It’s amazing what one can do these days with jsut HTML and CSS. Slick map css builds a visually attractive sitemap that could also be used to build organigrams, straight from a single line of ul / li HTML tags. It formats ul tags up to three levels of page navigation and additional utility links – and can easily be customized to meet your own individual needs, branding, or style preferences. Designed by Matt Everson, Minnesota.

The guys behind simpleviewer have had a huge success with the first version of their flash base image  viewer. The new tilt viewer is really a good one as it renders the feeling that the image can be explorer from all sides within the most appropriate angle. Another freebie from the same guys  reproduce the idea of postcards.

• 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

Handling mac to ttf conversino is a simple task but necessary when working with designers. CrossFont v5.4, developped by actute systesm INC in ILLINOIS (USA) does a nice job converting any mac format even when it’s been transferred to a PC via zip files.

I ust went for a few minutes of time tracking and found that Kimai is really a neat and well designed PHP/ Mysql
/ Jquery opensource application. Designed for multi users, it implements a very  simple one click time tracking  interface : select the project / customer you’re working on, click on play, and there you are,  time starts running. close your browser or leave it open, you can come back to the application to stop the counter and your work is tracked in database records that permits all kinds of reports and statistics. Even though the application works well for those who plan to work full time on a single project / task for a few hours  (implying a start  moment and a end moment), it also works well   to handle end of the day assessments by simply writing tasks and times.  Very good job. What could I improve on this ? tags handling as in wordpress !! (telephone, writing, programming…). And instead of a fixed client / project / task hierarchy, probably easier to understand for most users, I would rather have gone for unlimited sub levelled hierarchy of tasks..

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.

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After a few schema problmes on some obscure CMS installation, I decided to go for an automatic comparison of database schemas. Here is a list of tools you might try

• Commercial tools often come with synchronsiation features :
  • Mysqlworkbench commercial edition
  • SpectralCore Sync’ database (trial version)
  • SQLMANAGER EMS DB Comparer for mysql
  • Nob Hill Database Compare
• FreeWare or scripts
  • web  based mysqldiff :  http://www.mysqldiff.org/
  • for script addicts, this poor man’s schema comparator can be an option too 
  • database change management :  http://www.liquibase.org/
  • TOAD  for mysql freeware : http://www.quest.com/toad-for-mysql/

EXTJS 3.0 is coming with a new release candidate that illustrates a new feature we’ve been waiting for : the row editor component comines grid / grideditor features to allow single line editing features, as illustrated below. The row editor class works with the add button and the live example provided is a nice show case of  grid linking with charts.