by Eric Barnes
I have been a StumbleUpon user for a while now but never really got into it. When I was board or wanted to see something new I would hit the stumble icon and find a new random website. I thought that was all to it but yesterday I decided to try to Stumble our blog posts on this site. To my amazement our traffic had a huge spike all from one post. How to remove pesky SVN files.
This just goes to show you how using social media can help you get more visitors to your site.
If you are interested in using StumbleUpon then here is some great links of reference:
by Eric Barnes
Beta 4 of 68 knowledge base is now released and available from our customer area. This is basically a bug fix release with the core files upgraded to CodeIgniter 1.6.0. Because of the core upgrade almost all files have been edited in some way. We recommend replacing all the files.
You can see a full list of bug fixes from our issue tracker.
One new feature added is the ability to convert special characters in the url title. So now á=a é=e.
Upgrading
To upgrade you should follow the instructions here:
http://68kb.com/knowledge-base/article/upgrading-instructions
Also the includes/application/config/database.php.new has some changes that you will need to add to your database.php file.
Notes:
If you find any bugs please report them in our bug tracker.
If you need any support please visit our user forums or Ticket System.
The login for both the forums and issue tracker is the same as you use in our customer area.
As always I wanted to personally thank all the beta testers for your help.
by Eric Barnes
This is a quick announcement to let everyone know that we now have a ticket system setup and ready for use. We decided to go with osticket just because it was easy to customize and supported most of the features we wanted.
Another nice feature is the ability to require users to visit our website to reply to tickets. On some of our other sites we used ticket systems where users get the response by email and can reply back without visiting the website. In theory this is a good idea, however we ran into loads of issues where people just wouldn’t receive our replies and think that either we don’t respond or we just don’t care.
This ticket system works like this. First you submit a ticket, and you instantly receive an auto response with the ticket id and a link to login. Then once it is replied to you are emailed again telling you that their is a reply and a link to login and view it.
I hope you find this system useful and if you want to get in contact with us why not give it a try. 
by Eric Barnes
CodeIgniter released version 1.6.0 a few days ago and one of the new features is a Database Forge class which helps in managing a database. I have been upgrading the core of 68KB and because of this new feature I upgraded the whole install and upgrade routines to take advantage.
Before I was manually inserting the queries and prefixing the tables by pulling out the prefix value from the database settings. Now I no longer have to do this and the install runs a whole lot smoother. For us probably the biggest advantage to this system is now when you install the knowledge base the database tables have the charset that you enter in the config file. This should make the whole system more multi-lingual and available to more people.
Also this should allow for support for multiple database types besides just MySQL. Although currently we are only going to officially support MySQL but who knows what the future holds since the Sun buy out.
I am still very excited about the 1.6 release of CodeIgniter and I am really glad we decided to develop our script on top of it.
by Eric Barnes
Our January Newsletter competition has been officially over for a few days now and today we are announcing the winner.
We want to send our congratulations to Lee from Made By Fresh. We hope Lee finds our script useful and not just a cookie cutter solution.
