The Foozoo design studio blog does not display images on its front page : black and white is the color of sobriety. Inside pages will feature, obviously, images, plus a nice soft blue font that highlights margins and  Based on the very simple Hemingway-19 theme for wordpress, Foozoo adds a few very interesting plugins. Most interesting is the WP-cumulus plugin that transforms the original tag cloud to a real Flash based sphere with mouse 3D effect.

For those interested in developping the best possible web based application, Tine2.0, formerly eGroupWare2.0, a combination of CRM and ERP,  is worth having a look at. Its multiple feature interface is one of the most intuitive multi panel screen you can imagine, built entirely out of javascript and HTML. Based on Extjs and Zend Framework, it demonstrates that those 2 popular technologies can -finally- work together to build sensible opensource applications with features of most sophisticated desktops : accordion menu that browses between various parts of the application, tere based menu for hierachical structures, dynamic grid for data scrolling, simultaneous record viewing below the data grid. The fact that the source code of Tine2.0 can be downloaded separately from packages you might already have installed ten times on your server will save you the hassle of finding interesting code lines. But i’s not only design we’re after here : PDF export at right click on  TIne2.0 contact management. More technical details would only bring enthusiasts on the project, especially after a quick look at developpers’WIKI where specific  conceptual choices are explained : MVC or not MVC, that is the question. Anyhow, when Rich Internet Applications is what you’re looking for, try out Tine20 !!

Remember MonoSlideShow ? It’s worth its price but is being challenged by 2 javascript alternatives. Mootols and Jquery respectively handles nice image transitions with Ken Burns effect (Zoom-Translation combined movement) ,  via their SlideShow Class (Mootols) and CrossSlide plugin (Jquery). While the latter seems lighter, it offers the nice programmatic syntax to define exactly the level of zoom and time of transition for each image. The former has more options, such as a controller that mimics Monoslideshow’s own mimic. The fact that these two alternative to a flash commercial applet might decide you to make a smart choice between them ?

This article makes a quick comparison of 3 popular PHP  Content management Systems :  Concrete5, Silverstripe and Wordpress. While Concrete5 and Silverstripe are two real content management frameworks, Wordpress is hugely popular as a blogging platform and each new version brings new feature that make it perfectly usable as a CMS, provided you install specific plugins such as PageMash.

Read the rest of this entry »

The power of a framework is not often based on the speed at which it enables you to build applications :  the reason behind choices for using frameworks are often historical or political. In spite of this, as a developer, chosing a framework relies a lot on the ability to move from a model (database schema for instance) to a full CRUD  (Create-Read-Update-Delete) or BREAD (Browse-Read-Edit-Add-Delete) application. While Zend Framework does not seem ready for what we call scaffolding -quick buiding of interfaces from model-, quite a lot of people have thought about it and started working on it : it’s worth haveing a look at and using as a start if you want to go further with Zend Framework and MVC development

 

• EdwinV from Nederlands worked on the subject 2 years ago. his blog article is still interesting and provides a start for Zend Framework scaffolding. The zip works fine but requires you to create views for each table.
• Whitewashing, another blog entry from germany, extends the  Zend_Controller_Action which uses   a Zend_Db_Table_Abstract model to generate lists, forms and links for BREAD. Author was inspired by codecaine, another very interesting Zend Framework blog.
• Avesta is an out of date product built on top of Zend Framework

no more chrashing browser because of a single flash app freezing : multi threading is a feature that seems to drive google’s new browser imminent release, but not the only one. Google says “new applications have been deployed since browser were invented so we needed to rewrite the whole thing from scratch”. More today with press conference scheduled at its Mountain View, Calif., headquarters Tuesday at 11 a.m. PDT.

I’ve come across another data grid implementation, this time base on mootools. One interesting feature of AJAX datagrids is the ability to scroll unlimited number of records without reloading the main page. Using the scroll bar instead of a opage numbering system can dramatically increase productivity when playing with large datasets. But one advantage of pagenumbering is that it is a good indication of where you stand and page number is often remembered by users as an efficient way of finding specific datarows.  DrasticTools is a collection of PHP and JS scripts that generate AJAX-based data managers and viewers for MySQL tables. DrasticGrid is a data grid that supports pagination, sorting, insertions, deletion and update of records : the most unique feature it implements is precisely the page number indication in the dynamic scroll bar, as highlighted on the screenshot above.

We provide here a modification of Mark Allen ‘ Blogroll page plugin, that inserts blogroll into any page of your blog . What we did here is modify his plugin to create more than just a list : we make pages out the blogroll list, one page per category. The first page lists categories with link to blogroll list for this category. Slight Modification but useful fo SEO. Future implementations should modify title page to integrate category description. Enjoy and let us know how it goes.

• Demo here
• Download : blogroll-links-pages