Product Review: Artisteer / Wordpress Theme Generator
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I have been using Artisteer’s Theme Generation software for a few weeks now and I have to say that I have been very pleased with it so far. I use the WYSIWYG theme generator as a way to layout or brainstorm themes for client projects. This is sometimes a lot faster than customizing an open-sourced theme or purchasing a premium theme to use as a starter layout.
With Artisteers software you can also generate themes for Drupal and Joomla as well as Wordpress. This is pretty nice if you want to keep a consistent look and feel across multiple installations. One of the things I like most about the code that Artisteer generates is that it’s pretty user friendly, and you can easily tweak the stylesheet settings using third party applications like Topstyle. The php files generated by Artisteer are also pretty easy to get around in as well, I typically make a few rounds of modifications to both my header and footer files once I have generated my theme, and have never had any issues.
I know of a few other developers who have downloaded and been trying the Artisteer application since I first blogged about it a while back, and I have heard nothing but rave reviews from them in regards to the software as well. If you are using Artisteer, I would love to hear your comments as well. For more information or to purchase Artisteer software, click the link above…
Artisteer: Wordpress Theme Generator
I have been playing around with a software program called Artisteer for a month or so now and it’s starting to grow on me. With Artisteer you can develop your very own Wordpress Theme using the WYSIWYG wizard / editor and export it out in just a fraction of the time it would take to customize a community theme or hand-code your own.
Artisteer also allows you to export your theme for use in other popular content managements solutions like Joomla and Drupal, or you can select HTML w/ stylesheet and the software takes care of the rest. There is also a feature to export directly out to HTML w/ an attached stylesheet, this can come in handy if you are trying to matchup a layout. Here’s the best part of the software though, the WYSIWYG editor, or Wizard, is extremely easy to get around in, and it pretty much lets you control every aspect of the design process.
If you are looking for a tool that will save you some time while working with Wordpress, I strongly recommend taking a look at Artisteer.
PHPR / Smarty templates
Smarty Templates have been around for a while now and are pretty popular with developers. One of the things that I really like about PHPR (PHPRUNNER) is that it utilizes Smarty Templates and stores them in a directory called <templates> inside of whatever application you are working in. Let’s say we are working on a list page, with Smarty in use there are actually two separate files in play, one file will be called list.php and it will look something like this:
1: include('Smarty.class.php');
2:
3: // create object
4: $smarty = new Smarty;
5:
6: // assign some content. This would typically come from
7: // a database or other source, but we'll use static
8: // values for the purpose of this example.
9: $smarty->assign('name', 'george smith');
10: $smarty->assign('address', '45th & Harris');
11:
12: // display it
13: $smarty->display('list.htm');
As you can see, the list.php page just contains your actual PHP Code itself. The second file in this equation is located inside of the <templates> directory and is called list.htm. It contains the html and css values for the page:
1: <html>
2: <head>
3: <title>User Info</title>
4: </head>
5: <body>
6:
7: User Information:<p>
8:
9: Name: {$name}<br>
10: Address: {$address}<br>
11:
12: </body>
13: </html>
PHPRunner manual – Smarty templates
Web-Based Rich Text Editors
I have been trying to figure out how to allow RTE to add images and store them locally (in a writeable web folder) on an application that I put together for a client a while back. While out looking for information I went to PHPR’s Help Section and found this basic information on the 3 text editors that will plug into PHPR (phprunner) as of right now.
Basic Rich Text Editor
This editor support is builtin into PHPRunner. Nothing to download or configure. Just select it from the list of available Rich Text Editors. This editor is lightweight and footprint is very small. Documentation, support forum and examples are available at http://www.kevinroth.com/rte/FCKEditor
Proceed to http://www.fckeditor.net and download the latest version of FCKEditor. Create a folder named FCKEditor under C:\Program files\PHPRunner3.1\source\plugins
(C:\Program files\PHPRunner3.1\source\plugins\FCKEditor). Unzip FCKEditor files to this folder. After that FCKEditor will be available for selection on Textarea dialog.
FCKEditor adds 400+ files to the generated application, footprint is about 2.5Mb.
FCKEditor documentation is available on the Web at http://wiki.fckeditor.netInnovaStudio Editor
Download Innova Editor from our website http://www.asprunner.com/files/innovaeditor.zip. Create a folder named InnovaEditor under C:\Program files\PHPRunner3.1\source\plugins
(C:\Program files\PHPRunner3.1\source\plugins\InnovaEditor). Unzip Innova Editor files to this folder. After that InnovaEditor will be available for selection on Textarea dialog.
InnovaEditor adds about 1000 files to the generated application, footprint is about 3.5Mb.
FCKEditor documentation and examples can be found in documentation folder.
I am using the RTE editor on this project currently, its the smallest footprint and comes loaded by default in my IDE. I am going to attempt today to load FCKEditor and see if I can make it do what I want it to do.
Alternative to FCKeditor / Rich Text Editor…
I have been playing around with the idea of creating a php / mysql content management system in php runner the past few days and have a workable solution in place just not really comfortable with the FCKeditor or the basic Rich Text Editor that is bundled with PHPR so I have been looking into a standards based editor that my partner Greg turned me onto, Wymeditor, if you get a chance check this thing out. I have played with it a little bit but have been unable to get it to work into my solution so far. I posted a message on PHPR’s forum tonight, hopefully someone in the community will offer up a solution that might work: Link to Alternative to FCKeditor / Rich Text Editor… – Forums
I am looking at an alternative for the FCKeditor / Rich Text Editor in an app that I am working on and ran across a really cool XHTML editor called Wymeditor, you can kind of get an idea as to what it looks like here: http://www.cottonrohrscheib.com/projects/p…/03-plugin.html. Does anyone have any experience working with or integrating this inside of phpr? If not, any suggestions as to where I might start looking to integrate it?
I haven’t spent a lot of time messing with this yet but plan on doing so the next few days, if I run across a method for doing this I will post it back here. This editor is pretty slick in terms of what it will allow your “end users” to do. Here is some more info on the editor: http://www.wymeditor.org/en/
