Something new and cool for the Joomla CMS to keep an eye out for is WordPress 2.0
One of the best things to hit 2006 was the release of WordPress 2.0. Word Press was already a good blogger; maybe the best available. But the 2.0 release has made it even better. So good, in fact, that Yahoo! is now offering it as part of some of their hosting packages.
So what is so great about the new version? For starters, they restructured the admin console so it is cleaner, works better, and even looks better. A nice subtle use of fade effects around status messages so you are sure to notice the information confirming any updates you made.
TraceWatch
{mosimage}If you run a web site at one time or another you will want to get statistics on your traffic. There are, of course, a lot of commercial scripts which range from cheap to very expensive. And there are even more free (open-source) scripts. Unfortunately, with most of the free offerings are rather poor. Either they are too complicated to install, don’t integrate well with heterogenous site frameworks, or aren’t very pleasant to look at. Or all of the above.
TraceWatch is different, though. To begin with, it is easy to install. Un-zip the archive, set up a database, run a simple install PHP file and it’s done. Overall it has a flexible installation scheme which allows for multiple instances of the script to co-exist, handy when running multiple sites off a root folder.
SlideShowPro
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.
Simple Machines Forum 1.0
A 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.
WordPress 1.5
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.
Mambo 4.5
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 was 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.
MyInfo 3
Anyone who works in IT has a lot of information to keep track of. Passwords, account names, server addresses, license and serial numbers, snippets of useful (sometimes vital) PHP or mySQL code, to-do lists (usually 4 or 5 of these), and of course, links to various web sites. The mainstay PIM’s like Outlook are actually badly suited for this task. They are too big, not flexible enough, and the files are enormous – which is an issue when you need to sync once or twice a day, or want all your data on a USB drive to take with you.
Enter MyInfo 3, written by independant developer Milenix Software in Bulgaria.
