Optaros Labs

Back in July of 2007, Andy Peatling posted on his blog about creating a social network called ChickSpeak on top of WordPressMU, the multi-user version of the popular open source blog platform . It was a compelling possibility – compelling enough that Automattic (the company behind WordPress) hired him to work on it full time.

BuddyPress 1.0, the result of that effort, was released on April 30th of this year, and is an option that should be seriously considered anywhere a new content-centered community is being built.

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In this screencast (yet another in the continuing series by Jeff Potts), Jeff demonstrates an integration (developed by Optaros) of Alfresco and Django.

Consistent with our service oriented content management (SOCM) philosophy the integration enables separation of repository services from presentation services, enabling you to build content-centric applications in the python-based Django framework while still benefiting from the workflow and document management capabilities of Alfresco.

Django-Alfresco integration

The folks at Automattic rolled out an upgrade this week to the video quality of videos hosted on WordPress.com blogs using their VideoPress service.

The upgrade adds support for HD as well as other formats, using automated transcoding (see the announcement for more info):

With the video upgrade (available on your upgrades page, bottom left of dashboard navigation) when you upload a video of almost any format we’ll crunch it into several different formats just right for streaming on the web, DVD quality, HD quality, and even optimized for iTunes and Miro.

Videos can be streamed and embedded . . . on WordPress.com or on any site around the world, even in full HD.

I’m very happy – as all content creators and consumers should be – to see support for Miro as well as iTunes, along with the classic ease-of-use you’d expect from the hosted services at WordPress.com.

Taking it one step further, though, Automattic has released as open source the entire framework they’re using to manage uploaded videos, transcode them to additional formats, and serve them to consuming sites. This isn’t your average consumer-grade WordPress plugin, though, as they warn in the description:
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