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OSClass

Codrut Nistor — Tue, 19 Apr 2011 09:03:52 +0000

No matter how tough the economic situation may be, there’s one thing that applies almost every time: those who really want to work always find something to do. For the others, the crisis is always a good reason to rub the mint and complain about how tough their life is. Well, I won’t be able to provide anyone with a job in this article, but I can surely provide webmasters with a pretty good free & open source application that has the purpose of helping you create and manage a classifieds website.

Today’s subject, OSClass, was built using PHP and MySQL and, according to its official page that I just mentioned, it provides all “you need to easily create your own classifieds website.” With a bunch of sector-specific extensions for cars, jobs, dating, real estate and so on, OSClass allows you to easily create lists, not to mention that it can display any type and amount of items, all inside a customizable interface sporting flexible theming support, a few themes being already provided with the setup package.

Integration doesn’t look bad at all, since you can easily add Google Maps or PayPal into the equation, not to mention breadcrumbs navigation and a bunch of other goodies that I’ll leave for you to discover. Obviously, there’s no need to install the whole OSClass package to get a quick taste of it, since a demo can be quickly accessed by clicking here. I guess that’s all, folks – feel free to share your opinions on OSClass with the rest of us here, don’t be shy, all right?

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Nookstar

Codrut Nistor — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 21:55:31 +0000

Find a niche, build a store, advertise, sell, earn money. What’s missing there? Yes, I know, you also need some money to throw in, not to mention the time you’ll have to spend to get your business in motion! While I can’t help you with the time issue – most of the people I know, including myself, would surely enjoy to have at least 36 hours in each day – I can surely give you an idea that will help you lower your initial investment: Nookstar!

Nookstar is pretty well known, so that really makes me wonder how did they let such an error slip through – if you look at the home page I just mentioned, you’ll see that its highlights are these: Simple Setup, Cusomizable (!!!), Profitable, SEO Friendly and Niches. Come on, people, “Cusomizable” seems the best joke I had today!

On the other hand, what I just said above doesn’t mean Nookstar shouldn’t be trusted – after all, you can check the Admin Control Panel demo that allows you to control 8 different websites and get a better inside view of the whole thing. Just go here and use “admin” as both user and password – without the quotation marks, of course.

To really get started with Nookstar, you’ll need a host with support for ionCube, PHP 5.23 or higher and MySQL 5.x, but since I’m not supposed to reveal everything here, why don’t you go to the official Nookstar page and take it for a spin, huh? That’s all for now, may you get filthy rich and send me some $10k as donation!

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justVisual 2

Codrut Nistor — Tue, 15 Feb 2011 22:11:46 +0000

If someone tells you that WordPress seems like rocket science, what would you recommend? Sure, we are talking about some people that use computers at work, yet remaining computer illeterates when it comes to anything else than the stuff they do to earn their living. Well, I think the best thing for them would be a voice-controlled CMS, but until then… I think things like justVisual 2 may just do the trick.

While I may not fully agree with this description, the official mumbo-jumbo goes like this: “justVisual 2 is a databaseless XML-based content management system for small or medium-sized web sites. justVisual enables support for multiple languages.” More information and download/demo links can be found here.

Now, why would I disagree with that description? After all, it has been done by the team behind it, right? Well, as long as it involves some HTML tags, as easy as those may seem to people with more than a day of Web design experience, some consider even such things to be too complicated. Anyway, the idea is that justVisual 2 can help you decrease hosting costs while still offering features like URL rewriting, plugins or multiple languages. Unfortunately, it seems the project is currently on hold, but since the code is licensed under the terms of the GPL license, nothing stops you from taking over and pushing this interesting, yet really basic CMS, as high as possible, right?

Obviously, justVisual 2 works great with any major browser you can think of, so feel free to take at least a look at the demo(admin/admin). That’s all, folks!

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ImpressPages

Codrut Nistor — Mon, 14 Feb 2011 21:22:28 +0000

One of my dreams is to discover, one day, a CMS that allows me to add content with my mind – no voice commands, no use of ancient devices like the keyboard and mouse I use now – just the idea of an article, of a page layout, of a banner, and everything should go online in a matter of seconds! Oh, yeah, and another interesting idea – spam should be severely punished. I know, I know – I am dreaming, but small steps help us reach the highest peaks, and today we have here a CMS that allows you to edit almost everything using a drag and drop interface and just a bit of HTML/CSS… ImpressPages, of course!

But what’s so special about ImpressPages, after all? Well, while my mother could easily use it, maybe except the HTML/CSS parts, this CMS is SEO friendly, allowing you to edit meta tags for all pages and offering an automatically generated sitemap, not to mention the ease of managing multilanguage websites or performing basic content creation/editing, handing text, videos or photos/photo galleries as easy as possible. Pretty cool, especially since ImpressPages is absolutely free, being released under the terms of the GPL v3 license, don’t you think?

This demo page allows you to go and check both the public site and the admin zone, with a few restrictions needed to provide demo functionality to anyone who may be interested in it at any given time. Requiring at least MySQL 5 and PHP 5.3, ImpressPages works with all major browsers and features like the excellent newsletter module I didn’t manage to mention yet are waiting to be discovered, so I’ll let you get to it. Good luck!

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FlipBook CMS

Codrut Nistor — Thu, 03 Feb 2011 18:59:48 +0000

Today, I found myself listening to a few ladies talking about kids, books, computers and TV. I am no detective, I just happened to be in the right place at the right time and just hear them talk. All of a sudden, I remembered some of the books I read over and over again back when I was a kid or how glad I was every time I got a new book or even when I got a book from my school’s library. Well, those times may be gone, but… FlipBook CMS brings them back in a strange way – without any piece of paper, just with a computer, some kind of Internet connection and virtually no coding!

Absolutely free to download and use, FlipBook CMS also comes with the source code that you can easily modify and remove the backlink to flip-book-free.com. Great, so you can have a flipbook with a CMS-style backend without paying a single penny! In case you didn’t figure that out already, the catch is that pages can be easily edited, without bothering to edit any XML files and images.

FlipBook CMS includes a wide range of features, can be easily customized and is also SEO friendly, coming with a one-click installation PHP script. What else could you ask of it? A preview, right! Here you go – you don’t want to miss it, trust me, even if you think that you don’t need FlipBook CMS, because the preview flipbook has an excellent audio loop in the background and it would be a pity to come so close to it and not hear it. That’s all, folks!

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Pixie

Codrut Nistor — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 18:21:06 +0000

A few days ago, I had to explain some WordPress-related things to someone who had a blog hosted on WordPress.com and switched to a .com domain and a WordPress blog installed right there. For most people, there shouldn’t be any big problem switching from yourblog.wordpress.com to yourblog.com, as long as they both use WordPress as a platform, right? Well, sometimes it’s not like that… and since I had to explain a lot of trivial things to the person I mentioned above, today I decided to find something that may help people who just want to blog and don’t care about the technical part at all. The result of my search? Pixie!

To me, Pixie looks like a pretty easy way of setting up a blog/general purpose site without being too much of a nerd. Some go as far as calling it “a CMS,” but its creators consider this to be only “a small, simple, website maker,” but as simple as it may be, it already has a bunch of good-looking themes available, not to mention the fact that installing it only takes a few seconds and the list of features includes a pretty nice WYSIWYG editor, automated database backups, SEO friendly URLs and even multilingual support. Awesome!

Released under GNU General Public License v3, Pixie is completely free, but donations are welcome. To install it, you’ll need a server with PHP 5 or later, MySQL 4.1 or later, while the browsers accessing it will have to be JavaScript-capable. Nothing out of this world, I guess, so this is all for today, folks! Enjoy Pixie and, if anyone who had a WordPress.com blog for more than a few days starts asking about Categories vs Tags… tell them to take this CMS for a ride (click here for demo)!

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ProcessWire

Codrut Nistor — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 15:44:50 +0000

Finally, a brand-new CMS! Well, it may be true that ProcessWire already reached version 2.0, but as long as it’s new to me, we’re talking about a brand-new CMS, all right?

According to the official page, ProcessWire was created “to bridge the gap between the current CMS landscape and the needs of many designers/developers and clients in a CMS,” so before moving on to see what’s what with this CMS, I think that best thing to do would be to check some sites already using it. To do that, just go here and pick one or more from the list!

Covered by the terms of the GNU General Public License, ProcessWire was built using PHP and packs a jQuery-inspired API, having a really low learning curve, while its modular plugin architecture allows developers to extend its functionality to match their needs.

ProcessWire 2.0 requires at least PHP 5.2.4 and MySQL 5.0.15, a demo giving acces to both its front end and backend being available right on this page. That’s all, folks!

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Friendika

Codrut Nistor — Thu, 06 Jan 2011 20:25:12 +0000

Facebook here, Facebook there, “like this” all over the Web… “like us on Facebook,” come on!!! I hate this, really! I got a Facebook account long before it became the New Mecca of the Web, but the more it becomes popular, the less I like it. I think we need a Facebook killer. I would really like to see one day a social network where you have to pass admission tests. Hard admission test, with randomly generated questions that should separate spammers and retards from the rest of us – quite a brilliant idea, don’t you think?

Friendika may be just the Facebook killer some developers and users may be looking for already, but it may be not such a thing. Anyway, the idea is that we’re talking about a distributed social network application that’s worth a try – it runs on PHP/MySQL/Apache, providing a bunch of Facebook’s features, but with less privacy issues for its users, of course!

According to the official mumbo-jumbo, “a single Friendika installation supports up to several thousand members” and that’s just enough for the Facebook killer I mentioned in the first paragraph. On the other hand, I am sure that a capable server can help Friendika gather around a lot of people, especially since its features list looks pretty good – micro-blogging, photo/YouTube video sharing, photo tagging, serious privacy controls, yet simple, zero maintenance and so on. Interesting enough? Then go right here for a demo, will you? Good luck!

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ThinkTank

Codrut Nistor — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 12:46:58 +0000

A friend of mine asked me about some project he should work on. To be more accurate, he wanted to start working on something to sell, but didn’t have a clue on the topic. “Some Twitter tool,” I said, and it seems I was right. No, he didn’t become a millionaire yet, but since I see so many Twitter-related tools showing up these days, some of them selling for pretty high prices, I think he has a chance. Anyway, today we’re going to talk about an open source piece of code that includes Twitter support, but still… I think good Twitter apps can earn you some serious dough, if you do things right!

Today’s topic, ThinkTank, comes with Twitter and Facebook support for now, but more are expected to join them in the near future. According to the company behind it, Expert Labs, “ThinkTank is a new, free installable web application that lets you capture the insights and expertise of your social network by collecting and organizing replies to your conversations on Twitter, Facebook and (soon!) other networks.”

While the above may sound just like one of thousand software descriptions wrote every day, one fact is certain: if the White House decided to adopt ThinkTank in the near future, this project is surely one to keep an eye on and, if you got what it takes and could find it a good use, install it on your own server and play with it for a while!

Compatibility: all major browsers, as long as you got PHP and MySQL running properly on your server

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TomatoCart

Codrut Nistor — Fri, 28 May 2010 09:25:50 +0000

Despite the global economic problems, the Internet continues to grow with each day, and this opens doors to people who are willing to spend some time and money to try starting an online store. Some will succeed, some may fail, but if you do things right, your chances are higher than in the “real world,” at least that’s how I see it. While I won’t say anything about the market niche to choose, today I will point you to a free shopping cart script that will surely help you keep your budget as low as possible…

… but without going for some dark e-commerce script nobody heard of, because TomatoCart is based on the popular osCommerce package and, despite of that, it took over a year of development and testing until the first public release came out. When compared to its “parent,” this application has completely new front and back-end, with the last one using a desktop-style ExtJS-based interface.

Obviously, there’s no restriction on the type of goods you can sell using TomatoCart (there are laws to do that…), and the long list of features includes wishlists, gift certificates, quantity-based discounts, and so on. For the full list, please take a look at this page.

TomatoCart is available in multiple languages, and if yours is not available, you can help out by translating it. To run this on your server, you’ll need at least PHP 5.1.6 and MySQL 4.1.13/5.0.7. Oh, yeah, one more thing – ready for a demo? Go here and use “admin” as user and password (or take a look here for the front-end). That’s all, folks!

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