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Pleth Launches UACCB Redesign

September 20, 2008 By Leave a Comment

My partners and I couldn’t be happier about the recent launch of the newly redesigned website for the University of Arkansas Community College at Batesville.  UACCB approached us a while back to develop a redesign for their existing website and they had a pretty clear direction that they wanted to take the website. 

My partner Greg took the lead on this project and did an awesome job!  He worked closely with UACCB’s newly formed website committee to hammer out the mechanics of the website and with some of our strategic partners who assisted with project management and to content development.  Select Shots, a Batesville area photography studio provided photography for the project.  To preview the website, please visit http://www.uaccb.edu or click on the screenshot below.

Please note that we will post a formal press release for the media and on our corporate website in the very near future.

University of Arkansas Community College at Batesville | Home

Filed Under: Current Projects, MODx CMS, Press Releases, Web Development Tagged With: , ,

Twitter + RSS + MODx

September 12, 2008 By Leave a Comment

My business partner Stephen and I have been encouraging our other partner Greg to branch out and try some of the popular social networking tools that are out there today like Twitter and he has offered up tons of resistance, it’s been almost comical.

I knew that we almost had him teetering on the edge of giving in the other day when we were discussing some potential Twitter integration advantages for a few of our existing clients. The ideas just kept coming to us as we were having lunch. Well, with that being said, I was shocked to read Greg’s latest blog entry tonight about a Twitter / RSS / MODx mashup he’s been playing with, especially his admission to Stephen and I:

YOU WERE RIGHT.

Source: Coming Around: Twitter, RSS & MODx | Greg Smart

Filed Under: MODx CMS, Social Media / Web 2.0 Tagged With: , ,

MODx CMS Groups…

August 21, 2008 By Leave a Comment

I have started seeing a lot of MODx Groups starting to form on various social networks out there.  Jay Gilmore, a developer from Canada, has been making his rounds getting the word out about MODx and setting up these user groups, he’s doing an excellent job!  Today alone I have seen MODx groups forming on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Plaxo Pulse. 

If you aren’t familiar with MODx, it’s an open source PHP Application Framework that helps you take control of your online content. It empowers developers and advanced users to give as much control as desired to whomever they desire for day-to-day website content maintenance chores.  I have blogged about MODx a few times on here and a lot more information can be found on my partner Greg’s blog about MODx and our experiences with it.

It’s great to see these communities starting to form across the social landscape because with open-source software, the one way to insure that it’s going to grow and thrive is for it to have a large community of supporters backing it’s development and overall direction…

Filed Under: MODx CMS Tagged With: ,

MODx | Kalender Enhanced | 0.1

April 22, 2008 By Leave a Comment

My partner Greg and I have been playing around in our MODx sandbox installation this morning with Kalender Enhanced, a calendar plugin for MODx.  We looked at like 2 different installations of other Calendar systems and came to the conclusion that this is our favorite.  The only drawbacks I had really with this one on the front end without digging around is how the end user is going to interact with the calendar.  Calendar entries have two “tv’s” start date and end date.  On the first go around I totally missed how this worked and couldn’t figure out why my entries weren’t showing up.  The other drawback I had was initially I couldn’t figure out where to drop the entries until I figured out the folder thing below the text editor.  These are two very minor things that I am pretty sure I can get my mind around and we can simplify for our client.

Here’s a little information about the Kalendar Plugin from the MODx Repository:

As the title implies, I took the fantastic Kalender snippet by Danny van Ommen and Wim Beerens and did quite a bit of enhancement. The calendar now displays in a wide format (870px; can be changed), with large cells for each day of the month. Events that take place on each day are listed in summary form. Floating your mouse over each event brings up a more detailed summary. Each event links to the corresponding document that represents that event.

The original Kalendar used the pub_date and unpub_date to mark the date and time of each event. This is problematic, however, if you want to view the actual event page before or after the event has taken place, because MODx will force the document to be unpublished. Kalendar Enhanced uses two custom TVs, ‘StartTime’ and ‘EndTime’. This way, you can mark your event time without effecting its published status, allow the links in the calendar to lead to active pages.
Works very much like Easy PHP Calendar’s “Text on Calendar” mode. Very powerful for simple scheduling.

There is currently an active instance of this snippet running on my photography site that you can view as a demo. There isn’t a whole lot on it right now, but if you jump around to the different months, especially December 2007, you’ll see at least one event December 1st. :)

MODx Content Management System | Kalender Enhanced | 0.1

Filed Under: MODx CMS Tagged With: ,

MODx Overview (phpBB Weekly #023)

April 19, 2008 By Leave a Comment

I decided to tune into PHPBB Weekly’s Podcast this morning, not that we have a lot of clients running PHPBB but they occasionally discuss other things that are out there as well.  In this episode #023 they discuss MODx, it’s history, advantages, disadvantages, resources, etc.  It’s a pretty good bit of information so I figured I would add it here since I am digging into MODx Framework pretty heavy these days along w/ my partner Greg.

(If you decide to listen to the podcast, they start talking about MODx at around 00:09:20.)

Source: phpBB Weekly » phpBB Weekly #023

Filed Under: MODx CMS Tagged With:

MODx Framework Advantages

April 14, 2008 By 1 Comment

As some of you might already know, my partner Greg and I have been playing around with a sandbox installation of MODx PHP Framework and I have to admit I am pretty impressed.  It’s a very open-ended framework that allows for a lot of scalability and ease of management. 

MODx is a highly robust “open source” PHP application framework that enables website owners and editors to fully manage their website or extranet content in a centralised environment. It is used by organisations all of sizes across a wide variety of sectors.

From a business perspective, MODx offers total control and ownership over website content whilst minimizing business risk as it adopts standards-based technology commonly found among PHP developers. Most importantly, being open source implies that it doesn’t incur any license cost to clients and is therefore the most obvious alternative to purchasing costly content management systems.

From a developer perspective, it offers the ability to control the website functionality as desired in a flexible web 2.0 based environment and has thus gained much accolade among development teams and technical project managers and producers. As a result of its success, MODx has inherited a strong global developer network constantly producing updates and additional features.

Here are a few of the advantages to using MODx from a site owner or IT manager’s perspective:

  • Search engine friendly; URLs produced are keyword based to encourage better indexing
  • Take full control over content; add/edit/delete new sections, pages, images, documents and links
  • Manage and update your content from any location using Internet Explorer, Firefox or Safari
  • Permissions can be set enabling limited access to different editors within your organization
  • Website navigation is generated dynamically when new sections or pages are added
  • Choose different pre-defined templates according to the type of content to be added
  • Editors can set automatic publish or unpublish dates on a per page basis
  • Upgrades and new releases available free of charge
  • Administrators can easily edit meta tags on a per-page basis, for better search engine optimization
  • Ability to include an extranet or member’s only area
  • Ability for users to sign up to extranet or member’s only using self-registration
  • No limit to the number of pages or sections editors can add (design permitting)
  • Robust access control via user/group permissions, days of week and/or IP address
  • Multiple language support (both for editors and website visitors)
  • In-built search engine
  • Edit rich media content using easy-to-use WYSYWG editors
  • Easily track editor logins and behavior for auditing purposes
  • Large number of continually updated Plugins available – license free!

As a web developer, these advantages are very significant:

  • Strong Web Standards Support: easy to build strict XHTML websites
  • The first open source content management system to offer an API that fully supports Web 2.0 Ajax technology
  • A flexible API and event model that allows to override how the core behaves; means excellent flexibility and the ability to customize the solution to your needs
  • Simple upgrade path thanks to the flexible API and event model
  • Graphical step-by-step installer for less experienced developers
  • Export website as static HTML; or import an entire HTML website in the database
  • Separate manager and web user sessions; simplify your testing and development workflow
  • Improved document parser and error handling; build better custom applications with a more robust API, greatly improved error handling and reporting inside the manager
  • Custom Content Types; use MODx documents to manage your linked style sheets, images and JavaScript. Transform them into XML, PDF, Excel or Word documents with “snippets”
  • Advanced backup facility
Filed Under: MODx CMS, Web Development Tagged With:

MODx Framework | Calendar Solutions

April 14, 2008 By Leave a Comment

I headed up to Batesville this week to meet w/ a new client who also happens to be a College / University.  We (Pleth)were recently awarded the bid for their project.  This project basically consists of completely re-building their web presence from the ground up.  In preparation for our meeting Greg and I (mostly Greg) have been getting our minds around the MODx PHP framework, we know for sure that this is the framework we are going to be using for the project, it’s just that impressive. 

We are in the early stages of the project right now, our Graphic Artist is providing mockups right now for the committee to approve and sign off on but in the meantime Greg and I spent some time sitting at our board table going over the finer points of the MODx PHP Framework on the big screen and putting our heads together on a few of the other components we are going to need for this project.

Since MODx is somewhat “modular” in it’s architecture we know that we are going to be able to utilize a pretty vast library of options including snippets and chunks contributed by the open source community.  One topic we were discussing was an online calendar system for the project. 

I have spent a little time and researched the MODx Resource lIbrary, we are likely to plug each of these options into our sandbox environment and figure out which one we are the most comfortable with:

  • Event Calendar contributed by Dazze
  • Kalendar contributed by Deevio (inspired by phpevent calendar os)
  • Kalendar Enhanced by Joey Livingston (example of calendar in use)
  • Easy Events contributed by Honeydew Design

Another option that Greg and I discussed today on the phone was the possibility of integrating an already existing “Google Calendar” into the MODx framework, and wouldn’t you know it, there’s an alternative for doing this as well.  Google has went out of their way to make Google Tools such as Google Docs, Google Base, Gmail, etc., available to Universities and Educational Institutions.  This could be an option for this project…

Just wanted to post these notes regarding the Calendar Solution for this project so that I can refer back to them and update them as we move forward on this project.  For additional information about the MODx framework also visit Greg’s blog, he is also adding his notes for this project as we continue to get familiar with MODx.

Filed Under: MODx CMS, Web Development Tagged With: ,

SEO, URL’s, and Modx | Greg Smart

March 18, 2008 By 5 Comments

My partner Greg posted an entry on his blog the other day talking about SEO friendly URL’s and how MODx works to help you have an extremely search engine friendly website using .htaccess.  This is just one of the many upsides to using MODx PHP Framework, there are quite a few others that I am sure he and I will go into as we explore this framework a little deeper, here’s his post:

After looking over the SEOmoz article 11 Best Practices for URL’s I began thinking it might be beneficial to record my recent experiences with Modx. Particularly as it related to quick and easy creation of SEO friendly URL’s.

By utilizing the .htaccess file packaged with Modx to harness the power of Apache’s mod_rewrite engine, URL naming flexibility is within reach in minutes. All you have to do is uncomment the appropriate lines in the .htaccess file and upload it to the root directory of your install. The rest is just a matter of a few simple configuration tweaks inside of the CMS control panel.

Go to Tools->Configuration->Friendly URL’s and choose ‘Yes’. Also don’t forget to choose your appropriate suffix (.htm, .html, .php, etc.) that will be applied to all URL’s generated by the CMS.

Next within the document editor of any page within your site type the URL name within the ‘Document Alias’ field. This will be applied, along with the suffix, as the URL name.

That’s it, it’s that easy to create well formed, SEO friendly URL’s within a dynamic content management system. As I have been learning the ins and outs of Modx over the past few weeks I have found it is one of the more versatile tools I have come across as a developer. It is not a CMS for everyman due to it’s relative complexity, but it is just what the doctor ordered for a commercial developer in desperate need of a robust CMS system.

SEO, URL’s, and Modx | Greg Smart

Filed Under: MODx CMS, Web Development Tagged With: ,

MODx PHP Application Framework.

March 18, 2008 By Leave a Comment

I am a visual learner so whenever I have a new technology that I want to get up to speed on I usually turn to YouTube.  YouTube is not only the best place on the web to find off the wall videos of folks blowing things up in their backyards, it’s also a great resource for boring training videos!  I have used it quite extensively to get up to speed on various aspects of PHP and MYSQL programming in the past.  Since my partner Greg and I are digging into the MODx CMS pretty heavy I figured I would get on YouTube and see what’s out there, I was surprised, there’s quite a bit of stuff available, here’s a sampler:

If you are wanting to see all that YouTube has for MODx, click here…

Filed Under: MODx CMS Tagged With: , ,

MODx Content Management System

March 18, 2008 By Leave a Comment

My partner Greg Smart and I have been evaluating the MODx CMS on a couple of our clients websites. So far we have really liked the framework. Greg has spent a considerable amount of time working with it, a lot more than I have but I plan on getting into it a little more this week. I am creating a category on my blog to discuss my findings related to MODx. If you have used MODx before or are curious about it, please don’t hesitate to jump in on the dialog with us…

MODx Content Management System | Home

Filed Under: MODx CMS Tagged With: ,
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