I’ve always meant to take a closer look at Plone. It has an excellent reputation for being a robust, scalable, secure CMS used by all sorts of organisations, large and small. The lack of cheap, shared hosting had put me off in the past, but that’s really no excuse for not checking out a great CMS (particularly with the rise of cheap virtual private servers.) Read More…

We’ve just written a new component for Joomla! 1.5 and above that allows you to add music search functionality, and music recommendations to your site.

There are two options:

1. Allow users to search for MP3s online
2. Take a song & artist from a user and recommend other songs they might like

You can download it here (halfway done the page, right hand side.)

It’s powered by the fantastic Seeqpod API – check it out now!

(Please note you’ll need an installation of Joomla 1.5, and PHP5.)

Enjoy!

CMS Made Simple is the best content management system you’ve never heard of.

Version 1.4 brings a much needed redesign of the admin area, as well as numerous performance and stability tweaks.

As I mentioned before, no-one wants a static site anymore; I believe CMS Made Simple offers the simplest content management solution today.

Why do I love it?

• Any type of layout achievable with CSS is achievable with CMS Made Simple
• Completely table-less setup. (Assuming that’s what you want)
• Focus on accessibility; more so than most other CMS’
• Fine control over what administrators can and can’t do
• Easiest admin area imaginable

But what I really love about it is the speed at which users pick up the knowledge they need to run their site. Most training sessions for CMS Made Simple run at about 30-45 minutes, and not one person has had to come back for further training.

By contrast, I’ve seen training sessions for other CMS’ run into several hours, with repeat sessions required before they decide to delegate it to someone else anyway!

Having said all that, it isn’t perfect for every site; some of the extensions are of…dubious quality, so if a forum, e-commerce, or front-end login facility is required, I would go with another solution.

Having to edit the template in the browser window is also an annoyance, and I don’t favour the smarty templating system, but for small-medium formerly static sites, it can’t be beaten.

So please, check it out and spread the word!

I’ve received a surprising number of questions and comments from users regarding my Easy Ad Banner component and module for Joomla.

One user asked whether he should be using the module or component to display his banners – good question! For the banner system I’ve developed, the module will display one random banner on each page load. (And will look at the date to pull a current one.) The component will load every valid banner onto the page, in a random order.

A component typically puts content in the main body of the page. You’ll create a link from the menu to the component, and the contents of this component will appear when you click the menu. In our case, the component also creates the admin interface, so you will always need to use the component.

A module, on the other hand, typically sits on every page (although you can choose what pages it will appear on.) While components appear in the main body of the page, modules will typically sit in the sidebar, the header, or the footer of the page. You can’t create a menu link to a module, the way you could with a component.

So you have the following decision to make:

1) “I want the advert(s) to appear in the main body of the page and possibly create a menu link to it.”

You should download only the component. Once it is installed, sign in to the admin area, and go to Components->Advertising. Add new banner(s) as appropriate. Once that’s done, create a menu item in the usual way. The type of link should be ‘advertising->default layout’. Save your menu item, and you should now be able to see the page.

2) “I want the banner to appear on every page, or in an area of the page that is NOT the main content area.”

Follow the steps above, but don’t create a menu item. Install the module. Go to Extensions->module manager, then click on the cross next to ‘random banners’ to enable it. Click on the words ‘Random Banners’ to edit the settings of the module. From here, you can change some of the settings – which pages the module appears in, the module position (left, right, top etc) the CSS class, the title of the module, and more. As long as you’ve activated it, the module should appear in the desired position.

Hopefully this basic information will help some of you out a little bit. You can download the module and component here.

I’ve written a companion module for my Joomla advertising component.

This module loads a random banner from a user-supplied list, based on dates supplied by the user. It accepts both flash files (.swf) and images.

You’ll also need to download the component to use this module.

Go to the downloads page here!