SlideShowPro

May 21, 2005 Flash and AJAX, Forums & Galleries No Comments

{mosimage}Publishing image galleries is a typical duty of web sites. While most CMS’s have gallery modules they don’t compare to the elegance of SlideShowPro. For a mere $20 you get a Flash gallery component with smooth transitions, image labeling, XML-driven albums, a gallery browser, per-album sound tracks, customizable everything, and lots of great URL integration features.

The product is supported by the devleoper, Dominey Design by email and a forum on their web site. There is plenty of well-written documentation both in a PDF format manual and on the web site. The online documentation includes several examples implementations, how to animations, FAQ’s, There is also a nice little community of people who use the product who have contributed to the offering with back-end scripts, desktop applications and applets, and more to help make using SlideShowPro easier and more effective.

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Simple Machines Forum 1.0

May 13, 2005 Forums & Galleries No Comments

smf_background_logo.jpgA good bulletin board or forum is pretty much the cornerstone of an online community. Selecting and deploying one is a game of trade-offs. Do you go for something with all the great features, or something smaller and quicker? Do you go for something established that may be difficult to administer but has reams of plug-ins and skins, or something newer which may not have the add-ons, but will not consume a hours of time installing enhancements.

Simple Machines Forum more or less breaks the rules. It’s new, still on release 1.05, and not all that well known as compared with the flagship BBS’s packages like phpBB, vBulletin, and ikonBoard. But they got a lot of things right the first time. Enough to warrant serious attention by anyone looking to install a forum.

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WordPress 1.5

May 13, 2005 Content Management No Comments

There are a lot of blogging systems out there. Both open-source and hosted. And many of the hosted solutions are, in fact, pretty good and free. What you lose with a hosted solution is the ability to control your plugins and make modifications. So while this may be fine for normal blogging, if you want to use a blog system as a content system you probably want to install it on a server and have complete control.

All that being said, WordPress 1.5 is probably the best combination of features, ease of use, and good looks out there. The installation is one screen. Just upload the files, rig a database, hit the install.php URL and you’re basically done. There are dozens of great looking skins and just as many plugins. Everything from shopping carts to hit counting is available.

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Mambo 4.5

May 6, 2005 Content Management No Comments

Mambo is not really a new CMS. It has been around a while. It’s earlier incarnation was pretty dreadful, though. These earlier versions were slow, poorly organized, and seemed to do more to obscure your content than help publish it. But the latest releases are nothing short of incredible. (Note that this site is built with Mambo 4.5.2).

The basic content metaphor is one of publish/unpublish. This means that any element of the site, from a calendar component to a news bulletin, can be shown or hidden. Publishing of content items can also be pre-programmed to happen at a later date, as well as pre-programmed to expire at a later date. This is very handy for many business and eCommerce applications. Content editing can be done via straight HTML editing, or using one of several available WYSIWYG editors which are integrated into the system via the “Mambot” interface. While obviously not as robust as using Front Page or DreamWeaver, given that almost all of the style aspects of a page are taken care of by the template system, these are more than adequite for the job.

Note that some of these editor Mambots do not function well on the Macintosh. And bear in mind that they are JavaScript, so there will be quirks to be seen depending on which platform and browser authoring is being done on. All the editors have an “html mode” so it is always possible to drop down to raw code when needed.