developer and it's difficult to find the perfect one; Dreamhost, as the others, isn't without defects. I don't like, for example, their marketing approach, which makes prices and features not very clear. However, it is probably the best Web hosting service I have ever tried. I am impressed by their very complete control panel, from which you can really do everything you need.

About the support, I am using Dreamhost for a project I'm working on (sharing Web hosting and VPS Mysql) and I had the chance to test it: I don't know if the service is the same for all the plans but they literally saved my life last Christmas night when, by mistake, I dropped a very important MySQL table....yes, I did it, it happens :(
After having waited some time, I managed to chat - during Christmas night - with a guy from the support and the next day they provided a backup of the table (created automatically) that let me recover almost all the data; I lost only the last 36 hours of activity. Just for this reason I think I can promote their services, something I usually don't do.

Let me know, if you try it, your impressions.

P.S. Note that sometimes Dreamhost provides other special discounts, different from the one I'm providing and that you can't combine discount with additional discount.

UPDATE: I realized that, to use the DaDaBIK promo code, you have to go directly to http://signup.dreamhost.com/; at some point, the subscription procedure will ask you for an (optional) promo code. Furthermore, you should clean dreamhost cookies if you visited the homepage before, because otherwise the system takes the current dreamhost promotion as default. Very bad, I know :(
So I advise to look at the homepage and see if there is a promotion available, check if it is better than the one I am offering (could be) and if not clean the cookies and subscribe through http://signup.dreamhost.com/ using the DADABIK promo code.

]]> DaDaBIK 4.4 beta is out! Wed, 14 Feb 2012 17:29:00 +0100 Hi all,
a new DaDaBIK version is available. Back to work on DaDaBIK after a long parenthesis during which I was mainly doing research and working on my Mentor.FM project.

Version 4.4 beta fixes several bugs (see change log for a complete list).

A new bug related to dates has also been discovered and not yet fixed; not sure if it is correct to call it bug but for sure it can lead to unexpected results, modifying the date values you have in your database. Thanks to Mauri for having reported part of the problem, please look at the known bugs section of the documentation for all the details.

The lack of a locking mechanism has also been highlighted in the documentation, since the current behaviour could lead, in some situations, to unexpected results and data loss.

About the roadmap, the idea is to release a 4.4 final after having found the best possible solution for the dates "bug" and, later, to release a 5.0 alpha which will include a new security model and also provide a locking mechanism.

Stay tuned!

Eugenio

]]> DaDaBIK roadmap and OT: the Mentor.FM project Fri, 4 Nov 2011 16:50:00 -0800 Hi folks,
thanks for your patience and sorry for the long period of silence!

The new security/permissions model of DaDaBIK has been designed and a new dedicated admin interface has been built for providing to the user an easy way to set permissions. There are users, there are groups and the system provides a fine granularity approach: for example you can disable the edit for a specific field and a specific user or group.

All this new logic needs now to be integrated into the DaDaBIK engine; I don't think this new DaDaBIK version (5.0) will be published before the new year, most probably the first months of 2012. Two intermediate versions (4.4 beta and 4.4 stable) will anyway be released before.

OT: I'm working on a research project about Music Recommendations and I published a Radio application I'm using to test some algorithms, the Mentor.FM radio. You can listen to music for FREE and without ADVERSTIMENT, according to your taste, until the end of the year. You can find further info at the page "What's mentor.fm?".

Please try Mentor.FM, I would be glad to receive your feedback! if you want, you can also like the Mentor.FM page on Facebook.

Cheers from California,

Eugenio

]]> DaDaBIK roadmap and OT: the Mentor.FM project Fri, 4 Nov 2011 16:50:00 -0800 Hi folks,
thanks for your patience and sorry for the long period of silence!

The new security/permissions model of DaDaBIK has been designed and a new dedicated admin interface has been built for providing to the user an easy way to set permissions. There are users, there are groups and the system provides a fine granularity approach: for example you can disable the edit for a specific field and a specific user or group.

All this new logic needs now to be integrated into the DaDaBIK engine; I don't think this new DaDaBIK version (5.0) will be published before the new year, most probably the first months of 2012. Two intermediate versions (4.4 beta and 4.4 stable) will anyway be released before.

OT: I'm working on a research project about Music Recommendations and I published a Radio application I'm using to test some algorithms, the Mentor.FM radio. You can listen to music for FREE and without ADVERSTIMENT, according to your taste, until the end of the year. You can find further info at the page "What's mentor.fm?".

Please try Mentor.FM, I would be glad to receive your feedback! if you want, you can also like the Mentor.FM page on Facebook.

Cheers from California,

Eugenio

]]> Next releases of DaDaBIK and new security model Sun, 22 May 2011 22:32:00 -0800 Hi all,
I am glad to announce that Alessandro Andreoli, an Italian student of the University of Milan, decided to join the DaDaBIK team and to do a very important work on DaDaBIK as part of his master thesis in Computer Science.

Alessandro is working on the new DaDaBIK security model, something I wanted to implement since years but I didn't find the time to.
When his work will be finished, it will be possible to create group of users and to set permissions at a very granual level, for example saying that the group X has read permissions on the table customers while user Y has also write permission on that table, but not on the field customers.phone_number.

It is a very important shift toward the adoption of DaDaBIK in an enterprise environment.

A big "thank you!" to Alessandro from all the DaDaBIK community.

Another big news is that I'm writing from the United States, where I'm going to live for some months as a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley.

I Hope to give you some news about the next release of DaDaBIK soon!

Ciao,

Eugenio

]]> The locking mechanism is the feature chosen from the Wiki, tell us how to implement it! Fri, 8 Apr 2011 21:51:00 +0100 Hi,
the locking mechanism is the feature chosen among all the ones proposed by users in the Like, disLike and Propose Wiki.

I want to discuss the implementation details with the users so please leave your comments in the Wiki! Registration is not mandatory to write.

Thanks!

Ciao,

Eugenio

]]> I need feedback from SQLite users Wed, 2 Mar 2011 18:44:00 +0100 Hi all,
as you probably know, DaDaBIK now supports SQLite. Since February 2 2001, more than 30 SQLite installations have been registered online.

I would like to have feedback (good and bed feedback) from those users, because I'm going to release a new version.

I also remind you that the Like, disLike & Propose Wiki will still be available for one month. Please use it to tell what you like, dislike and propose about DaDaBIK. A feature selected anong the ones proposed will be implemented.

Ciao,

Eugenio

]]> DaDaBIK has SQLite support, v. 4.4 alpha is out! Wed, 2 Feb 2011 12:58:00 +0100 Hi all,
I'm proud to announce that DaDaBIK has now SQLite support!

The SQLite database engine has become very popular in the last years and I think its support can increase the user base of DaDaBIK.

Since I experienced some problems in trying to write an ADOdb driver for SQLite3, I chose to use the PDO library instead; this means that you need at least PHP 5.1 to use DaDaBIK with SQLite.

Beyond SQLite support, you can find the complete list of new features, feature changes and fixed bugs for DaDaBIK 4.4 alpha in the change log.

Maybe it's important to point out that the SQL logging feature, due to some problems I experienced with the last ADOdb releases used since DaDaBIK 4.3 beta RC2, is not available anymore.

Ciao,

Eugenio

]]> DaDaBIK can be flattred Wed, 22 Dec 2010 23:01:00 +0100 Do you know flattr? It's a social micropayments system and I think it's a very nice idea.

You can help the DaDaBIK project by flattring it! Just click on the icon on the up-right corner.



Ciao,

Eugenio

]]> University of Cambridge uses DaDaBIK Sat, 18 Dec 2010 20:01:00 +0100 I've read on ReadWriteWeb that the University of Cambridge used DaDaBIK for the World Oral Literature Project.

DaDaBIK is used to manage and show online a "database of language endangerment levels with references to collections and recordings of oral literature that exist in archives around the world". Here http://www.oralliterature.org/research/databaseterms.html you can see the on-line application.

:-)

]]> DaDaBIK 4.3 final release is OUT! Wed, 8 Dec 2010 23:41:00 +0100 Hi all,
I'm proud to announce the final release of DaDaBIK 4.3.

After 3 months of work, 6 intermediate releases, about 25 bugs fixed and several new features/changes, we can provide a final release.

I hope this could be a milestone in the DaDaBIK development process.

In this release the main changes are the upgrade to TinyMCE 3.3.9.2 (this can fix security problems and other issues that the old TinyMCE version used could cause), the fix of the extracting problems with some MS Windows systems and the fix of some delete-all related bugs. The complete list of the changes are available in the changelog. The on-line changelog for some reasons didn't contain the changes for DaDaBIK 4.3 beta 3, this was fixed too.

I have added a small Amazon link to the Amazon mp3 store in the admin interface. If you buy mp3s from that link (can be a nice XMASS gift!) you can financially support DaDaBIK. If you don't like it, DaDaBIK it's open source so you can delete it.


Ciao,

Eugenio

]]> DaDaBIK 4.3 rc2 is out Sun, 28 Nov 2010 18:25:00 +0100 Hi all,
the main change is the upgrade of the ADOdb library.
Some users (thanks Chris) reported that DaDaBIK, with some PHP versions and error reporting settings, produced some "Deprecated" and "Strict Standard" warnings. This was due to the ADOdb version used, which was too old. DaDaBIK now uses the last ADOdb version for PHP5 and automatically load the last PHP4 compatible ADOdb library if you are still using PHP4. This can also fix security problems and other issues that the old ADOdb version used could cause.

Another improvement regards DaDaBIK code's footprint: a lot of not strictly-needed files has been removed from the official release, which is now lighter (zip file less than 2MB).

Finally, the single-donation button of the admin section now works as expected.

For the complete list of changes, read the change log

Ciao,

Eugenio

]]> 4.3 rc1 is out, new admin section, last security patch, PLEASE UPGRADE! Tue, 23 Nov 2010 11:41:00 +0100 Hi all,
the version 4.3 release candidate 1 is out; I think it's a milestone in the DaDaBIK road map: many bugs fixed and a new admin section. I hope the 4.3 final release will be available soon, but the idea is to come out with something that can produce applications very close to the enterprise level quality without coding so I want to wait your feedback on this rc1.

From the security side, DaDaBIK 4.3 beta3 in a case-sensitive environment didn't include the htmLawed library; this left DaDaBIK exposed to the security risk that version 4.3 beta3 was supposed to fix; now the problem is solved and also another (potential) security problem has been fixed as you can see from the changelog (where you can find the complete list of changes and bug fixes related to the version 4.3 rc1). So you really need to upgrade!

Teh new admin section, a lot of work: new look, some improvements in the interface, in-line help for the interface configurator, possibility to send feedback, to donate and to buy email/phone commercial support. The configuration file has been improved in clarity too.
Furthermore, the documentation has been completely revised, clarifying some aspects when needed and highlighting some new known bugs/limitations.

A completely new demo is also available, it's an enterprise-oriented application: a simplified invoicing system.

Donations: I'm very happy to see that, just during the last 15 days, 33 people decided to give some money to the project. But it's stil a very small fraction of all the people who download DaDaBIK (a lot) and it's not enough to dedicate a fixed amount of time to the project like I'm doing at the moment. Please have a look to other commercial softwares similar to DaDaBIK, then come back here and think if it's fair or not to donate some euros if you use DaDaBIK, considering the plus of having the source code available.

My road map (an update soon in the section) is quite clear now: a couple of 4.x which fill fix some bugs and/or introduce some small new features and try to enlarge the users base introducing the support for SQLite, IBM DB2 and (maybe) Microsoft Access, then (in 6/7 months) a version 5.0 which will come out with (maybe) some code refactoring but first of all with a completely new security/permission infrastructure with high granularity: the possibility to allow the user John to see just some fields of a table for example.
In order to follow the road map I need to be economically supported , this is the way to allow DaDaBIK to survive. If a compamy would like to sponsor the development of some new features (according to the company's and the project needs), it would also be very welcome.

Ciao,

Eugenio

]]> DaDaBIK description in German and Spanish Mon, 22 Nov 2010 00:44:00 +0100 We now have a description of what DaDaBIK is even in Spanish and German.
Thanks a lot to my friends Juan García and
Georgi Kobilarov!

I want to seize the moment to let you a couple of links to visit: http://www.solidarybikes.org, a charity and "green" initiative by Juan and a friend of him; http://uberblic.com the research & development company founded by Georgi that works mainly on data integration and linked data.

Ciao,

Eugenio

]]> Security Risk, second patch. PLEASE UPGRADE! Mon, 15 Nov 2010 12:42:00 +0100 Hi all,
a new beta version (DaDaBIK 4.3 beta3) has been released in order to solve the second problem I post about a few days ago, the one related to the use of the html content type. First of all it is better to highlight that the problem could arise not only with the html content type but also with the rich_editor field type (together with another content type than html); I think the rich_editor is usually used together with the html content type (it should be) but maybe someone used this in conjunction with other content types.

After having looked at some HTML sanitization libraries, I finally choosed htmLawed. It seems to me that at the moment htmlpurifier is the most effective one in recognizing malicious code, but it appears to me too complex, heavy and it also doesn't support PHP 4. htmLawed seems a good compromise.

The library is now used to filter the content (html content type and rich_editor field type) before displaying it. You must however keep in mind that, as the documentation states, there are some minor cases in which htmLawed can fail.
Since some people asked me about previous releases, as I already told in a comment, the security issues highlighted during the last days also affect the older releases of DaDaBIK and not just the last one.

See the changelog for other details. The documentation has also been updated; if you have read the on-line documentation this morning there was a mistake about the version was related to: the documentation content was the new one (related to 4.3 beta3, already patched with htmLawed) but it stated to be about the 4.3 beta2 (which is not patched with htmLawed) so be sure to read the right one (the on-line mistake has now been corrected) in order to avoid misunderstandings about the security problems that affect your version.



Ciao,

Eugenio

]]> Security Risk, PLEASE UPGRADE! Thu, 11 Nov 2010 15:31:00 +0100 Hi all,
last night I discovered an important security hole in DaDaBIK so I decided to immediately release a version 4.3 beta2 with the only purpose of partially fixing it. All the other bug fixes and new features are waiting for the version 4.3 rc1, avaiable in 1 or 2 weeks as expected.

Here is the problem: if in a DaDaBIK application the insert or edit feature was enabled (at least for one table) and a select_single field type was used (at least once, even in another table), a malicious user who had access to the application could in many cases insert in a listbox some arbitrary javascript code, which was then executed by other users just by using the application.
Among other problems, this could lead to XSS attack (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-site_scripting), which in turn could allow an unauthorized access to the application (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Session_hijacking) and, if the Internet browser of the user contained security holes, even the execution of arbitrary code in the client machine.

The new 4.3 beta2 solves this problem. Even the DaDaBIK demo was affected and exploited by a malicious user; now it has been patched.

The problems described above can however occur even when the insert or edit feature was enabled (at least for one table) and the HTML content type is used; at the moment there isn't a patch for this second scenario, so the HTML content type should be used very carefully, as highlighted in the upgraded documentation. In the next few days, I would like to use something like http://htmlpurifier.org to allow the users to insert html text without security problems.

The 4.3 beta2 also fixes another minor GUI bug, as you can read from the changelog.

Ciao,

Eugenio

]]> Is DaDaBIK still used with non-MySQL DBMSs? Tue, 09 Nov 2010 01:56:00 +0100 Starting with the last 4.3 beta, the users can register the installation of DaDaBIK; I receive information about DBMS type and DaDaBIK version.
97 installations have been registered so far and these are the statistics about the DBMSs usage:
MySQL: 95 installations
PostgreSQL: 2 installations
Oracle: 0 installations
MS SQL Server: 0 installations

97 is (statistically) still a small number but I'm wondering if DaDaBIK is still used with non-MySQL DBMSs....maybe the tipical Oracle or MS SQL Server user doesn't work much with PHP but I think that it's not true for a PostgreSQL user.

I decided to dedicate some time in future to test DaDaBIK with other DBMSs (SQLite and DB2) but if everybody's using MySQL I don't know if it's still a good idea.

Eugenio

]]> New admin section, new release soon Thu, 28 Oct 2010 12:38:00 +0100 Hi,
I have finished the redesign of the admin section: new look, some improvement in the interface, in-line help for the interface configurator.

This will be released soon with DaDaBIK 4.3 release candidate 1, together with an improved documentation and a new enterprise-oriented demo (an invoicing system) that I'm developing.

Stay tuned!

Eugenio

]]> Demo cleaned-up and downloadable Fri, 22 Oct 2010 16:45:00 +0100 Hi,
I've cleaned and improved a bit the demo section in order to show easily some DaDaBIK features.

I've also made a downloadable version of the demo. This can be a good learning tool, looking at the configuration/settings you can easy learn by example how to get the same result. Instructions on how to install the demo included in the downloaded file. Available just for MySQL.

Ciao,

Eugenio

]]> 4.3 beta is out, we have a (hopefully) cool graphic interface! Thu, 21 Oct 2010 02:07:00 +0100 Hi folks,
yes, difficult to believe but true!
DaDaBIK is powerful and easy to use but the GUI has always been something that could hurt....
Why? Because I'm too nerdy to take care about GUIs? No, just because having limited time I've always preferred to spend it improving the features set and fixing bugs.

But your long wait is over, some days ago I discovered by chance a very nice DaDaBIK graphic customization made by Erik Pöher; I firstly started to implement that GUI but I ended up developing the GUI from scratch, in part inspired by Erik's work. Here is the result: demo (user: demo1; password: password).
There is still space for improvement (better warning/error messages for example) but I think it's much better than before. Let me know what you think.

Another important improvement: magic_quotes_gpc set to On is not anymore needed.

There are also several bugfixes, as you can see from the changelog; some new bugs were also dscovered.

Ciao,

Eugenio

]]> We have a new forum! Sun, 17 Oct 2010 23:57:00 +0100 Hi,
a new forum is available! I finally decided to continue using phorum (www.phorum.org) as software, mainly for two reasons:
- they provide a script to convert my old forum data
- even if it doesn't provide all the features that some competitors do, it focuses on reliability, simplicity and customization and for this reason I feel it very close to the DaDaBIK philosophy. They also have an amazing support.

All the old user accounts are still valid. You have now some of the modern forum features, including avatars, private messages and so on...

I still need to embed the forum into the Web site layout and find a solution for a problem: in many posts there are links to other posts, but those links don't work anymore because phorum 5 uses a different way to call a post via URL.

Anyway, enjoy it and let me know problems/bugs!


Eugenio

]]> Any advice for a new forum software? Sun, 10 Oct 2010 17:32:00 +0100 Hello,
I need to switch to a new forum software, any advice?
I will probably keep the old one read-only, or, if possibile, epxport the messages.
My needs are:
- open source
- light
- easily embeddable in the site layout
- rank system (for user and post)

Thanks!

Eugenio

]]> Update on donation campaign and new release soon Mon, 4 Oct 2010 00:56:00 +0100 Hi folks,

I have to spend a couple of words talking about the donation campaign: since I posted my appeal to donate in order to allow the project to continue (more or less three weeks ago) I received 18 donations.

I am very happy about your answer. Really.

Several donations are small but no problem, I think that the act of donating is still very important regardless of the amount. The "donation economy" is something that could really change the way software (and other things) is created and distributed and we should really get used to try it (both passively and actively) to understand if it can work.

Here is the list of our heroes (not complete, I haven't got all the permissions to publish)!!:

Rüdiger Fritsch
Richard Bradbury
Yiannis Vavouranakis
Roberto Javega
William Armstrong
Robert Bacchas
Patrick Simon
James Merrihew
David H.
Michael Frotscher
Jason Fifner
HISPANIC SEARCHING S.L.

Many many thanks guys!

I also want to tell a big "thank you" to RHX, the italian software and hosting company that since many years ago is providing Web hosting and domains to DaDaBIK for FREE. These guys strongly believe in Open Source software and they demonstrate it with facts.

Ok, second thing: a new release of DaDaBIK will be available soon, together with a new Graphical User Interface! :-)

Very last point: DaDaBIK is now on Twitter: http://twitter.com/DaDaBIK I still don't know if I will use it just as a reminder for the posts published in the main site or for something different, anyway…follow us! :)

Ciao


Eugenio

]]> DaDaBIK 4.3 alpha is out. Master/details view: done! Tue, 14 Sep 2010 04:12:00 +0100 Hi,
A new DaDaBIK release is out, together with a big new feature: the master/details view, that allows to easy handle a typical One-to-Many relationship.

For example if you have an albums table and a songs table you can set DaDaBIK to display in the same page the details of an album and the result list of the songs linked to. Here is an example directly from the updated DaDaBIK demo: http://www.dadabik.org/demo/index.php?table_name=albums_tab&function=edit&where_field=ID_album&where_value=1

It is also possible to link more than one details table to the same master.

I set up a donate+download button and I encourage you to use it, it is the only way to allow the further development of DaDaBIK!

Check the change log for the complete list of changes.

Cheers,

Eugenio.

]]> DaDaBIK is ALIVE and need your support! Tue, 09 Sep 2010 23:43:00 +0100 Hi folks,
yes, I know, long time since the last post and almost three years since the last DaDaBIK release :(

I haven't had enough time for DaDaBIK in the last period and, to be honest, I also haven't had enough reasons to spend my nights and my spare time in coding and testing as I did before.

It's hard to believe but the next year DaDaBIK will turn ten. Ten years! First public release on Sourceforge: November 2001. I can't imagine how many bugs that version contained :))

Many many times during this “sabbathic” period I tried to decide something about the future of DaDaBIK but I didn't manage to do it.
But...after nine years from the first release, almost three years from the last release and more than two years of “silence” I still get e-mail from people who want to thank me, people still download DaDaBIK, people still write on the forum, people still use DaDaBIK: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=%22powered+by%3A+dadabik%22&btnG=Google+Search
so now I'm sure that DaDaBIK is not dead and I WANT TO KEEP IT ALIVE because maybe was one of the most useful things I made.

I used to work as a consultant for a software house but some months ago I decided to quit my job and to dedicate the next year almost entirely to scientific research: I'm doing a PhD on recommender systems (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recommender_system) and I have to work hard on it now; I won't have so much spare time but I really want to take some time for DaDaBIK...even because I really need some coding activity :)
But this time I really need your support; DaDaBIK is still a GPL software but, after hundreds of hours spent on it for free, now I really would like to have some economic return for the future work. If you think DaDaBIK is useful, I ask you to donate some money to the project; even a few euros/dollars is enough if a lot of people will do it. If you also use DaDaBIK for your business and make money with it, you should perceive the donation as the MOST NORMAL THING TO DO.

Chris Anderson predicted that "free is the future of business"; I instead hope the future will be: users paying small fees (would be great if voluntarily) for good services/software, and I want to experiment this with DaDaBIK.

I still don't know if I will implement a real business model for DaDaBIK, by now I would like to put more emphasis on free donations and see what happens, see if the community will respond to my appeal; then maybe I will try a more structured approach (see for example how the ardour project gets money http://ardour.org/development) or a donation-per-feature approach. I also thought about double licensing and selling a commercial version of DaDaBIK, what do you think? Will someone be interested in paying for a commercial/premium version of DaDaBIK? DON'T WORRY, my ideas is too always keep a GPL version available.

I don't know exactly where to start; the code is a bit old-fashion now but it's clean and it works so for the moment I think it wouldn't be so useful to rewrite DaDaBIK from scratch using some modern paradigm. Maybe it would be better to start implementing the next steps of the road map or including some of the custom features that users added to DaDaBIK during these years.
The Web site too would need an update, but maybe at the moment just for the fourm: the forum system (phorum) is very old and now there are many open source systems with a lot of interesting features like the trust level of each user. What do you thing about this? Any suggestions? I think the second issue in order of importance would be adding a real blog system to the site instead of this home-made announcement system.

Last but not least: I (we) really have to say a big “thank you!” to Debbie, who during these years took care of the support forum, even during my virtual absence. Debbie YOU ARE GREAT!

Ok, long post but many things to say after so long time. Now I would like to read your comment, please let me know what you think.

Ciao,


Eugenio

]]> Web site problems solved Tue, 28 Jul 2008 23:28:00 +0100 Hi all,
during the last three weeks this Web site has experienced some problems in sending e-mails. The problems have been solved.

About the Forum issues (PHP5 compatibility) you probably noticed (I didn't post about this) that I solved them some time ago, without upgrading Phorum; the only problem is an annoying error message that you can see viewing a post detail without being logged-in (e.g. http://www.dadabik.org/forum/read.php?f=1&i=10323&t=10323) but the forum is totally usable.

I want to thank Rainer Scheidegger for this, who pointed me out a very simple solution.

Bye,

Eugenio.

]]> Forum problems Wed, 23 Apr 2008 19:02:00 +0100 Hi all,
my ISP has unexpectately changed the PHP version of the server which hosts dadabik.org from 4 to 5. Unfortunately the DaDaBIK forum, based on an old version of Phorum, doesn't work on PHP 5.

I have scheduled for the next week an upgrade of my Phorum installation to the last version so the forum will work again!

Sorry for the inconvenience.

Bye,

Eugenio.

]]> DaDaBIK OWL Module Sun, 04 Nov 2007 14:36 +0100 Hi all,
I have developed an additional module for DaDaBIK which allows to generate an OWL ontology starting from the database managed; this is the result of my computer science degree thesis.

At the moment I have just uploaded a zip file containing three files: install.php, footer.php and generate_owl_ontology.php. If you want to try this new module, you can download it and, starting from the last development version of DaDaBIK update the install.php and footer.php files and put the generate_owl_ontology.php in the root folder.
You also need to download and import an SQL version of Wordnet from http://www.androidtech.com/html/wordnet-mysql-20.php and to edit the $wordnet_server_* parameters in generate_owl_ontology.php.

Only MySQL is supported at the moment.

I hope I will integrate the module in the development version and write some documentation soon.

Bye,

Eugenio.

]]> The forums are now working fine! Mon, 3 Sep 2007 16:26:00 +0100 Hi all,
all the forum features which need an e-mail sending (registration, generation of a new password, reply e-mail notification) didn't work correctly due to the lack of a setting required by my ISP; the good news is that now everything works!

Sorry for the inconvenience.

Bye,



Eugenio.

]]> DaDaBIK 4.2 final released Thu, 18 Feb 2007 17:54:00 +0100 Hi all,
version 4.2 final is now available, the only difference with the previous version (4.2 beta) is that the Rumanian language is now complete.

In a few days I think I'm going to release version 4.3 alpha, which will support the master-detail view.

I think that for version 5.0 the DaDaBIK code will be in part re-written; even the data structure will change, allowing to have a DaDaBIK db, containing DaDaBIK meta data, separated from the DB(s) you want to manage.

If you have any advices about please discuss them by commenting this post.

Bye,



Eugenio.

]]> Version 4.2 beta released Thu, 8 Feb 2007 23:22:00 +0100 Hi all,
NULL values are an important aspect of the relational model so I decided not to wait for the 5.x release and to add this feature in this 4.2 beta version. Now DaDaBIK can handle NULL values.

Another feature implemented in this release is the new "is empty" search operator.

Check the change log for the complete list of changes.

Bye,

Eugenio.

]]> Version 4.1 released, Web Design Contest Fri, 19 Jan 2007 10:07:00 +0100 Hi all,
after almost three months of public beta testing, more than 4000 downloads and several bugs fixed I'm proud to announce the final version of the 4.1 release of DaDaBIK.

This version fixes some minor bugs; check the change log for the complete list of changes.

Thanks to all people who daily post bug reports on the support forum.

Some people experienced problems using DaDaBIK on MySQL 5 with STRICT_TRANS_TABLES enabled; I was not able to replicate the problem, if you have any clues please report them on the support forum.

Regarding my last call for developers, two people wrote me in order to start the collaboration so I hope DaDaBIK will have a new administration interface soon.

Now I'm asking for WEB DESIGNERS: DaDaBIK needs a new, usable and cool interface; send me your proposals: two simple HTML page (one for the record results view and one for the record details view) are OK; the best one will be the new standard DaDaBIK interface. The contest will close on March 31, 2007; more about the rules of the game in the next few days.

For the winner will be a good chance to spread his name on the Web, through this popular piece of software.

Bye,

Eugenio.

]]> New release Sun, 14 Jan 2007 20:04:00 +0100 Hi all,
DaDaBIK version 4.1 rc2 produced a "[08] Error: during query execution." error message during the installation so I have fixed the bug and published a new version, 4.1 rc3.

Bye,

Eugenio

]]> New release, call for developers, RSS feed available Sun, 14 Jan 2007 19:07:00 +0100 Hi all,
a new version of DaDaBIK (4.1 release candidate 2) is available.
This version fixes some bugs, in particular the "Refresh installation" bug and the one about previous and next record links, which didn't work correctly.

Check the change log for the complete list of changes.

Call for developers: I'm looking for someone who wants to join the staff; the goal is the restyling (in terms of layout and features) of the admin section of DaDaBIK, in order to increase usability. I have realised that the admin section needs an update in order to be really usable; to work on this code you don't need to know how the DaDaBIK engine works, it is a very simple programming task. If you are interested, please contact me (eugenio dot tacchini at unicatt dot it).

An RSS feed of this "What's new?" section should be available in a few minutes.

Bye,

Eugenio]]>