CMSFactor.com - php

Flashblog - Flash Blog Software

marcus — Thu, 13 Apr 2006 16:54:38 -0700

Flashblog is an open source php/Flash Content Management System geared towards blogging, though it could be used for any simple Flash website. The admin interface is done in PHP while the entire front-end is Flash.

The web interface is very simple to modify. There is a single Flash file that contains all the assets needed. Customizing the site is fairly simple as well--as long as you're familar with Flash, it's just a matter of drawing and moving things around where you'd like to place them. No HTML coding needed.

There are a couple downsides--for one, it's all in Spanish--unless you speak some Spanish it might be a little difficult to get installed the first time around. The second is that it's been quite some time since the site was updated, indiciating that development has, in all likelyhood, stopped--at least for now.

One of the most compelling things about Flashblog is that it could be used as a template for any Flash/PHP website. You have the .fla, the ActionScript and PHP all there for you--once you're able to understand that code, you're well on your way to creating your own customized content management system.

While it's definitely a shame that it's not under active development, it's a great open source project that is being used on several live websites.

Run Your Own Digg with Meneame, Pligg or DiggClone

marcus — Wed, 05 Apr 2006 04:04:18 -0700

Digg is cool. There is no denying it. It's so cool that you might have thought at one point of running your own Digg-like website. Think about it no more! There are at least three ways for you to run a Digg like site without writing a line of code:

1. First there's Meneame, the source code is commented in Spanish so it may help to speak a little, but you can clearly see that it works by the heavily trafficked production version of the site.

2. Only speak English? There's Pligg which is a branch of Meneame translated and has an active community behind it.

3. DiggClone I haven't tried or seen this one in action and I doubt it's under active development, but if the above two don't work for you, it might be worth checking out.

Drupal 4.7 Looks REALLY Good

marcus — Tue, 04 Apr 2006 17:12:53 -0700

Drupal 4.7 RC1 is released and you're looking at it! The upgrade from 4.6 couldn't have been easier--delete the old files, insert the new files, run an upgrade script, update modules and done. It took me about 15 minutes on this site. I have a few other Drupal sites that use modules that haven't been released for 4.7 yet so I'll probably wait on those.

What's new in Drupal 4.7? Here are the changes from the changelog that I thought were most interesting (my comments in red)

added free tagging support. woohoo!
added a site-wide contact form.
added the PHPTemplate theme engine
reworked the 'request new password' functionality.
reworked the node and comment edit forms These are much nicer now!
made it easy to add nodes to the navigation menu.
added site 'offline for maintenance' feature.
added support for auto-complete forms (AJAX).
added support for collapsible page sections (JS).
added support for resizable text fields (JS).
improved file upload functionality (AJAX).
made it possible to alter, extend or theme forms.
added support for "mass comment operations" to ease repetitive tasks.
reworked the revision functionality.
added a block to display author information along with posts.
added support for private profile fields.
added the ability to track page generation times.
made it possible to block certain IPs/hostnames.
added support for theme-specific block regions.
made the aggregator module parse Atom feeds.
made the aggregator generate RSS feeds.
added RSS feed settings.
added 'loose caching' option for high-traffic sites.
improved performance of path aliasing.
made indexer smarter and more robust. Nice. This needed major work.
added advanced search operators (e.g. phrase, node type, ...).
added customizable result ranking.

Over all a huge release with alot of features that have been much anticipated. I'd say that this release probably should have been Drupal 5.