1.  Lightbox Plus

Lightbox Plus is a great tool for displaying any of your pictures within your blog in a Lightbox.  You get about 15 different styles to choose from, and 2 different transitions.  You can also change the opacity of the overlay that is applied behind your lightbox.

Not only can you use the lightbox for individual images in your blog but you can also have slideshows, and galleries (Must use WP Gallery plugin).  Visit the plugin’s site.

2. cforms

Ever want to have a form on your site for contact, or any other reason?   Hate plugin forms that have no versitality?  With cforms it is simple and easy to style and create multiple  Ajax driven contact forms throughout your blog or even on the same page.  cforms will then Email you with the end-user’s inputted data.

cforms has a place to edit CSS and also an API for building dynamic forms. You can basically do anything you want with it, if you know enough!   If you are looking for a form choose cforms, don’t even bother with the rest.  View the plugin’s site.

3.  WP to top

So lets say you have 5 blog posts on your homepage and an end-user has to scroll a mile to get to the bottom of your webpage, now he/she remembers something towards the top of your homepage that they wanted to read. Are you really going to make them go through the hassle of scrolling all the way back up?  You don’t need to anymore.  With WP to top you can place a “Back to top” button that when clicked will automatically scroll the user back to the top of the page.

This plugin doesn’t have too many options but if you know any CSS you will be able to find the styles and do what you need to do to make it your own.  This is a great tool to keep people on your site instead of getting frustrated with scrolling and leaving.  Visit the plugin’s site.

4. Fixed Social buttons

Fixed Social buttons is a great WordPress plugin to hook in a place for users to submit a post they like to their favorite social sites.  You can select from a variety of social sites to submit the posting or page to.  This plugin also seems to be updated quite regularly. Fixed Social buttons has these options:

• Choose beetween 3 button styles.
• Show button on top or bottom.
• You can also hide some buttons.
• Open social bookmarks links in a new or in the same window
• Set with « rel=’nofollow’ » attribute or not on social bookmarks
• You can show buttons in horizontal or vertical axe.

Also the plugin has the following social buttons for use:

• RSS
• Twitter
• Facebook
• Youtube
• MySpace
• LinktIn

and more…..  Check out this great plugin.  Visit the plugin’s site.

Fixed Social button from GraphicLux.com

5. WP Super Cache

Are you noticing that your users drop from your site because of long load times?  Did you under pay for a host and now you’re paying for it from loss of visitors because of slow connections?  Do not fret, WP Super Cache will solve all your problems.  This is a very fast caching plugin for WordPress that can triple your load speeds.  There is tons of information on what it does and how it works on the authors site.  So check it out.  Visit the plugin’s site.

Buffalo is a dying city.  It’s been dying for about 50-60 years now.  We need large corporations that will help support Buffalo while Buffalo helps and supports them.  Google is that company.  I am afraid without something big happening, Buffalo will just get worst.  Don’t you want to be able to continue to live here and maybe have your children live here too?  Please help support the cause, below are a few links to check out.  Do it for the cause.

http://www.buffalowantsfiber.com/
http://www.buffalorising.com/2010/03/buffalo-wants-google-fiber.html
http://www.city-buffalo.com/applications/googlefiber/default.aspx

PS:  Sorry about the lack of posts.  I have been sick and had a bunch of side work to get out of the way.

Although adding a CMS to a site is not the most involved process, but it will increase a clients cost but usually the convienence and money saved in the long run, out ways the price.

I would have to say a majority of sites I have helped developed with CMS’s have left my hands looking sleek, consistent and pleasing.  About 1 month after the client has control the site usually turns into a bunch of poorly written paragraphs, with styling added to them which breaks the consistencey of the site, adding images way too large, usually breaking the site, or even links that go to no-where.

So what are developers supposed to do?

One simple solution is not to implement CMS’s.  This is usually not an option since no-one will turn down money, and most developers say once it’s out of their hands then it really is none of their business. Another solution is creating detailed instructions explaining what pages and what styles to use when using the editor.  We all know clients will not read this information that you spent hours creating for them, so what’s the point then?

Obviously the above will not work.  What will then?  I think the only way to have this work is in a couple of ways.  One way is to create the site for your client and then give them update options.  You can give them a billable option of how long of a turn around they will want for a price and how much time they will get per week or month.  These options may be good enough for some clients, but then again there are other clients that want to do it all themselves.  What should we do with these people?  Train them.  Teach them.  Meet with your client while the site is in development and go over the essentials.  Of course all of this would be billable.  If you client wants a CMS and wants to update it themselves, simply tell them that you would need x amount of hours for training before the CMS would be completely ready to go live.  Usually if you put in around 10 hours of total time updating the site with the client the correct way, and explaining what to do and what not to do when using an editor, then the client will usually not destroy the site.

Any other thoughts and strategies?  Leave a comment.

Now the user has the control over the data.  No more worrying about never getting your data back again.  No more being held hostage.

There are huge benefits to the applications owner(s) too.  Now there would not need to be huge amounts of server storage space to pay for, now you only have to host the application and maybe a small database or 2.  This would make prices cheaper.  This would make people happy.

There would be issues with speed of data transfer but the internet, and computers are only getting faster and more powerful, and should be able to handle these connections in the very near future (if not now).

I think this would make supporting the application much easier too.  If you know the application is not having issues you can be confident that it’s on the end users side and then you can charge for support or the client will end up having to fix their issue.  So now you have less money and time invested in support and the ability to make money supporting end users with their problems.

There are many ways people can say this is a terrible idea but everything one of those ideas can be proven not to be a problem with the proper precautions.  Thoughts?

SlickPlan is FREE!  Just sign up, get the email, click the activation link and you’re ready.  Within minutes I was adding pages, sub-pages and all the navigation elements what would be constant.  After you are done you have several options to export.  

You can “Get HTML” which a great place to grab the code to start your real site map, add a little CSS and boom.  You have yourself a nice sitemap.  You can Export to PDF.  This function is nice but I was hoping for a better PDF.  It still looks good but not great.  The lines connection the pages is quirky to me.  You can also Email an HTML link to anyone so they can view what you have created.

There are a few things I would love to see updated.

1. I would like to see the ability to style  the page “buttons”.  Being able to change the colors, font, font size and size of “buttons”.
2. Being able to create copies of pages
3. Having the list of pages on the left not get so unmanageable in large site maps.
4. Having the ability to zoom in or out
5. Having the ability to collaborate.
6. Having the ability to export to html and css (matching what is on screen)

Not bad for something that is FREE.  I suggest everyone at least try this and if you like it support it with some donation cash.

The install is pretty easy and straight forward.  Just download the files put them on your web server, setup a database, run the database scripts, change some settings in the config file and you are off and running.  If you work like most developers then you already should have an approved mock up of what the e-commerce site will look like.   For me the easiest way to implement a design with CFWebstore is to first build-out your approved mock up into valid XHTML.  Now you just have to cut and paste your build-out code into your default_layout file within CFWebstore.  Most code is well commented within files, and gives you a good idea what that code is doing.

Within CFWebstore there are many built in functionalities.  Some of these include  payment processing integrations (including Paypal, Authorize.NET, and a few others), UPS integration, downloadable products, articles, discounts, and promotions.  I know I am missing a bunch of other great reasons to use CFWebstore but I am just giving a taste.

There are many more positive notes in using CFWebstore than negative.  Other than the already given functionalities, the support is superb.  Mary Jo (creator of CFWebstore) is always updating CFWebstore’s yahoo group, adding comments, advise and instruction.  Not only is she daily making posts in the group, but Mary Jo also has live chat which is available on her website for the most part of the weekdays.  Another positive of CFWebstore is that it is often updated, and if you are using the same version number as the revision has, you can download and upgrade for free.

As for the negatives, here they are.  CFWebstore is still using table based layouts in a bunch of places, which can be annoying.  Also there are a bunch of tables and <td>’s that should use css, but have some unneeded inlined styles which are a pain to find and update.  Also CFWebstore’s main style sheet uses classes and id’s that are way too generic, such as .header, which becomes a problem when you build out your mock up and now have to change your styles so the two don’t mix .(I’ve always been in the frame of mind that the application should use some kind of naming convention for style naming.)

You can see that I don’t find the functionality of CFWebstore to be bad but the HTML code and CSS that the store runs with.  If you have a client that is not that picky about how every single thing looks like then maybe this won’t be an issue for you.  Overall I will give it 4 out of 5 stars for a ColdFusion E-Commerce engine.

I understand the need to charge for support at some points but I also believe that you should only charge support if you have a great deal of knowledge base, FAQ’s, and troubleshooting information easily found at the tips of someones finger tips.  This is not saying that Kentico doesn’t have a bunch of documentation, but the quality of the support documents is low and to search for anything specific is a nightmare on Kentico’s Development site.  

I have had some issues in the past (when I was a paying support client of Kentico’s) and would always go to their documentation and come up completely empty hoping by some chance of luck that I would find something.  When I couldn’t find what I needed I would email Kentico’s support and I could expect a follow up email from them about a day later.  Most of the time they where helpful.

Now that my year of support is over I cannot get any support help at all.  I have emailed, tweated, left messages in forums but no help.  The only reason I need any support is because of what I believe to be an upgrade bug from 3.1 to 4.1 from Kentico themselves.  I could understand If I gave them no details of my problem but I spelled it out and sent the error I was getting, and I could understand If my problem was a problem with some custom programming done but this site had none.

So now I am done ranting.  I will end with this.  Kentico would be one of my favorite .NET CMS’s of 2009 but the lack of support has changed my decision.  Support for your clients should be above your blog postings that nobody reads.  Stop planting trees and give your clients some support.  It’s not like I didn’t pay for licenses.  I will probably never suggest you as a CMS for any of my clients or any web developers if the topic comes up.  OK now I am done ranting.

Gliffy

Gliffy is usually what i first start with when getting a large application organized.

Creating a wireframe is a can help improve the vision for an entire web development team. Gliffy makes it pretty simple to create wireframes and then to share  your web mockups with anyone.

Gliffy has drag and drop elements from a tool library that you can put anywhere on the page. You can add text to wireframe to have a clear mockup.

Gliffy allows you to share and collaborate with anyone all online.  This is much easier to use between a diverse team, no need to have Viso installed on everyone machine, all you need is a browser and internet access. Team members can create, share, and edit your website wireframes.

With Gliffy you can publish your wireframe and share the URL with anyone, you can also export an image of your web wireframe or into a pdf document, and invite others to view and edit your wireframe online.

Overall if you need a wireframing tool for free, this could be the tool for you.

Hot Gloo

Hot Gloo is another Free web based “wire framing” application.  I usually will use Gliffy first to build out the framework then dive into Hot Gloo to put the actual pages together.  If the project is big enough I will sometimes show the client my mock ups of pages so they can get an idea and feel for what the site will look like and how it will work.  Of course these mock ups are unbranded and simple they give the client a place to change things around before it get out of hand.

Hot Gloo has drag and drop elements and allows you to create your own elements so you can reuse common includes like footers and headers for pages making mock ups much quicker to create.  Hot Gloo allows for collaberation as well. You can give users one of two different access points, Reviewer or Editor. You can invite other to see your ideas and alter them if you like, you can also chat through the Hot Gloo app.  You can export your pages through PDF’s or png’s too.  This free based application is only free up to a small certain amount of pages you can create.

For me Hot Gloo is a program that is more for mocking up pages or sections and not for wire framing, though you could use it for both.  I give Hot Gloo 4 out of 5 stars.

If you don’t already know, Project Bubble i,s in my humble opinion the best project management application for free. Project Bubble is easy to use and understand and the design is open making it not as much for a task for data entry. You can add multiple projects, clients, tasks, invoices and even estimates. So far Project Bubble is in its infanticy but has made some major strides since its official launch late last year. The creator Stu Green has made the development of the application not just from his own ideas. Stu almost daily polls his audience to see whats on their mind and what they want to see Project Bubble become.  Stu takes the users wants and executes updates with hardly any hiccups.  So far I can only use Project Bubble as an invoicing and estimate application.  I really want to start using this as an all in one project management tool.

I could use this as a main hub between salesman, clients, developers, and myself. Some things are holding me back at this point.

• You cannot export data yet, but this is in the works for Project Bubble.
• You cannot download the source code and make the application work for you. (I do understand why)
• No editor within the text areas, hard to make distinction between items without lists, and some basic styling.
• No way to upload attachments that may be pertanant for a specific job.

These reasons above are only my reasons, I am sure this works perfect for a lot of people, I just want more.  I think this application has so much potential, and seems Stu is heading the right direction.  You better bet I will be checking Project Bubbles Tweats daily.  Thanks Stu!

.NET CMS’s

Kentico

Kentico in my opinion is one of the best CMS’s in 2009.  Kentico is well built, updated regularly and can offer many solutions for little modification. Kentico has great out of the box features like its Blog, Calendar, Newletters, Event Calendar, Forums, and easy to create forms.  The year of 2009 has surely pushed Kentico’s platform into the social marketing age.  With new upgrades to Kentico several new features have been developed to add more social networking aspects. Polling, Groups, Friends and Private Messaging are all contained within Kentico.

Kentico has its weaknesses though.  The challenge is to understand how Kentico works, and this can take a while digging around .NET code.  They do have a large collection of documentation but it seems that they rushed it and they do not give the detailed information that you would like.  The cost of Kentico is also a downfall.  I understand the need for cost with an application this size but I think they would be able to make even more money if they put this software in the Open Source market.

Their support is descent.  Better than most companies.  You can email them and they will usually give you a good answer or push in the right direction within a day.  I have even Tweated about Kentico once, complaining about how difficult some things are and shouldn’t be, and they actually called me that day to ask if I needed any specific help.

Kentico is a great CMS’s if you can afford it, don’t need to customized it much, and have clients with above average internet technology knowledge to manage it.  This CMS’s is not for you if you have a small budget, will need to program against the framework, have clients who don’t know what Google Chrome is, and need a good E-Commerce engine.  The Kentico site itself has big knowledge base, forums, blog posts but is hard to search for anything in detail.

Umbraco

Umbraco is another .net CMS that is worth checking out.  But again just like Kentico this CMS has a verticle learning curve.  This is not for average developers.  This is for seasoned veterans.  I do not have as much knowledge in Umbraco as I do Kentico, but from what I can see and what has shown through my web development years anything written in .NET is going to have a steep learning curve.

One plus with Umbraco over Kentico is that is free, and the Umbraco site is pretty nice and has a bunch of information.

PHP

CmsMadeSimple

In my mind CmsMadeSimple has the quickest turn around time in putting a template, includes files together and implementation out of all CMS’s.  Not only that, it has a large amount of modules to download.  This is also Open Source and free to download and use.  The ease of updates and learning curve can be handled by most novice computer users.

This CMS does have some issues though.  Many modules are incomplete, and most are not very pretty (which doesn’t mean you can’t go in and make them pretty) out of the box.  Finding modules on CmsMadeSimple isn’t the easiest either, the search isn’t very helpful and the only filtering going on for modules is alphabetical.

WordPress

The best Blog engine, and a damn good CMS added on.  The modules are robust, and written well.  They even look great usually.  So many easy to intall plugins and widgets to name.  WordPress is not the easiest to skin around but if you learn the framework its not to bad, and if you didn’t want to get creative you could always find a template that’s all ready for you.  If you need to build a site in a small amount of time and have a bunch of features that your clients could administer on their own then WordPress is the CMS engine for you.