OnePress Community

Posted on February 3, 2010 by Dovyski

I see lots of open source projetcs using Worpress as a blog platform, phpBB as a forum solution and Mediawiki as a wiki. I like them all, but maintaining them separately with no integrations is a pain. It's great when you register to a website and you can use the same fresh new account to comment on the blog, reply to a forum thread and/or contribute to a wiki page.

Excluding the wiki part, there is a tool that makes it all possible. OnePress is an integrated website and forum solution. It is, simply, a WordPress theme to serve as the foundation and framework for your web site and online community.

Some of it´s cool features:

Seamless integration with phpBB, complete with unified login and widgets to display forum posts on site.
Widgetized WordPress layout with drag and drop interface to quickly build site.
Professional featured content widgets to display important posts with prominence.
Easy to use backend enhancements for editing OnePress widget content.
Highly optimized page rendering process for optimal performance.
Built with WordPress 2.7 and child themes in mind. Flexible hook system for full theme customization.

Simple and powerful intranet

Posted on October 18, 2009 by Dovyski

These days I was looking for intranet solutions and I luckily found Open Atrium, an intranet in a box that has group spaces to allow different teams to have their own conversations.

OpenAtrium is built on top of Drupal, has a nice design and a useful set of features:

Blog: A classic blog for each group that has commenting, file attachments on both the post and comments, and granular notifications.
Calendar: A calendar that lets you quickly add events, suck in iCal and other calendar feeds, and support single or multi-day events.
Group Dashboard: Mini widgets give you a snapshot of all the activity happening across your groups.
Documents: A simple online handbook that lets you collaborate on documents, store and compare revisions, attach files, and once you're done print out the final copy.
Shoutbox: Kind of like a private twitter, the shoutbox lets you share short messages, links, and information with just the people in your group.
Case Tracker: A full ticketing system that lets you assign to do's and create unlimited projects within each of your groups. The case tracker also lets you classify the to do, give it a priority, and manage its status.

For small companies, it is an efficient tool to create/maintain an intranet.

Flash instead of Powerpoint?

Posted on October 16, 2009 by Dovyski

Probably I've spent several hours editing and arranging pictures to create a nice Powerpoint presentation. Even though the Microsoft product is a great tool, I do not like the final result. It seems unfashionable, too poor and/or simple.

This is one of the reasons why I like image sliders developed using Flash. I look at them and imagine how wonderful life would be if I could easily use it and some lines of text in a .txt file to create a presentation. Nice graphics, beautiful font rendering, smooth effects (including blur and glow) and maybe some physics, why not?

Trying to make my dream come true, I found two amazing image/content sliders in Flash: MegaZine 3 and CU3ER. The first one is an open source pageflip/flashbook engine, written completely in AS3.

The other one is a content slider with 3D transition effects, such as spinning.

cu3er

Certainly those two projects have lots of cool features and they can perfectly fit into a wide range of uses. If I have the change to save some time for my personal projects, such as my own Flash slide presentation, I will use MegaZine 3 and CU3ER for sure.

PHP and PDF in pure Javascript

Posted on June 3, 2009 by Dovyski

Javacript is the very first base stone concerning web 2.0. In the past, I always heard bad things about Javascript, but I guess all of them were said because Javascript was being used by the wrong people, in the wrong place and at the wrong time.

A lot of sites use huge Javacript libs, each one performing nice things, such as HTTP requests, animation effects, generation of RIA content, etc. Javascript is so famous now that several things have been ported to it, such as encryption algorithms.

I have found two of those Javascript ports that can be really useful, specially if you are a PHP developer (just like me): PHP.JS and jsPDF.

PHP.JS is an open source project in which you can use PHP functions client-side, in pure JavaScript. jsPDF is an open-source library for generating PDF documents using nothing but Javascript.

Webapps brought to the Desktop

Posted on May 17, 2009 by Dovyski

Some years ago, the only thing that came to my mind when I heard the word "web" was "very simple websites", a bunch of bytes available for browing. Google was not even born at that time and everyhing was focused on desktop applications. If your application was able to connect to the web, then it could update itself in a easy way, nothing else.

The main flow was to bring every single business plan into the desktop world: office stuff (such as Microsoft Office), e-mail (Outlook), image, music, movies, etc. In the web world at that time, Javascript was an ugly word to be fired and Flash was just a way to make things look a little bit better.

The world is different now and ironically it seems to be the opposite of what it was in the past. Instead of bringing things into the desktop, the idea is to take them to the cloud, make them available on the web. This is happening very fast, but sometimes it's useful to have some desktop behavior in a web app, such as offline access to your e-mails.

webappers

Why can't we use the best things of those two words (web and the desktop)? Even better, why can't we use our web development knowledge to create hybrid apps that work in those two worlds? In fact, we can, and a lot of people have noticed that.

The first one I can recall is Adobe with Apollo, on March 19, 2007. Apollo, after named to Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR), is a cross-platform runtime environment for building rich Internet applications using Flash, HTML or Ajax, that can be deployed as a desktop application. A very powerful tool able to create nice apps featuring half desktop half web blood.

Right after Adobe, Mozilla started working on a similtar idea and on October, 2007, Prism was born. It is open source, like all the things Mozilla does, and it splits web applications out of the browser and run them directly on the desktop. Prism development is not fast as Adobe's AIR is, but they are moving forward.

These days I've found a brand new tool like those previous ones: Appcelerator Titanium. As far as I could see, it works just like AIR, but it is open source. I read a few forum threads at Titanium forum and some developers said their Titanium apps were running faster then their AIR versions. Another very nice thing is you can use sevel languages to code your application, such as PHP and Phyton instead of only HTML and Javascript.

If you were thinking about developing an desktop-and-web application in a easy way, take a look at those options above. I'm sure you will have a lot of heavy weapons available to make your ideas to come true.