It’s always hard to choose when having to develop CMS based websites : there are litteraly thousands of solutions out there, and even when you think you’ve found the ultimate software (have a look at silvertripe), a new one comes in that changes the whole story. That might be the case for Digitalus CMS, whose objective is not to be the best out there, but to provide a foundation for solid web site  development. As such it is a good start to rely on popular technologies, such as Zend Framework and Jquery. We’ll never be able  to decide which is best, because the final solution is the one that you’re the most happy to work with : as such Digitalus is good bet if you have experience with Zend framework and wish to start with basic features such as suearch engine, page and menu builders, privileges management. And in the end, software keeps evolving, but if one can judge from other features described on  Digitalus website, this one has good reason to convince you to try it out !

We have covered Jquery’s flexigrid, which delivers a great range of features. The article was the occasion of a review of various grids delivered by other libraries, such as openrico, ExtJS or dojo. This article here focuses on a another version of data grid, delivered on EXTJS by Jack Slocum. The big feature of Jack’s grid is its buffer that allows to read chunks of data from an underlying storage (common use case: a database) without the need of paging. OpenRico does that too, by the way, but it hasn’t evolved much since 2006. The advantage of Ext JS LiveGrid Component is that it relies on popular EXTJS javascript extension.

The alternative to checkboxes (nice but space consuming) and multiple select (space efficient but not very intuitive for multiple selections) is there : a combination of single select and DHTML code is the point that Michal Wojciechowski’s article develops on the subject. it’s worth the read if you plan to change your multiple select, explains various Javascript methods to process interactivity, you have the choice between DOM and Jquery and Michal goes further to a detailed explanation of PHP processing of form input.

There is a lot to say about the knowledge of making forms for the internet : we have recently covered form making interfaces on applications such as Wordpress and Silverstripe, and this article focuses on JOTFORM and other hosted web service that let its registered users build form, and save them as HTML to be displayed on any website, and processed by a distant platform hosted by the service. Submission can then be sent by email or kept on server databases for access from registered user account. While JOTFORM seems relatively simple compared to competitor FormAssembly’s conditional multiple page infrastructure, it hosts interesting features such as payment gateway processing.

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My last article on Silvesrtripe CMS online image editing feature led me to investigate alternative solution for websites and software developers that wish to implement this kind of component for their backoffice.. Surfing on CAKEPHP framework homepage turned out to illustrate perfectly the kind of component that should be standard on all CMS : resizing is now pretty common, and what we want now is cropping. There is actually a plugin for jquery that does the interface job, ImgAreaSelect. ImgAreaSelect come with loads of configuration options that make it a perfect tool for cropping images : the selection area is responsive, draggable, and can be adjusted to work only within specified limits or predefined aspect ratio. What’s missing in Jquery is the server side of things, and you’ll find that either on webmotionUK for pure PHP or on CAKEPHP’s site for Cake integration.

Ever been through the nightmare of planning to unify all data sources your business is dealing with ? Ever thought of what could happen to sensitive data when you’re travelling all around the world, physically or virtually, aggregating experience and datasources from all over the place  ? Seems that web based content and data managment is a must these days, and it pays to look at ajax based software from California based Informatica, which develops its application on the basis of SmartClient library. SmartClient library is part commercial, part GPL  : you can download client side libraries and develop your own modules to serve data to JSON, XML, or whatever data format you can handle to provide. PowerCenter, that’s the name you want to remember when searching for data unification and centralization, accessible anywhere. Migration, synchronisation, warehousing are common tasks accomplished by PowerCenter Enterprise Platform, for which the AJAX based client side we could experience is only the visible part of the infrastructure iceberg it aims to support.

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A lot of nice names for this commercial J2EE based content management system that demonstrates extensive use of best dynamic HTML practice, with the help of the very special extJS library. The problem with that demonstration is that it will take you a while before you can test it on your development servers as you will have to go through commercial business AND serious java expertise in collaboration with Innovation Gate, the german company that develops this system. But it’s worth the try : this CMS goes further than basic content and workflow management : cross browser is not enough, WGA is also “cross client” : Browser (IE and Mozilla), Lotus Notes, MSWord, HTML- and XML-Editors or Email are acceptable platform to work with the system that allows publishing content to any media : Web, Cell phone, PDA, pdf. Finally, WGA allows to integrate any data source and to deal with it as “virtual repositories”. Invoices from SAP, business cases from CRM, data sheets from relational databases – all “business objects” are treated as content, just as if they were Web content maintained by authors.

• Click here for demo (user : demo / password : demo)
• Source:  ExtJs forum

The famous 3 column layout is used all round the place : from default wordpress blog template to most advanced daily news paper edition such as iht.com (International Herald Tribune) or lemonde.fr, multiple columns allow difficult content hierarchy choices to be made . While it’s a great idea to reproduce such a nice and extensible layout, playing with multiple columns is a dangerous game. Column heights, font size, paragraph justification, and last but not least images display are difficult parameters to harmonize when allowed width is fixed and limited.

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Advanced DHTML / javascript grid layouts have been around for a while : OpenRico’s livegrid  has been available for years, and last february a new version of EXTJS’ grid came out (UPDATE : EXTJS is about to relaease a new version of its editable GRID) . Well it’s good news that Jquery javascript library should now be able to provide its own implentation of a data grid, with many features that any good data master should expect…

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you’ve heard about web2.0 for years, and you want to go for it ? Well you might have guessed : WEB2.0 is all about user interactivity, and interactivity is all about forms. Making forms is a boring business, requires many different skills : displaying, validating, processing . Obviously what you do with the data is the most important thing , but this article will focus on the 2 first aspects of form making. Among Content Mangament Systems, I have tried two which have a visual form building interface : WordPress with CFORMS plugin and Silverstripe’s userDefinedForm page type.

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