Ever thought of using Wordpress as a CMS ? Today’s showcase features a perfect example of wordpress implentation for corporate advertising. Served by efficient graphic design, 4 seasons entertainment implements an event page, a list of artists via wp-page-numbers plugin, and of course the usual suspect CFORMS.

Showcase your site on webmasterbulletin

If you’re in the business of creating stunning websites powered by efficient opensource or commercial CMS, let the world know : submit your work for review at webmasterbulletin showcase !!

Today’s showcase : 4 seasons

4 Seasons Entertainment & Events has been bringing life to many major events in Dubai, U.A.E for over a decade. 4 Seasons delivers results, time and again. We pride ourselves to be one of the few agencies that renders 360 solutions for any type of event. All our resources are in-house, giving us the flexibility to support any event from small internal meetings to large conference and awards dinners or product launches with efficiency and precision.

Link : 4 Seasons Entertainment

Ext Js grid component has more than just inline editing, sorting, paging : a little javascript knowledge can get you far. An example of a nice implementation is server sid grid filtering and quickserach provided as sample featured on EXTjs website. I particularly like the quicksearch that displays a drop box of fields available for search.

After a few hours looking for a good implementation of recursive data with Zend Framework, I came across Hector Virgen’s table abstraction for nested recursive tables, which uses the efficiency of the Modified Preorder Tree Traversal method that retrieves descendents and ancestors faster that with the old parent_id reference. In fact parent_id is not needed any more but in the example below we will keep the parent_id implementation. My aim here is to implement a draggable tree with data from this Zend_DB_Table abstraction. Setting up ext js with Zend Framework is not that hard, especially when many tutorials have been posted around for extjs tree with other frameworks such as Cake PHP .
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what is nice about Omeka CMS is not the backend : you will find in the admin sandbox that most sections of the restricted area, while perfectly efficient, lack today’s common AJAX reactivity.  But on the front end, the result is stunning :  websites built with Omeka have all gone throught a graphic design expertise that  push the enthousiast to look more into the technology behind (Zend Framework). As such the tool fits perfectly into its mission statement : “web platform for publishing collections and exhibitions online. Designed for cultural institutions, enthusiasts, and educators, Omeka is easy to install and modify and facilitates community-building around collections and exhibits.“

wmc is a professionnal web content management tool that does more than just let you write within your won website : it helps you with words via a specific semantic engine that will do its best to optimize your website for Search engines ! From the vendors website : “Semantic analysis is the process of linguistically parsing sentences and paragraphs into key concepts, verbs and Proper Nouns to determine the “aboutness” of content. Using statistics-backed technology, these words are then compared to your taxonomy* (categories) and grouped according to relevance“.

Javascript, Ajax and DHTML are going so fast I can’t keep track of all frameworks and libraries. Here is a quick list of rich components for application development

• CLient Yahoo YUI : version 2.6 is out , 3 is on the way for beginning of 2009
• Meteroa Javascript widgets
• Server Side ITM Toolkit , PHP EXT (an extension of GWT-EXT for PHP)
• Interesting study of client centric vs server centric on ZK’s site

Can Zend Framework do scaffolding like Symfony or Cake ? No, would you say after downloading the framework and trying out. But a quick search out there shows that you’re not the only one thinking about it. In fact there are many code generators out there for PHP   : look out for Codecharge, codeigniter, or any cakephp like framework. What was missing was code specific for Zend Framework, which offers the great advantage of being developped actively and offers new versions often. A quick browse on french developers forum popped up a few applications to be tested, and looking a bit further I found some interesting implementations of scaffolding for Zend Framework :

• easyphpapp is a good start for manually building CRUD for Zend Framework, 
• Zenerator is a PHP based application that builds classes for database objects out of templates and live database connection
• ZDBForm is quite old but is good enough to generate very quick  CRUD out of Zend_DB_Table
• GEckoToolbox has nice grid and form components. By the way Zend Framework V1.7 is coming out soon with Jquery support.
• Zend Framework data grid generates a table from Zend_DB_TAble
• Another Grid implementation for Zend Framework

Have your ever found that communicating with distant partners or collaborators involve a lot of window changes : email, phone conversation, chat… Protonotes is a hosted service that aims to centralize all conversations to a web page, can be either a web design prototype or the beginning of your own extranet. Protonotes works very simply by the inclusion of a javascript that displays a control bar on top of your web page, and allows the display of yellow notes all over the place. nice and simple, doesnot require login or installation : might be a good idea to implement password protected notes for privacy - or moderation !! Link : protonotes

AFter spending years with XML generated data management interface (check out webxadmin), I am particularly seduced by the idea developped by DOJO guys that makes javaszcript interfaces as easy as writing XML. That’s the purpose of  DOJO.E that features a set of XML instructions that interact and build DOJO interfaces. Amazing.

We have collected 2 javascript image addons that perform nice enhancements or animations on simple images

• Instant js is a  javascript library that adds visual effect to any image, just via a style sheet attribute. Wonderful and simple light javascript effect that saves you either photoshop or server processing time. link : http://www.netzgesta.de/instant/. 
• For Jquery addicts, here comes another nice effect : we call it  SlideText Gallery and it features a nice  image rollover that displays the alt text. Implemented for Silverstripe CMS experts (download zip for HasManyFileManager module),  inspiration : Kyanmedia.