w-script is a nice example of how a good development framework like codeigniter can deliver solid applications. W-Script is a simple wall paper script that comes free opensource with many functions, one them is the color indexing that allows searching colors in pictures.

http://www.wallpaperscript.net/

Create, publish, enjoy : this is the  mission line of ionize CMS, built entirely around Code Igniter, looks very promising as it comes with basic features : drag & drop pages tree, media navigator, permissions…

http://ionizecms.com/

while gmail is certainly one of the most professionnal email readers, I still like to sort messages in folders and sub folders the way I used to do in old outlook clients. Even though google tries to promote its wonderful search capabilities, argumenting they remove the need for hierarchical labelling, I can’t get it out of my mind, and I ‘m not the only one. As of today, is takes a few minutes to configure your PC / chrome navigator to process sub folders.

1. download the sub folders script from the adresse below and save it  to chrome’s directory :
   http://arendvr.com/folders4gmail/
   Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default\User Scripts
2. enable user script on your chrome application by using the –enable-user-scripts command line tag,a s sexplained here
   http://arendvr.com/folders4gmail/

In spite of its remarquable popularity, Prestashop still suffers from a complex layout design that makes it quite hard to customize, especially when one  compares with the flexibility of zend framework layouts as they are implemented in Magento. This is why a shop built with prestashop often bears a strong resemblance with the default design, and designers find it hard to get away from the usual 3 column layout with rounded corners block that’s presented by default. Below you’ll find 10 shop sthat display a good work on prestashop, customized  to a level where  one wonders if this is still Prsetashop behind : yes  is it possible to do opensource ecommerce at a fraction the cost of setting up a Magento shop, and do it well too. It’ s intersting to notice that most of these  shops share the common love for the top horizontal drop down menu.

• Shops with free template by djcraft
  • http://www.photos-art-decoration.com/
  • http://grainmagique.free.fr/ipnotik/
  • http://photosalgerie.free.fr/wallcraft/
  • http://kamel.kelkoul.free.fr/prestashop/
  • http://ipno.tik.free.fr/blackwhite/
• Professionnal work of djcraft
  • http://www.biquinimodapraia.com.br/
• Professionnal work by Other designers
  • http://dedikate.com/eshop/
  • http://www.dieet-afvallen-lijnen.nl/
• Professionnal work by me (PoleOuest)
  • http://groupetournon.com/vpc/
  • http://prayandcomfort.co.uk/
• Nice try (find the bug on product category page)

• • http://www.sayann.com/

The power of Magento is great but it requires long days of learning and suffering to get through relative simple features, such as the now common front page slide banner. I had a quick look at magento free templates on google and was conquered by Magento ’s classic theme, the kind of  stuff that’s really given free of charge when I would have paid for it. It actually comes with an interesting development of Magento’s block systems, and demonstrates how to add a custom block between navigation and content : the prototype glider that scrolls images is defined a cms static block, which is then called in the home page CMS  custom xml definition, with a reference to the slider block that’s positionned in phtml files and declared in the xml layouts as a core/text_list type . Impressive stuff : that’s pure  magento design and illustrates how versatile the system is.

Links : 25 free templates for Magento

After the Mega Drop down menu comes the sroll drop down menu, a solution for long choices display dilemna : Make menu scroll up and down as you mouse through it. http://css-tricks.com/examples/LongDropdowns//

A quick code snippet that uses a Zend form (in the case below, with subforms) to generate a SQL table create statement. Useful for scaffolding : create your form with Zend Form Elements then the SQL table automatically.

One decisive sign that some contributors can make a change is the sincere thankyou they openly receive from community members: silverstripe’s UncleCheese certainly deserves the thankyou’s he’s getting from Silvesrtripe users that obviously benefit from the amazing Data Object Manager  modules , that also include the  innovative image gallery manager from which I kept the idea of my own jquery drag and drop image manager. UncleCheese’s latest innovation is the nested object manager, which deals with 1 to n relation ships in one of the most user friendly ways, as Silverstripe likes it :

Magento, in earlier versions, does not seem to handle log cleaning very well. A lot of configuration options are vailable under the configuration  / Advanced / System menu, that seem to have an impact on the cron.php process. But trying to remove logs this way is a complicated task that involves full log counting (select count on mage_log_visitor) and the result is not always there, don’t know why. A full truncate on log tables seems more appropriate, as described on the knowledge base, to use with caution obviously : Magento Maintenance Script was posted a few days ago but I tried it and it’s pretty efficient. Let us know how it performed on your install, on mine it works well. Go ahead after you’ve performed the appropriate backups !

It’s nice to setup a magento shop, but one particular task is painful and time consuming : the modification  of automatic email templates . By defautl, email tempaltes in Magento are well designed as a sample given out to the developer, but when you expect to have your shop running in a few hours  time, it is really a pain to go through all emails jsut to change phone numbers, shop name, and opening times especially when this information could be centralized in the database.  The subject is not new and here a few hacks to let you work faster when setting up a shop

• You can use a linux script to automatically modify magento email template files in your language / email folder
  • script 1
    http://www.osetemplates.com/?p=138
  • script 2 (slightly better because incorporates store specific vairables in the script)
    http://www.pridedesign.ie/content/magento-email-template-script
• You can also use the email template adapter extension to get the job done via magento’s administration interface

skitch is the application I dreamed of when blogging or managing web site content. The idea is simple and it was just waiting to be developped : skitch is a light picture / image processing software and webservice that does the save, screen grab and gives you a few tools to work on the image, and finally upload the result to your ftp or an online host on skitch.com, while loading your desktop cut/paste buffer with the url : the final task you have to perform now is to go back to your favourite online cms and place the image. I know that sounds long but beleive me this is much faster than working with Photoshop, saving the immage locally and uploading it via your administration. Oh, detail : skitch is available for mac only.