I have made a tentative decision to go into the domain name business! I found this great domain websitetheme.com and its available for sale. The great thing about this domain is that it includes two keywords "website" and "theme" related to website design and development. It is also a short and easy to remember dot com. This domain is an excellent address for a website design house or a website themes dealer. If you are interested in purchasing this domain just make an offer through the contact form. Please note that the minimum offer is US$150.00.
Website Development
Simple website navigation with PHP
A good website is easy to navigate from one page to the next and an easy to navigate
website will make the following clear to the user:
- Which page he is currently viewing, i.e. where he currently “is” in your
website - What pages he can view
Furthermore, you want to be able to save time and effort in
coding your website while also ensuring that your site can be easily modified and updated.This is
an ideal situation in which to use PHP server side scripting to dynamically generate the links.
In this post I present code that will generate links grouped under different sub-headings. It will apply a special style to the navigation bar entry for the page that the user is currently viewing.
Shiny Plastic serendipity theme
This is my second theme for the serendipity blog engine. Its got a shiny banner graphic and comes in three colours.
Changing colours
Changing theme options in s9y1.1
By default the theme is in blue but you can change it to red or green as well. The first step is to enable smarty templating for the categories plugin using the "configure plugins" option in serendipity administration. If you don’t do this the xml feed icon for categories will not appear correctly. If you have s9y 1.1 you can easily change the theme’s colours using the "manage styles" option in the administrator interface. A few other options are also available for users of this version of s9y.
Update 30 July : I have fixed a number of bugs in the latest release of this theme including entry preview in firefox and other modern browsers.
You can download the theme here.
Adding Hijri date to serendipity entries
The other day I came across this website that was promoting a wordpress plugin that displays the hijri date in blog entries. I thought this was a fantastic idea and I should try and implement this on my site. As a Muslim I think I ought use the hijri calendar system. I also thought it would be easy to implement this given the wide choice of open source software available on the net. I didn’t think I could program the actual gregorian to hijri conversion myself. I just wanted a php script that I could modify. Unfortunately the code provided on that site was not upto the mark. It kept outputting incorrect dates. And despite my initial optimism it took lots and lots of googling before I came across a useable script. In this post I describe how I modified this script and integrated it with serendipity to achieve the effect you see above (at least at the time of writing). I also provide links to the neccessary code so you can implement this same effect on your blog! Continue reading
MODx CMS
I have been exploring a new open source content management system called MODx. Its designed to be extremely flexible. It is aimed at developers who like to their hands dirty. Its admin interface is based on AJAX so that even though it looks as good as joomla its actually a lot faster.
While other CMSs provide limited support for modification MODx embraces cutomisation. You can specify your own CSS, insert your own HTML code and your own PHP and javascript snippets. You can then insert MODx tags in the appropriate places to add content to the HTML files.
I tried it out at opensource CMS and I think it is probably the most flexible CMS I have tried yet. Because it is so developer oriented the learning curve can be a bit steep. And of course, you must really have a need for such low level control of your website. MODx also does not seem to support any sort of remote posting API such as blogger.
From a purely development point of view I think this CMS stands out from the crowd.