AJAX Goodies for phpWebSite!

In the past few months, we've been doing more and more AJAX-like customizations and getting to know some great javascript libraries like mootools, etc. Now it's time for us to share some of those results with the rest of the phpWebsite community. One of the largest 'complaints' we hear out there is in regards to the CMS's 'plain' user interface. Those of us in the trenches know that's just the book on the cover, but the scripts/mods/hacks below offer some easy ways to spiff up a few things like photoalbum, photobox and phpwslistings modules already available for my all-time favorite CMS, phpWebSite.

Support is minimal on these, as is - unfortunately - documentation. I will be adding more detailed readme files very soon, but in the mean time, feel free to contact us here with questions. You can download any and all of the files for these mods here.

To see these mods in action, check these sites out:

Vashon Youth Council has a nice implementation of the RedWoodHouse.Com's photobox module. Just click the thumbnail on the front page...

VashonMusic.Com uses lightbox in both the photobox module and the standard photoalbum module which you can see here.

VashonBeach.Com integrates lightbox into the phpWSlisting module. This mod has a few added bennies, such as the crude but effective next/prev functionality to quickly navigate through the 'listings'.

(For the curious... I live on an island outside of Seattle, named Vashon. Folks around here are quite proud of their heritage and community, so there are a plethora of Vashon-related websites. For more info, you can peruse one of our other phpWS projects, VashonPages.Com).

The New Scripts Are Here! The New Scripts Are Here!!!

Well! After much trial and tribulation (not really, but it sure sounds more dramatic that way, eh?), we have our first version of calendar conversion scripts ready for testing and... dare I say it? Implementation...

Whew! They've been a long time comin' and they ain't perfect, but this is a quietly significant milestone for us here at SallenGroup HQ. The scripts have been checked into our SVN repository, so if you have login access, you can check them out Here. Currently, they simply take any version of an ical/vcal file and convert it into the format that phpWebSite needs in order to import.

Of course, there are other ways to skin this cat, such as RSS, XML-RPC, and another I recently tripped upon: hCard Microformats. The latter sounds very interesting and easy to implement just about anywhere, and the former(s) are tried and true formats already in use all over the place. Chances are, we'll be utilizing a bit of each as we refine development of our particular phpWebSite 0.10.2wmb "branch".

Next Up: phpWebSite Installation Wizard scripts, brought to you by Felicia and Jay Wade...

This Week In The News

Time for another update, as we slide into the swing of a sweet summer schedule...

We've all of course been quite busy. Special thanks to Chris Buss, Tavi Black and The Beachcomber, along with Susan McCabe, VPD and VoV for their recent publicity boosts they've given us. Needless to say, now that we've done the talk, it's time to walk!

Our Project Management System is starting to get fleshed out with what we've been up to lately. That'll be the place to fully document the tasks, milestones and even bugs we'll encounter over the next few weeks. If you don't yet have an account on that site, then Let me know, and we'll get you set up ASAP.

We also have our initial repositories set up now, which can be seen at:

http://sallen.homeip.net/svn/phpws_0.10.2
http://sallen.homeip.net/svn/CustomScripts
http://sallen.homeip.net/svn/phpWS_themes

I should clarify that these links are a different repository than what is shown on http://files.webmasterbates.com/, which is where you currently go when you click the 'Versions" link in the header above. Due to a difference in how remote login was handled by our IPS, we had to make a choice and reroute our svn set-up to a locally hosted machine. This actually has many advantages for the future, but took a bit longer than expected since we ended up doing the same thing twice. Sorta. But not really... ;-) IMHO, it was not at all a waste of time, as I think we here in the digital trenches would all say that we each learned something from the process. In fact, I decided to leave the link above as is because it may still prove to be a handy resource in the not-too-distant future. I wouldn't be surprised... The tech crew here are almost finished with all the initial client/server set-up, repository creation and check-ins of all pertinent files. As you can see from the links above, we've already got a couple working files in our CustomScripts repository, namely:

http://sallen.homeip.net/svn/CustomScripts/convertCalendar.php
http://sallen.homeip.net/svn/CustomScripts/truefalsetest.php

These are the humble but oh-so-promising beginnings to our calendar import scripts. Film at eleven, later this week, some time after Wednesday... ;-)

-Kris