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.

Be warned, though. This is a Flash MX 2004 component - not a standalone application. The component needs to be put into a Flash presentation (.SWF file) and then hooked into the web site as such. This means the developer needs to know enough Flash to put together a basic presentation.

I have used this product in building a couple of sites and the flexibility of SlideShowPro lends itself quite well to CMS use. All one needs to do is point the component at the desired XML file as a tag parameter and it is possible to access any gallery in the catalog. Or with a little more JavaScript, start SlideShowPro at a specific slide in an album. For one Mambo-driven site it was little more than a 5 minute job to write a “Mambot” to access a SlideShowPro album.

SlideShowPro is a hidden gem and clearly one of the most cost-effective, and stylish, ways to integrate image albums into a web site of any kind.

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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.

For starters, SMF is fast. It runs on PHP and mySQL While a relatively new player there are enough well-designed skins for the system to make adoption and integration into a site pretty straightforward. Likewise for plug-ins, I was surprised by just how quickly this product has had a wealth of add-ons developed for it. This is likely due in part to how well thought out the system is to begin with. It’s easier to write add-ons when the core code is well structured and the places to hook in functionality are obvious. There’s even a bridge to the Mambo CMS available.

The best part of SMF for the webmaster is the ease with which add-ons and themes are installed. Everything is handled through a nice upload interface. No logging into your web host and unzipping and moving things around by hand. No hacking of individual files like some BBS’s require you to do. Just browse to the .ZIP file, upload, and enable. The system is even smart enough to recognize when you need a special FTP access to do that upload (like on some shared hosts) and provides a way to temporarily input the over-ride user/password to enable the package to be uploaded.

And there are converters; at the time of this article there were converters from 4 major BBS systems into SMF available, as well as 3 more converters for variants of those systems.

All in all this is one of the best thought out forum systems available. If you are considering installing a new forum, SMF is definately worth a serious look.

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