WebDev3000 » PHP

phpA/B

Codrut Nistor — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 12:17:11 +0000

While some say content is the king, I must somehow disagree. Content may be the king, but it’s all about delivery. No matter how brilliant and useful may be your writing, for example, users visiting your blog won’t look for those Google ads placed in a corner, or somewhere below the copyright information. Even more, colors and placement of page elements may turn interesting content into boring one, but – usually – not the other way around, so instead of finding about what’s good and bad the hard way, it would be a good idea to do some A/B testing…

Since I told you about this, I will tell you about a free tool for quickly setting up A/B tests on your website, namely phpA/B. Covered by the terms of the Creative Commons License, phpA/B integrates automatically into Google Analytics and can be run in both trial and live mode. After all, going for live testing with a popular website can hurt your finances a lot, in some cases.

Anyway, you shouldn’t worry about testing your work a bit, because phpA/B is able to automatically keep out search engine bots of your tests, allowing you to get some clean results and minimize risks. If you got “PHP version 5 or above, Google Analytics, and a thirst for knowledge,” you should go ahead and give phpA/B a try, don’t you think? Good luck!

cFTP

Codrut Nistor — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 16:38:47 +0000

I don’t know about you, but I sometimes have to share various documents with people who are a bit paranoid. In most cases, it’s about some pictures from a party, but this also applies to work-related data, and when it comes to sharing something only with a few people, you could go ahead and upload some password-protected archive using RapidShare or a similar service, or…

… you could go ahead and grab cFTP! With less than 120kb to download, cFTP allows you to easily create clients accounts thanks to a very easy to use front end, then you can move on and upload as many files as needed to each account in a matter of minutes. To make everything even more serious, you can add a title and description to each file you upload. Cool enough?

Here’s the cherry on top of the cFTP cake: this piece of code comes under the terms of the GPL license, and you only need a server with PHP/MySQL and some free space to get it up and running. Obviously, the amount of free space required depends on your file uploading needs…

Unfortunately, there’s no demo for this PHP application to play with, but a bunch of screenshots can be viewed on Facebook (you can find the link on the official page I pointed earlier). That’s all, folks!

ScriptArtist

Codrut Nistor — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 11:20:57 +0000

Sometimes, I really think about starting a career in programming, and the only reason for this is my laziness. Just think about this – when I write stuff, I have to write it all by myself, and I only quote various sources from time to time. On the other hand, programmers have sooo many code generators at their disposal that sometimes, creating a fully featured application is more about messing with a code generator and then checking the resulting code, rather than writing a lot of code by yourself…

While ScriptArtist may not be free, I chose to tell you about it today because it has a decent price, a lot of useful features, and – don’t laugh – I really love its name. Sure, branding may not be everything, but it’s something that matters more and more these days…

… and if you didn’t feel like clicking the link above, no problem – here’s a short excerpt of the official mumbo-jumbo: “ScriptArtist is a powerful PHP and AJAX code generator that allows you easily to generate the PHP scripts connected through MySql database. ScriptArtist helps you save a lot of developing times to create the completed CRUD operations (Create, Read, Update, & Delete), easily generates web forms (email or contact form) retrieved information from either database fields or user-defined fields and many more.”

For the full features list, you should take a look here. Speaking for myself, everything looks fine. If you’re planning to try this PHP/AJAX generator, you should know that it works on XP/2003/Vista, requiring IE 6 or later, while your server should have PHP 5/MySQL 5 or later, no matter if it’s a Linux- or Windows-based one. That’s all, folks – enjoy ScriptArtist!

Commentics

Codrut Nistor — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 10:14:39 +0000

As we all know, and some of us even feel it, the global economy seems to cool down. Unfortunately, for some people, things are really frozen, but at least when it comes to online shops, there’s still a pretty solid chance to succeed. Sure, a lot of shops, online and offline, have been going down lately, but this leaves some room to exploit, especially since things will slowly start heating up again pretty soon.

All the above being said, you may think I’ll tell you about some shopping cart, but I won’t. Why that? Well… I am thinking about people who built their own carts, but maybe forgot or didn’t have the time to add some serious user-driven comments capabilities. For them, as well as others who may need to quickly add some user comments, here you go – Commentics!

Commentics has a really inspired name, if you ask me, but this one surely’s about the features, and not the name. Completely free to download and use, Commentics was built using PHP, and you can take a look at the demo here. Its features include captcha spam protection, smilies, star ratings, pagination, email subscription, even a RSS feed, but you’ll surely get more than just these!

The backend offers a ban system, drag and drop design, database backup capabilities and more, while this actively developed GPL project should work on all major browsers, even text-based Linux ones, but I wouldn’t bet on that. Unfortunately, I have no chance to try that right now, so why don’t you boot up your Linux box and load the demo in Links, then come back here with some feedback? Thanks in advance!

Lucid Desktop

Codrut Nistor — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 14:18:34 +0000

A few years ago, Web-based operating systems promised to become the way of the future. Unfortunately, most of those who were making everyone go “Wow!” back then disappeared in the meantime, so it’s always good to see new ones rising from the ashes. This time, it’s about Lucid (Lucid Desktop, if you like it long…), a rather old one, since Dojo Foundation, the company behind it, has been around since 2006.

According to its official webpage, “Lucid is a free, open source web desktop, or webOS,” offering a bunch of features everyone would expect from a WebOS, including remote access to your files, Twitter/RSS feeds updates, an even the ability to create Web apps with just a few clicks! To make everything even more interesting, Lucid offers a powerful permissions system and filesystem quotas, so setting up a multiuser environment based on it should be as easy as possible…

… and since I mentioned “setting up,” let me add that Lucid should work with any Web server that has support for PHP5 (PHP4 is not supported) and any of the popular database servers (mySQL, pgSQL, SQLite). For additional information, feel free to browse the documentation, available here. That’s all, folks!

AdverTool

Codrut Nistor — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 12:18:06 +0000

Managing PPC campaigns can be pretty easy or a “headache generator” like never been seen, it all depends on the tools you’re using to get things done. To be honest, I usually go for affiliate programs, but the fact that I didn’t get rich so far may be one sign that I should also try other things… especially when we talk about bringing traffic to my sites. Since I don’t have much time for my own projects anyway, here’s what I found for you: AdverTool!

Oh, my, but what do we have here? AdverTool is an open source Web-based application that allows you to easily control PPC campaigns, integrating with most of the popular ad networks, including Facebook, AdBrite, Microsoft Ad Center or the notorious Google Adwords. Why use it? Think about managing all your campaigns from the same interface, and you already got one of the many possible answers!

To sum it all up, AdverTool can help you earn some extra cash. How? Time, my friends, time! While this piece of code won’t improve the efficiency of any campaign you may be running, it will surely give you more time to spare and do that by yourselves, and that’s what really matter – having enough time to get things done properly!

Compatibility/Requirements: all major browsers, PHP/SQL database, with support for most SQL servers

CuteNews

Adrian — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 12:56:58 +0000

If you want to integrate a news system to your website, you should take a look at Cutenews. Cutenews is a great news management system and the most important thing, it uses flat files to store its database. This way you don’t need a MYSQL server. It supports comments and archives that can be organized by months. Also it supports search function, file upload management, backup & restore, IP banning, flood protection and more.Not only it supports comments, but also you can use smilies, avatars and HTML code. All of these can be inserted using its WYSIWYG editor.

For enhanced security the names in comments are password protected. Also CuteNews offers flood protection and you can ban the IP of users who post offensive comments. CuteNews offers spam protection with random bot word. This is done very simple: people will have to fill in this word before the comment can be added to the database. This word is a generated String of letters and numbers. This protection is similar to reCaptcha. The main difference is that in reCaptcha users will have to introduce a scrambled code from an image.

The installation is very simple. Download the script, unzip it and upload it to the hosting server. After that go to www.yoursite.com/cutenews/index.php , login and that is all.

The main problem with this script is the price: $39.95.

Chyrp

Adrian — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 19:16:39 +0000

One of the easiest ways to communicate in these days is to post your thoughts through your blog. Chyrp was designed to be lightweight while retaining functionality. . Chyrp has a great standard theme and robust module engine. You can personalize and modify it any way you want.

One of the best feature besides its simplicity is the Feathers system. This system allows Chyrp to do anything you want. You can just stick to the default Text feather (running a regular blog) but you can also post anything and everything.

Feathers add new post types to Chyrp. Post types determine what kind of media you can display in your blog. You can also add multiple extensions. Extensions add functionality (ex. audio clips, video, photos) to Chyrp. It can be a module, a feather, a theme, or a localization.

Chyrp is driven by PHP (PHP 5 >= 5.1.3) and MYSQL (MYSQL 4.1+) or SQLite (SQLite 3+). The installation is simple. Download the script, unzip it and upload it to your server. Create the MYSQL database with a username and password. The final step is to run the installer.

Chyrp is a powerful application and is perfect for tumblelogs. Unfortunately Chyrp does not have the capability of automatically posting content based on new items added to RSS feeds.

Moa

Adrian — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 19:50:39 +0000

If you want to integrate a image gallery into your personal website or a small company website, you can easily use a free image gallery website system. One of the best image gallery website system I have ever seen is Moa.

Moa is written in PHP and uses MySQL for data storage. Moa is not intended for people who want comments or ratings and it doesn’t require registration or login usernames. Moe is for people who want to share on their website their pictures from holidays, pictures wih their family and other personal photos.

With Moa you can create galleries and sub-galleries. Also you can put your photos into galleries based on keyword tags. You don’t need to make the thumbnails because Moa generates them automatically. In the admin panel you can check for corruption and lost or un-tagged images.

Moa allows a hierarchical gallery structure and allows images to appear in more than one gallery without re-uploading. Galleries can be made and will auto-populate with any images that have matching tags. Because Moa was created for users with basic needs, adding, editting and deleting galleries or images is easy.

Moa is released as Open Source under the zlib/libpng license. Download Moa from here. The creator of the script put on his website a Live Demo of Moa, so you can try it before you download it.

Compatibility: MySQL 5.0.1 or higher, Apache 2.0 or higher, PHP 5.2 or higher, PHP extension – gd2, PHP extension – mbstring

D3000 Box widget for WP released

Csaba — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 14:36:09 +0000

Today I finished development of initial version of D3000 Box widget for WP.
What does it do ? Well… it displays latest software releases from Download3000.com in your sidebar. Nothing less nothing more
You can download it from here . Demo is available here in sidebar, so just take a look.