ExploreWeb2

PrestaShop - is professional-grade e-Commerce shopping cart software that you can download, install, and use for free! Using PrestaShop, your online store is just few clicks away.

To use Prestashop, just

• Download PrestaShop free of charge, with no registration required.
• Install PrestaShop quickly and easily (less than 2 MB). (See system requirements.)
• Add functionnality by adding options (“modules”) of your choice.
• Choose your Website’s graphical theme and enter your products into your PrestaShop database.
• Take your Internet business online!

Open Flash Chart, is open source. It is free to use and you get the source code to fiddle with!
When the user downloads the web page, Open Flash Chart requests the chart data from the server. The server knows who the user is so it can generate a chart for that particular user showing up to the minute data.

Using Open Flash Chart is easy and simple.

• User browses to your web site.
• The browser downloads the web page which contains the Open Flash Chart.
• Open Flash Chart downloads the data file and displays the chart.

You will need to include the Open Flash Chart in your HTML, and you also need to provide the data file on the server. The data file is either a text file, or a PHP, Perl, Python, Java, Ruby on Rails (or another flavour of dynamic) page.

Many of us developers follow this basic process while developing either a blog design or CMS using WordPress and I’ve put the average time spent on each job according to my experience.

• Do the designing using software like Photoshop, Illustrator (Time spent: 30%)
• Slice it and do the XHMTL/CSS coding. Some start with existing free clean and simple WP Themes while some do it from scratch. Fight with XHTML/CSS to make it W3C valid and cross-browser compliant (Time spent: 50%)
• Integrate it with WordPress themes (Time spent: 20%)

If we notice the time spent on the above 3 steps, maximum time is spent while doing the slicing and XHTML/CSS coding. More time will be spent if the web site has sub-pages with different layouts.

The maximum time consumed, while developing a site using WordPress following the above process, can be drastically cut down if we get the pre-coded XHTML/CSS.

So here comes the rescue, its WP-Remix. It is a WordPress theme bundled with various homepage layouts and sub-pages with the following features.

• 5 homepage options
• Multiple page templates
• 10 different sub-pages options
• 2 Event listing page
• FAQs template
• many more…

So if you’re a WordPress developer, its worth to give a try with WP-Remix.

And as a bonus, WordPress Premium is an elegantly designed, 2/3 column, feature packed, widget ready theme that comes with three color-scheme options which is free to download.

This post is published to enter the competition held by WP-Remix to get a free personal license copy.

NicEdit is a Javascript/AJAX inline content editor to allow easy editing of web site content on the fly in the browser. It integrates into any site in seconds to make any element/div editable or convert standard textareas to rich text editing.

Features:

• Small file size <35KB Total, <10KB Compressed!
• Only 2 files (js + icons) required for operation
• Flexible Configuration
• Multiple editors can optionally use single controls
• Save content via AJAX or HTTP Post
• Compatible with IE 5.5+ / FF 2+ / Opera 9+ / Safari 3+

When I started out in this web world, I started with programming. I did both programming and scripting languages. I didn’t know about the web designing world. But today I design and develop websites using Photoshop CS3, Dreamweaver CS3 and open source CMS like Wordpress, Joomla, CMS Made Simple.Here I would like to share how do I design clean and simple websites coz I believe in the saying that goes “Beauty lies in simplicity”.

I’m not a Photoshop geek either. Before designing any websites, I hunt and collect inspirations and designing objects. I have subscribed for CSSMania’s RSS feed which gives me enough new websites for inspiration. I often visit Kuler and ColourLovers for color inspiration. And for effects, abstracts and objects to put in the design, I simply prefer Photoshop brushes, layer styles and gradients. Using these brushes, layer styles and gradients ain’t that hard.

These are some that I designed using the afore-mentioned three elements of Photoshop within 4 hours and 0.5 hour respectively.

Resource information is already there in the zillions vase of world wide web. But what does make difference is finding the right and effective one. So to make your life easier, here are some resource links from where I download my designing weapons often.

• Web2 Gradients, Layer Styles
• Brushes (Deviant Art, Bittbox and Brusheezy)

Here is a brief process how to design clean and simple web2.0 website in photoshop.

1. Create a blank canvas
2. Make an outline for header and footer using Marquee tool and fill it up with the gradient either using the downloaded web2 gradients or with your own choice of color via swatches
3. Write a name of your website using the Type tool. Use the smashing free fonts. To give it a logo look, apply some web2 layer styles over it
4. Create your navigation menu keeping the consistency of the design
5. Splash up some relevant brushes over your design to give a cool and modern look
6. Decorate your body and sidebar (if you’ve) with Loreum Ipsum texts
7. Give your design some more professional look using free images
8. Your clean and simple website design is ready

Hope this will help some beginner designers to boost up their design skills.

In the next post I’ll give a PSD design file designed using the above simple checklist and a Wordpress theme based on the same design.

So, stay tuned or subscribe to ExploreWeb2 feed not to miss it.

Datejs is an open-source JavaScript Date Library.

Comprehensive, yet simple, stealthy and fast. Datejs has passed all trials and is ready to strike. Datejs doesn’t just parse strings, it slices them cleanly in two.

Datejs is released under the MIT License and available for download at GoogleCode.

Using Datejs is so easy:
Just include following javascript link in the head part of your html file.
<script type=”text/javascript” src=”date.js“></script>
and write down the code:
// What date is next thrusday?
Date.today().next().thursday()

// Add 3 days to Today
Date.today().add(3).days()

Ain’t it easy!

I’m back after my vacation of Dashain. This ain’t the first article about installing Apache under Windows. But I’ve put it here to ease the life of beginner developers. Without further ado, lets delve in.

Step 0
Installed OS is Windows XP.
The server package that we’re installing is WAMP5 1.7.0

Step 1
Download WAMP5 1.7.0 and Install it. (Note: If you already have installed older versions or other package like EasyPHP, then remember to backup your files first.)
I installed the WAMP5 in my D:\Server directory. So, the following tutorial will assume this as the main Server folder.
To test whether the server is installed properly, just type localhost in your browser’s window.
If the list of folder is shown, then server is working.

Step 2
Many of you might know that if we type localhost in the browser’s address bar, the list of the server root is listed. In this case, the folders of the directory D:/Server/www (Here, the folder D:/Server/www is our web-root folder.)
If you open the file named “hosts” at C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc in plain text editor like notepad or notepad++, you’ll notice the following line

127.0.0.1 localhost
Actually this line instructs the server to parse localhost to IP 127.0.0.1 (which is a local and free ip).
Just copy the line and paste it below like

127.0.0.1 localhost
127.0.0.1 www.mysite.sac
and save it.

Now you might be thinking that where is the settings defined to list the contents of web-root folder (in this case D:/Server/www) when we type localhost in the browser?
Well, this is defined in the file D:\Server\Apache2\conf\extra\httpd-vhosts.conf
Notice the block,
<VirtualHost *:80>
DocumentRoot E:/Server/www
ServerName localhost
</VirtualHost>
I’ll explain this in the following steps.

Step 3
Open up the configuration file of the Apache web server located at D:\Server\Apache2\conf\httpd.conf
Find the line: Include conf/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf
At the begining of this line, there might be a # symbol. Just delete that # symbol and save the httpd.conf file. (# stands for comment, so we’re just commenting out that line). If there ain’t any #, then just do nothing to this file.

Step 4
Open up the file E:\Server\Apache2\conf\extra\httpd-vhosts.conf
Find the line: NameVirtualHost *:80
Same as Step 3, just delete (uncomment) the # symbol at the begining of line.
Copy the block
<VirtualHost *:80>
DocumentRoot E:/Server/www
ServerName localhost
</VirtualHost>
and paste it below that block and change the values
<VirtualHost *:80>
DocumentRoot D:/Server/www/mysite
ServerName www.mysite.sac
</VirtualHost>
Create a folder named “mysite” at Web root (i.e. D:/Server/www in this case) and put some files there.
Save this file.

This block is called Virtual Host Directive.
The DocumentRoot defines the root folder for the ServerName (here, www.mysite.sac)
You can put any name and extension to it. I’ve used .sac
Just remember to match the exact ServerName defined in the VirtualHost directive and in hosts file at C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc

Step 5
Restart your WAMP Apache Server and type www.mysite.sac in the address bar of your browser.
If you see the contents of the folder “mysite”, then the installation is successful and its working. Enjoy! developing your projects with the feel of online development in an optimized approach.

Its known to all that web analytics has changed drastically since the launch of free Google Analytics. Here comes another player Clicky in this field.

Following are some of the features.

• Customize your dashboard so you only see the data that you want to see. Popular data can also be viewed as a “Tag Cloud”, for a fully certified Web 2.0 experience.
• Clicky gives you unprecedented detail on every visitor to your web site. Keep track of who’s who by naming them manually (by IP address), or automatically from your web site’s account data.
• Real time data, API access, RSS feeds, Spy, Outbound link tracking, Data export, Google Maps, SSL support.

So, its worth to give Clicky a click.

DealDotCom has just open to public today on Sept 18th.

DealDotCom.com is the place on the web to find all the Internet Marketing products you really want for rock bottom prices. We sell products and services that help save you time and money when it comes to running your online business.

They sell anything and everything related to building an online business, increasing traffic, monetizing your websites, blogging, web design.. They’ve spent the last 4 months stalking big-name (and not-so-big-name) Internet Marketers who sell high-quality products, and convincing them to let us sell their stuff at huge discounts on DealDotCom.

Every day, they only have ONE product for sale. It’ll be for sale at an insanely low price, and there will be an extremely limited number of copies available. That product will only be available until it sells out, or until midnight the next night, when we pull it down and start selling a new product.

2-tier lifetime affiliate commission
When you refer others to DealDotCom and they get their free account, they are marked in their system as having been referred by you. Anything that they ever buy from them nets you a 35% commission FOREVER. What’s more, anyone that they refer to DealDotCom goes on your second tier. Anything people on your second tier buy nets you a 15% commission FOREVER.

Stripemania creates stripes in seconds. Web2 Stripes can now be made easily.

Besides, it has also a few tutorials dealing with Stripes (patterns) and Photoshop.