ZoneMinder Blog

ZoneMinder Relaunch

2016/02/29 Kyle Johnson

Hello Everybody,

While the relaunch of this site was a good bit of work, I am finding this first blog post - after over 10 years since the launch of ZoneMinder - significantly more difficult. How do I sum up 10 years? Of where we have been, where we are now, and where we are headed?

Bullet points. That is how. And by starting with more recent news.

  • We are very excited to announce the re-launch of the ZoneMinder.com website. This is a part of our long-term initiative to revitalize and renew interest in the project.

  • In addition to finally upgrading the forums and wiki, and moving from Drupal to a statically generated website (Jekyll), we have migrated the forums, wiki and website servers to scalable, secure and highly-available infrastructure.

  • We have recently adopted a more frequent release cadence; we are aiming to have monthly releases.

  • You may have noticed a ‘subscribe’ button at the top of our site. We are launching a mailing list in order to better keep in touch with our users. Sign up, if you’d like. We won’t spam you, and we certainly will be not selling your email address. We will send you release announcements, and other cool ZoneMinder-related news.

  • Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit. We’re now paying attention to those pages. Follow the links at the footer of our site, like us, and follow us.

Finally, by parsing our server logs, we have determined that over 75% of our user base is on a release that is over 5 years old. Here are some really good reasons why you should upgrade:

ZoneMinder is easier than ever to install (and upgrade).

Upgrading and installing ZoneMinder takes just a few minutes and is a far cry from the old methods. Almost all distributions have ready to use packages, and compiling from source is rarely needed.

Many security patches, and countless bug fixes.

Everything from monitor streaming stability improvements to unauthorized playback vulnerability fixes.

Multi-Server

If you have a really large deployment, horizontal scalability is of utmost importance. The new multi-server features allows you to connect and run multiple ZoneMinder servers, distributing the CPU load among your cluster.

A brand new API for 3rd party developers.

We have deprecated the XML view, and replaced it with a full-featured RESTful API. The super-cool mobile app is designed around this API.

In time, the official ZoneMinder UI will be re-written to make use of the API.

Support is good.

Between the forum, github issue tracker, and IRC channel, you can get the help that you need.

In Closing

More good stuff to come.