Flashback to sometime in November: after yet another weekend spent fighting with the old “Wi-Redux” interface for OpenSim on behalf of customers – myself and James Stallings at SimHost decided two things – first Wi-Redux is the spawn of the devil, and second – we probably should write our own. So we did.

Which brings me to the following pretty screenshot:

This is a fresh install of Gridmix – one of the main aims of the package has been to make it so it requires very minimal configuration to look good, and do what you want. It’s pretty easily adapted for either a private or a public grid with a host of settings suitable for each.

For example – Signup & Registration, for private grids you might not care about verifying email address. In which case, you signup form is configured like so:

But if you are running a public grid – and you want to ensure signups are legitimate, you will want to verify email addresses, enable a captcha — and assuming you are in beta, you might want to say enforce a ’signup code’ to limit who can create accounts. Your signup form might look like this instead:

The entire skin is very customisable – not only can we easily substitute alternate themes in, but the entire default skin has been setup so that all the images and CSS can be HSL shifted at any time (allowing you to easily recolour your grid with minimal effort)

In addition, we’ve implemented a Mediawiki-Syntax parser into the content management system – allowing you to edit each page on the site using wiki-syntax. This allows you to ensure a consistent appearance across all pages – and keep that in the event that you choose to change the theme.

Finally – there’s a bunch of features in there which I know many people will find a big improvement over what Wi supports; such as Google Maps based world maps (which are generated in realtime – and include live positioning of all online agents on the grid – see the green dot.)

Cost, Availibility, etc.

We’re providing GridMix as an alternative to Wi for all current (and new) SimHost customers who have private grids. This will be a private beta for a period of around three months while we work in any specific feature requests and bugfixes that our customers bring to us – if you are a current customer, just contact support and we can get you setup with GridMix fairly quickly.

We’ll be releasing a limited “core” version as open source software sometime in the future (once we’re out of beta) – we’ve built this all using a MVC framework and have spent some time ensuring that it is both secure, functional and a lot more useful than Wi was. One of the big improvements has been the implementation of an ACL system based on the godLevel – you can now delegate users with a range of roles which grants them certain powers to ban or edit users or change grid settings.

It represents a complete ground-up rewrite, no-code has been copied from the original Wi (or anywhere else), the only foreign code is the base MVC framework. We’ll be adding new features fairly regularly as time goes on – some of the features we plan to implement include some compatibility with the search system, events calendar support & some analytics.

The full version will be available for a fee to non-customers, and a hosted version will be free to all current and future SimHost customers, who have one of our hosted grid packages (or a dedicated server). If you are a current (or potential) SimHost customer and wish to participate in the beta – as I said above, please contact us via support for more information.