WebDev3000 » LGPL License

Coral IE Tab

Adrian — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 21:20:35 +0000

Mozilla Firefox is one of the best browsers on the market. But there are some websites that say no to Firefox and renders correctly only on Internet Explorer. Untill now, IE Tab was the only solution for people who wanted to use Mozilla Firefox on all websites, including the “banned” ones.

Coral IETab is a Mozilla Firefox extension which enables you to use the embedded IE engine within tabs of Mozilla Firefox. Coral IETab is a improved version on IE Tab. At first glance you might think that Coral IETab and IE Tab are identical, but the core DLL is completely rewritten, to support more advanced features and provide better performance.

Coral IETab is perfect especially for web developers because enables them to use the embedded IE engine within tabs of Mozilla Firefox. Coral IETab is usefull for normal users too because they can easily switch to IE in TAB VIEW when you meet incorrectly rendered web pages in Firefox.

One of the main improvements of Coral IETab over IE Tab is the support to the Adblock Plus addon, this way all ads on TE tab will be filtered. Also with Coral IETab the cookies will be synchronized between IE and Firefox. So you don’t need to relogin when you switch between Firefox and IE.

Download Coral IETab from here.

Compatibility: Firefox 3.0 – 3.7a1pre

CKEditor

Codrut Nistor — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 08:00:08 +0000

Some people I know simply love Web-based editors, but I must say I’m not exactly crazy about them. No matter if we’re talking about code or some article, I’m always more comfortable using Notepad++ or some other similar tool that I have installed in my computer already, and I don’t have to get into detail with this – after all, it doesn’t really matter what you like to use, as long as you get the job done, right?

Today, I have a little something for you, all those who don’t like editing the way I do – we’re talking about a Web-based editor, of course, and its name is CKEditor. I could tell you a lot about it, but I think you should check the demo first of all. Then… you can draw the conclusions, of course!

To me, CKEditor looks like a pretty fast tool, easy to use and pretty customizable (I love the ability to use skins!). The cherry on top of the cake is the ability to use plugins, so CKEditor’s feature list can grow, grow, grow…

Covered by a bunch of licenses, CKEditor is free to use and works with most major browsers, so why don’t you give it a try?

Compatibility: IE, Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera have been confirmed to work properly with CKEditor, but I can add Flock and Mathon to that list, too

Picok

Codrut Nistor — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 10:22:58 +0000

I love start pages. Sure, I usually load my bookmarks, but having a lot of useful info inside a single Web page is also a pretty good idea, and I must confess that, despite the fact Netvibes is my all-time favorite, I recently started playing with iGoogle from time to time, just to get to know it better. These begin said, it’s no surprise that bumping into an open source script allowing you to build similar pages made me instantly decide to write about it…

… so this is how you end up facing this short article about Picok. The name comes from “personal information cockpit,” and not “peacock,” as I was tempted to believe at first sight.

Picock is a multi-user script that’s a great choice for intranets, since the user of the admin account can choose the available components that regular users can select from the list, so they won’t start their work days checking funny movies again… but that only works if various Internet access limitations are in place, and since that would take the discussion somewhere else, let’s stop here, shall we?

Sure, existing items can be easily configured, dragged around using the mouse, minimized, and so on, offering about the same functionality as most startup pages (including even a multi-language interface and support for integrating Lotus Notes, Doodle, Wikipedia, Google Maps content!) you may find online these days, only that those aren’t exactly open source…

Oh, one more thing – Picok requires PHP & MySQL, but can also work with Microsoft SQL Server, or IBM Lotus Notes, and the demo is available here(user/pass “demo” works well, but you can also create a custom demo account). Enjoy!

Compatibility: all major browsers, obviously

AjaXplorer

Codrut Nistor — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 08:45:05 +0000

Managing files on a remote server is a real pleasure to me, and that happens only because I NEVER use the rudimentary file manager available inside cPanel, or any other kind of Web-based file management solution. I am really happy with FileZilla or the file managers built into Total Commander or Unreal Commander, so I never cared much about Web-based file managers, until I found the treasure we’re going to talk about today…

… a treasure simply called AjaXplorer! While the name already reveals a lot about this useful piece of code, Ajax is not everything you should remember about AjaXplorer, because there’s much more to it. Of course, we’re not going to pass through all its features here, but I’ll try to give you just a taste of it, enough to make you want more.

When talking about requirements, it’s good to know that AjaXplorer 2.4, the last version, only need PHP 4 or 5 on the server you’ll install it on, so you won’t need to mess with your databases at all, but what I enjoyed about AjaXplorer the most was its ease of use, as well as the tools you don’t get to see with every Web-based file manager, like the built-in image viewer or the video player. Sweeet!!!

Other than the above… come on, guys, spare a few minutes and play with the demo, you will surely get back here to thank me for finding this awesome piece of code and telling you about it, believe me!

Compatibility: Firefox, Internet Explorer (including version 8, although the official page only says “6 & 7″), Safari, Opera, Flock and Google Chrome had no problems running AjaXplorer

Php Free Chat

Codrut Nistor — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 08:22:41 +0000

A few days ago, I installed some chat script on a site of mine. I guess I told you about my quest for such a thing before actually doing it, but I can’t say that I am completely happy with the thing I got, and since there’s always something better than what you have… here’s another one!

To be honest, I won’t play with Php Free Chat anytime soon, but it’s good to have it in my “scripts to try” list, and if you need to add chat functionality to some project of yours, this is a good script to start with, since a lot of people find it to be a really good one.

Php Free Chat is a LGPL open source program, with support for customized CSS style sheets, and additional plugins can be easily written to enhance its functionality, for example to store conversations into a database, instead of external files, as it happens by default.

Installing it is extremely easy, since it doesn’t need a database to be up & running, and you users will surely find it really easy to use, since its commands are irc-inspired, and the interface is very similar to those found in mIRC and XChat.

Compatibility: since it uses PHP and XAJAX, Php Free Chat should work with any browser you can think of, probably even with the text-based ones (unfortunately, I wasn’t able to try the online demo in such a browser, so I can’t say it for sure, but if you give it a try, some feedback here would be more than welcomed!)

SyntaxHighlighter

Codrut Nistor — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 09:08:02 +0000

I am no coder, I have to confess this to you, but that doesn’t mean I never wrote a single line of code. In fact, even these days I sometimes find myself with my hands deep in some WordPress template, manually adding advertising code or tweaking the visuals, and about a decade ago, I even got into some average programming projects (school needs, you know…). Considering these, I would be a fool to deny the fact that syntax highlighting makes working with code much easier, and when talking about code snippets on a site… syntax highlighting is simply priceless!

SyntaxHighlighter is another piece of code standing under the Google Code banner, and covered by the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public license. With it, you can post code snippets online without breaking a sweat, and since this little tool is completely based on JavaScript, it doesn’t really matter what you have on your server, as long as the browser loading the page supports JavaScript, everything should work just fine.

Having multiple languages support, SyntaxHighlighter reached version 2.0 on the 3rd of February, 2009, and everyone should be able to use and deploy it, since all that needs to be done is to copy the files from the package and link them in your templates. With a compressed core library as small as 11kb, and the ability to describe highlighting rules for additional languages, SyntaxHighlighter is a great choice for any developer who wants to share his knowledge with the world and make his code snippets look great.

Compatibility: SyntaxHighlighter works with any JavaScript-capable browser, so if you are using some script blocking plugin in yours, be sure to disable it before calling for help!