Oxwall Reveals New Focus On Interface & Mobile Going Into 2015

Oxwall, the popular social networking platform, has released a very interesting statement via their blog, identifying their, “key directions and objectives for this year”.

In my recent article regarding what the CMS world needs to see more of in 2015, I discussed how a social networking CMS needed to step up. Perhaps, starting with this announcement, Oxwall will be the platform to do it.

Oxwall is free and open-source and available to anybody who wishes to self host. Wall.fm on the other hand, is the hosted version of the platform.

Here is what Oxwall will be paying close attention to throughout 2015, as seen on their blog:

CMS & Interface Changes

Content management has always been an underdeveloped part of Oxwall. We’ve been busy with making Oxwall better in social aspects (it’s a social network product after all), but because of that some basic tools that any website requires (like CMS) went overlooked.

Having received fair criticism for that, we’ve developed our vision for content management in Oxwall’s next iteration. Together with that we refine existing interfaces and rethink some basic assumptions in the product, and how they match real life usage patterns.

This is going to be a series of releases spreading the new paradigm across the product and leaving plenty of time for user and developer adoption. Details will be gradually introduced in our Dev Diary column and beta release announcements.

Mobile 

Pocket version of Oxwall has been around for some time but it still lacks important features. We will be working on that front since a lot of people now use phones instead of desktops/tablets, even if Oxwall is not especially accommodating for that. We laid solid foundation for the small screen version of Oxwall but haven’t been active on feature development side yet. This will change.

To reiterate, we think that the “pocket” version of Oxwall (the one adapted for phones) differs from the desktop/tablet primarily by usage patterns, let alone obvious input/output characteristics. That’s why we made a decision to essentially build two products instead of one, so now we have to catch up in the mobile part.

Documentation & Test Coverage

More news coming to the Oxwall developers camp. This year we finally start covering code with tests and we’ll be working on better documentation. Right now third party developers mostly rely on the existing plugins to build their own ones. To create systematic approach to developing plugins we have to step up our game in the essential technical aspects. These works are to be launched together with the new development cycle.

For me, all of the above points raised by Oxwall are hugely encouraging. I personally see the social networking CMS sector to be a rather stagnant one, so hopefully this announcement will not only spark the beginning of a newly invented Oxwall, but also inspire other platforms to improve, too.

Oxwall users were equally excited about this announcement in the comments section of the blog post.

To see those comments, and to find out more about Oxwall's plans, check out their blog announcement.

Also, you can explore more of Oxwall via our CMS Directory.