WebDev3000 » Licenses

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!

QuoteURL

Codrut Nistor — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 12:45:49 +0000

Still using Twitter? To be honest, I discovered a few interesting people using it so far, and more than enough spammers – or simply people I have nothing in common with. Should I start taking it seriously? Nope, no way, but as long as it may help some of you, I’ll get back to it from time to time, and today’s the right moment to talk about QuoteURL, an interesting replacement to the original script allowing interactive tweet embedding, but this time a Web-based solution (no coding required, so it surely works for me!).

If you missed the script from Twitter I just mentioned, you could take a look here, while a detailed article about using it can be found on Mashable, but if you’re really in a hurry, I think you should jump straight to QuoteURL and get busy!

The official mumbo-jumbo goes like this: “QuoteURL helps you group different Twitter updates from different people into a single page that has a permanent URL. So you can put it on your blog or send interesting conversations to friends.” Demo is available here, and… I guess that’s all, folks!

Compatibility: all major browsers, obviously

Sudo Slider

Codrut Nistor — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 13:12:44 +0000

Since weekend is coming, I think that some CMS or shopping cart wouldn’t be a good idea. At least when I think about myself, I usually enjoy some light work during weekends, nothing special, as it happens with most of my friends. The web designers that I can call “friends” usually go in the woods during weekends, but when they don’t, they usually avoid work, that’s certain. If things are so boring for them and they end up facing some script, I know they would surely enjoy something like Sudo Slider…

But what is this thing called “Sudo Slider,” you will ask, right? Based on Easy Slider, Sudo Slider is a jQuery slider plugin packing quite a few interesting features. To make a longer story short, I think it’s enough to say that this piece of code will help you to display any HTML content via Ajax, displaying the items with fade or slide effects. Even better, you can use multiple sliders in one page and you get support for forward-back browsing, so you can easily bookmark every item.

Before giving Sudo Slider a try on your website, I think best thing to do is take a look at the demo. This 10kb plugin may be unobtrusive, but it’s surely faster to click the link above than make it work on your pages, right? That’s all, folks – have a nice weekend and be sure to enjoy Sudo Slider!

Compatibility: all major browsers

BBYIDX

Codrut Nistor — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 11:42:57 +0000

If we forget about health and time, probably the most precious thing one can have is a box full of ideas. Hey, even one good idea can be worth millions, especially since it’s not that easy to gather a bunch of ideas under the same banner, no matter if they belong to one or more individuals. These being said, what do you think about a Ruby-powered idea-gathering piece of code freely available?

According to the official mumbo-jumbo, “BBYIDX is a free and open source idea-gathering application written in Ruby and distributed under the GNU Affero General Public License.” Used as the foundation of the not-so-notorious, but really interesting Best Buy IdeaX website, BBYIDX allows its users to easily post, tag, comment and vote on ideas, while administrators can moderate incoming comments/ideas, also being able to assign work-flow to certain ideas for further development.

To make everything more interesting, BBYIDX comes with read and write APIs that one can employ to access an instance via another website or even mobile application. That’s all for now, folks, but be sure we’ll hear about BBYIDX again some day in the future!

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!

TeamLab

Codrut Nistor — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 14:33:34 +0000

While I can work in a team, I usually hate teamwork. The main reason is the fact that my work could be influenced by other’s mistakes, but I can’t say I am really that much into other people, either. These being said, I’ll turn things upside down and tell you a few things about a collaboration platform usable by small teams and enterprises, as well. What, you were expecting a tool for solitary freelancers? Lol, not today, that’s for sure!

TeamLab is our subject today, and the story is pretty short – it comes in a hosted and open source version, both freely available, enabling you to easily create teams, manage projects, setting milestones, creating tasks, and so on. Hey, it even has a built-in instant messaging client, integrated blogging, forum, and the 2-minute introductory video tutorial can help you get a clear idea about it without wasting time. Awesome!

Unfortunately for PHP fans, TeamLab requires ASP.NET and MySQL, SQLite or ADO.NET databases to work on your server. Oh, well, if you’re happy with the name.teamlab.com URL format, you can go with the hosted version, at least for a while…

Compatibility: all major browsers, at l;east until someone proves me wrong…

Bubble Engine

Codrut Nistor — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 09:33:11 +0000

Some say bubbles are useless when it comes to graphic effects for your site, but I disagree with that. Sometimes, they can be really funny, just like a bubble bath – somehow useless, but surely a lot of fun! Today, I’ll give you a hint about a free bubbles generator. Unfortunately, it only works with websites, because if it would have been able to turn a regular bathtub into one with bubbles, I wouldn’t be in front of my computer right now…

Bubble Engine comes at no charge, version 1.0 being released about two weeks ago and providing a pretty rich collection of adjustable settings, like the size, looks, position of the bubbles generated. While adding bubbles to a page can be pretty fun, you can also include BubbleMachines.js to your code and then get some draggable graphics able to create bubbles. Is this cool, or what? Cool or useless, I know what some friends of mine might say…

… but if you’re still wondering about this neat jQuery plugin (jQuery Easing is also required), I think you should go ahead and take a look at the Bubble Engine demo available here. That’s all, folks!

Compatibility: all major browsers with Java enabled, of course

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!