Besides the famous CFORMS plugins, opther plugins exist that forward user input directly to posts

• TDO Mini Forms : comes with a lot of options that specify who can publish what and how new posts are moderated
• FV Community News

IxEdit is a JavaScript-based interaction design tool for the web taht gives designers and developers a few ready to use jquery tools, such as animation, form enhancements (date picker), and DOM manipulation, all designed within a web based interface. It uses GEARS, a tool developed by google that interfaces browsers with desktop, and the only requirement to start working on a web page is to include the ixedit javascript, plus the jquery libraries.

http://www.ixedit.com/

I usually take superfish for granted when working on a jquery based drop down menu : based on regular ul / li tags, it uses CSS layout directives to position menu items, which I have tried up to 3 levels of navigation. I have just found another good example of submenu implementation that demonstrates the ability to write paragraphs inside the sub layer, as  shown in the illustration below. The tutorial written by Jon Philipps on The Web Squeeze explains how CSS3 manages to implement rounded corners while jquery deals with the drop down effect. Nothing really new, just another way of working with Jquery and layers, but nice.

• vertical scroll
  http://www.webdesignbooth.com/create-a-vertical-scrolling-news-ticker-with-jquery-and-jcarousel-lite/
• portlets  feature drag/drop, expand, collapse and many more features!
  http://sonspring.com/journal/jquery-portlets
• grid plugin : new version with master  /detail view
  http://www.trirand.com/blog/
• jquery dynamic drag & drop
  http://www.webresourcesdepot.com/dynamic-dragn-drop-with-jquery-and-php

A few months ago I published a quick comparison of 3 opensource cmses that come with a form builder. At the time the form builder feature was quite new and innovative, it now comes as a standard feature in a lot of web publishing solutions. I have reviewed a few hosted form makers, such as

• Wufoo (hosted),
• MachForm onsite application available for less than 100 dollars,
• FormAssembly hosted (on site version available for a few thousand dollars),
• FormBuilderPro (hosted and onsite application)
• Experimental Free opensource jquery form builder
• [2009-10-23 edit] Sonoku’s Form Builder

They all have very nice interfaces including data gathering and statistics but the one I loved best was MachForm that is also distributed as a standalone application fro a very reasonable price. It uses Jquery as the main javascript library and lets the user build forms using drag and drop. One good idea is the composite field that lets the user add adresse field in one click. The screenshot below displays my own translation of the admin interface to french.

Magento’s wiki has a few articles on the subject of Magento’s PDF generation, which is not very efficient in its default version : one of the main critics I’ve seen is the size of the generated PDF, which can fly to more than 1MB, where a simple font replacement can bring the weight to less than a few KBs ! The subject of the article below is to illustrate how to display images on each line of the generated invoice and shipping PDF.
The product line display occurs in specific PHP classes within  the app/code/core/Mage/sales/Model/order/pdf folder

there is one folder for shipment, one for invoice, and one for credit. The product display occurs in the DEfault file where the Mage_Sales_Model_Order_Pdf_Items_Abstract is defined. What I did was simply instanciate a product object using the id from order / items, and get the image file using the following code in the draw function :

There are a lot of discussions going on about Magento’s one page checkout procedure : it is supposed to enhance customer payment experience by probviding ajax based single page order progress. But there are alos some discussions in the forum on how to enhance this process which is quite unusual and might discourage some customers. In a previous post I reviewed the code that produces sidebar shopping cart in default pages with right margin. The solution below explains how to add a full shopping cart display for the customer’s that trying to complete an order.

Read the rest of this entry »

This month has been full of releases. Zend Framework is reaching V1.8 featuring the new Zend_Application interface that instantiantes a preconfigured bootstrap when used via the Zend Tool generator (tutorial here in french). EXT JS, the popular and controversial semi commercial javscript library has reached a new milestone with a 3PR1 release. We’ve already mentioned Tine20, a new version is out but you want to keep that link where the developers publish a tutorial that explains how to combine EXT JS with Zend Framework.  On the Magento side, version 1.3.1 is out, should fix a lot of bugs but more importantly is the fact that Magento has finally annouced the release of an enterprise edition that starts at 8900$ per server. Nice to know that the company behind the most popular opensource ecommerce application is going to make money on a business model that proves to encourage customers and technicians to adopt this solution for long term development. Redhat did it and it’s still around with the FEDORA that’s developped independently. Let’s hope some features annouced for Magento enterprise will come one day to the opensource product as affordable extensions : Administrator Permission Roles on Website and Store Levels, Private Sales including Events, Invitations and Category access permissions, Category View and Purchase permissions per on customer group , Gift Certificates/Cards are among features that certainly justify some financial investment. Currently we have the Customer Groups Configurable Catalog extension , but obviously you’d have to test that before going ahead in production.

We’ve not covered PHP based file explorers yet : they are indeed an essential component of any serious web application. When Ajax comes in the game, browsing, uploading and dealing with files is as easy online as it can be on your desktop. Thos willing to develop might be interested in extjs grid views, while application developpers looking for a working and bug free component have the choice of two or three opensource components available. All of them have the following features

• access control
• flash based and  / or FTP upload for big files 
• file viewing / previewing
• drag and drop folders

The choice is rought. For integration into a Wysiwyg editor such as FCKEDitor, we preferred the  Ajax file manager from PHPLetter because it is light and does not come with a huge infrastructure. For a quick access to web based files, we prefered ExtPLorer because the interface is based on the famous ext js library. As a new challenger on this area, ajaXplorer comes with a nice polished layout (picture above), a MP3 player (DEWPLayer) and a FLV player. But lacks translation into most languages.

The flexibility created by the attribute feature in Magento allows limitless possibilities : vairous product types can be created and each of them can go with specific attributes, meaning specific form fields for the admin, that are inserted in the product view (template/product/view.phtml) for public display. The functions availble for each user defined attributes are very simple to guess : they are dynamically created for each attribute create using , as explained in the Pratthost developer zone blog…
Read the rest of this entry »