Web Site Tools

WordPress Secrets: The Real Ultimate Static Front Page

Quick Note: If you are looking for the source, find it here.

With WordPress, there have been so many attempts to make the best static front page. Most variations have included plugins that change the default behavior of the home page to display a pre-selected WordPress page. However, the Turbocharged blog showcases a new technique that uses a theme’s home.php template, and even allows you to add pure PHP code to it. Rudd-O’s solution Continue reading »

Invision Power Board

Perhaps one of the best bulletin board (aka forum) packages available is Invision Power Service’s Invision Power Board (now officially called IP.Board). It has many powerful features and a growing community of users and developers.

IPB’s newly updated administration panel provides about half of the board’s power. The interface is somewhat logically laid out, with big top navbar buttons for managing the categories, users and other content related features; the look and feel of the forum; settings; and third party extensions. There is somewhat useful help within the interface for quick reference, and the latest version’s color scheme looks pretty. I have two main complaints about the Admin CP, however. Within the Components section, the list all of the modifications installed and their respective management pages are in a rather long sidebar on the left, slowing down access to options located further down when many components are installed. Also, the permissions system isn’t very fine grained, giving you very few permissions to work with for each user group and forum category (in comparison, Simple Machines Forum has about two dozen permissions just for a category).

When it comes to front-end options, IPB has it all. The Personal Message system works pretty well, the topic controls are unparalleled, and post authoring is very intuitive. My favorite feature in IPB is the announcements, which will place a topic-styled post in a separate area above topic listings (screenshots below). The post notification system leaves something to be desired, however, since every email sent by it has the same title. This causes every single post’s notification to be grouped into one thread when viewed in Gmail. After a while of just archiving the messages, you will have many messages stacked up in the conversation, and you’ll soon discover the usefulness of Gmail’s relatively new Delete button.

Overall, I would highly recommend IPB as an excellent commercial product (the price tag at press time is $149.99 for the standard edition, $299.99 for the Business license), but for the beginner to online communities, Simple Machines Forum is a more cost-effective alternative.

For Your AJAX Apps: Loading Icon Generator

Weblog Tools Collection came across this great Web 2.0 freebie, which lets you generate those throbber icons for your site. Big time saver, and produces nice-looking icons too.

Easy WordPress Updates with cPanel and SmartFTP

WordPress is terrifically easy to use. From simply posting to installing plugins, WordPress makes it easy to make your blog truly yours. Some people shutter at making updates to it though. Here’s the extremely easy way to get the whole thing done in just a few minutes, with two of my favorite tools, cPanel and SmartFTP.

Start by following the four essential steps in the official upgrade guide, which involves backing up everything and deactivating all of your plugins. When you are done with that, continue here.

1. Extract the update archive to your disk.
2. Upload the files in the wordpress folder of the update archive (all of the .php files), but not any folders contained within the root wordpress folder.
3. Delete the wp-admin folder from your site using SmartFTP, the cPanel File Manager, or whatever file management mechanism you use.
4. In Windows Explorer or the SmartFTP file browser (that’s where part of the SmartFTP mention comes in, since it redefines convenience), right click on the wp-admin folder on your disk, select Send To, and then click Compressed (zipped) Folder. This will give you a new .zip file containing the contents of the wp-admin folder that you would normally upload yourself.
5. Upload the wp-admin.zip file to your WordPress root directory on your Web server.
6. In the cPanel File Manager, navigate to the wp-admin.zip file, and in the right pane, click Extract File Contents. This should extract the directory, saving you hours of time that you would normally spend uploading the update file-by-file.
7. Close the resulting popup window, and delete the wp-admin.zip file on the Web server.
8. Repeat steps 3 through 7 for the wp-includes directory.
9. Upload the wp-content directory on your disk to the site using SmrtFTP, which will overwrite the older versions of the Askimet, DB Backup, and Hello Dolly plugins. It will also give you the update default Kubrick and Classic themes. You don’t need to zip it up this time because the total size of these files is pretty small.
10. Re-enable your plugins, and test everything. If you see something scrambled up, clear your browser’s cache, and refresh that page.
11. Done!

Now if the rest of life were as simple as that, the world would be much more peaceful. But for now, at least WordPress upgrades won’t give you migraines (in most cases).

Finally Found a New Theme

Browsing a gallery of 700 something themes was not easy or particularly exciting work, but that’s what it took to give my blog a facelift after almost a year with one theme. I spent some time browsing the gallery at Themebot.com, and came across a nice theme. Actually, I didn’t find this one at Themebot, rather I saw it on the author’s site (link at bottom of page). I’m just happy that I’m using something new and beautiful (not saying the Regulus isn’t beautiful – it’s just old).

Enjoy the new look folks.

My Views on AJAX

AJAX isn’t new, but I haven’t really gotten around to expressing my views on it. For those that aren’t in the geek circle, AJAX stands for Asynchronous Javascript and XML. It’s used to build whole web sites in some cases (Gmail and dozens of other Web 2.0 sites) or to add bits of instantly-accessible functionality (Quick reply in vBulletin or Quick Edit in Invision Power board, My Pages at PCWorld.com, for example). AJAX uses existing technologies and languages to help create enhanced user experiences.

I think that some AJAX sites are well designed, like my favorite, Gmail. It uses AJAX as the basic foundation for the whole thing, so it’s either AJAX or the standard HTML version. Other sites (or products in some cases) rely on AJAX for doing certain – albeit important, like editing records in a CRM system – tasks, but don’t use it as the actual page rendering mechanism. Using that system, the AJAX-based feature might not really work sometimes. I can’t really think of anything off-hand right now, but I remember it happening at least once.

So the next time you use a Web site or service that uses AJAX (whether you know it or not), think about how the site acts. Can you do certain things without leaving the page? Do certain features perform really quickly? Does the site have to load (with an obvious message saying it’s doing so) before you can use it? If so, it’s run on AJAX, and may (or may not) provide a better browsing experience.