AMT Blog

Get Unique Themes for Every Blog Posts with Anchor CMS

Anchor CMS is an open source content management system, written in PHP5, built for art-directed posts. It is extensible, simple and free. There is a powerful, yet simple theming engine behind Anchor, just waiting to give your posts that unique touch.

Since the beginning, Anchor has been written and maintained by an amazing community of web designers and developers, all working to produce a great product, for free. Anchor features a simple, uncluttered admin interface, so you can be writing blog posts with no distractions.

Anchor CMS is available on GitHub under a WTFPL License, and requires PHP 5.3+ and a MySQL database.

Read more…

Like what we post? Share your thoughts on the comments below. If you wish to get regular updates on what we post, do subscribe to our RSS Feed.

Mezzanine is a simple yet powerful content management platform built using the Django framework. It is available free under a BSD licensed and is designed to provide users with a consistent interface for managing content, and also a simple, extensible architecture that makes diving in and hacking on the code as easy as possible.

Mezzanine reminds you of tools like Wordpress, with an intuitive interface for managing pages, blog posts, form data, store products, or any other type of content you can imagine. Mezzanine takes a different approach from other Django applications in this space like Pinax or Mingus that glue together many reusable apps, instead opting to provide most of its functionality included with the project by default. 

Above all the usual features offered by Django such as MVC architecture, ORM, templating, caching and the automatic admin interface, Mezzanine provides the following features:

• Hierarchical page navigation
• Save as draft and preview on site
• Scheduled publishing
• Drag-n-drop page ordering
• WYSIWYG editing
• In-line page editing
• Drag-n-drop HTML5 forms builder with CSV export
• Custom templates per page or blog post
• Twitter Bootstrap integration
• API for custom content types
• SEO friendly URLs and meta data
• Search engine and API
• Configurable dashboard widgets
• Multi-device detection and template handling
• Shopping cart module (Cartridge)
• Blogging engine
• Tagging
• One step migration from other blogging engines
• Disqus integration or built-in threaded comments
• Gravatar integration
• Google Analytics integration
• Twitter feed integration
• bit.ly integration
• Sharing via Facebook or Twitter
• Built-in test suite

Read more…

Like what we post? Share your thoughts on the comments below. If you wish to get regular updates on what we post, do subscribe to our RSS Feed

Ice is a free, but really useful track changes implementation engine, built in javascript, for anything that is contenteditable on the web. It was conceived & developed by the CMS Group at The New York Times and has been piloting successfully for articles written in their newsroom, since then.

Features of Ice

• Track multi-user inserts and deletes with the option to turn on and off tracking or highlighting.
• A robust API to accept and reject changes, gets clean content, and adds a lot of configuration.
• Plugins for tinymce and wordpress.
• Optional plugins to track copy-cut-pasting, convert smart quotes, and create em-dashes.

Do Check out the Demo here. 

Ice is available on GitHub with a GPL License.

Read more…

Like what we post? Share your thoughts on the comments below. If you wish to get regular updates on what we post, do subscribe to our RSS Feed.

Reverie is a versatile HTML5 theme framework for WordPress from theme developers from ThemeFortress that is based on the ZURB Foundation.

Reverie is not like some other frameworks that are packed full of user friendly features. That is to say, there is no options page for non-technical WordPress users to change things around easily. Consider Reverie as a blank canvas for creating your own unique theme. It’s very well coded and is optimised for search engines too.

The default design is minimal yet has everything you need with a menu area at the top and bottom of the page and widget areas in the sidebar and footer. It includes an archives template, full width template and a custom page template that you can use as a base for creating your own page templates.

The framework was designed to work with the new bbPress 2.0 WordPress plugin. bbPress integration is still actually pretty rare. I had predicted months ago that most designers would be making their themes bbPress friendly but it doesn’t seemed to have happened yet; therefore I’m sure this framework will prove popular with those who are looking for a good theme that works with bbPress out of the box.

Reverie is a good framework for those who are looking for a blank canvas to create a unique design for their website. Even beginners should be able to change colours, fonts and layouts as the code is well documented. Those of you who are looking for a user friendly drag and drop framework though should look elsewhere.

Read more…

MailChimp is a popular email marketing platform with excellent stats & analytics.

MailChimp.com offers free email marketing services to companies and businesses. Offers simple and easy-to-use tools for sending out emails to potential clients. Its List Manager helps you build and manage huge lists of emails in a simple and hassle-free manner. You can also design and track email campaigns using MailChimp's tools.

AMT recently has developed a plugin to integrate MailChimp with your sites done with CMS like Contao, Wordpress, CRM systems, Custom build CRM/CMS systems etc. The plugin automatically add new users to your email lists and import all your existing users. This is an efficient way to connect between your CRM/CMS systems to an excellent newsletter service. You can ensure that you are always in touch with the leads which you have generated. For more information, contact us at: www.amt.in

PHP

10 PEAR Packages for Every PHP Developer's Toolbox

An interesting article written by Jason Gilmore on PHP Extension and Application Repository, better known as PEAR, and in this article he tries to shine the spotlight just a bit brighter on this fantastic community resource by highlighting 10 useful PEAR libraries (better known as packages) that has become an indispensable part of his programming toolkit.

PHP as a data source for Flex applications

If you have a RIA as the user interface the server no longer needs to mix the data with the visuals. This means PHP coders no longer need to worry about styling data, surrounding the information with tables, divs and tons of other tags. The only thing they need to do is send the data back in some usable format, and luckily XML is supported by Flex. Let's take a look at some code needed to start communicating Flex with PHP...

Web Design

Create an Elegant Patterned Web Design in Photoshop

This web design tutorial on Design Instruct walks the learner through the creation of a beautiful and trendy web layout using Photoshop. The web design is best used on a personal portfolio site.

A Study of Trends in Mobile Design

The aim of this article is to showcase the variety of methods in which some of today’s most popular websites provide an interactive and (hopefully) useful mobile experience for their end users. There are plenty of big names which were analyzed, such as Facebook and Amazon, and you’ll see plenty of useful graphs to draw some inspiration from. With statistics and some really interesting revelations on the diversity of modern design, you can be excited about the future of mobile Web design!

UX

Designing for the mind

Design is powerful because of the way our brain processes visuals. We might think of vision working by our eyes pulling in images and projecting them in the back of our mind. If this were the case then there would no be design or art. There are in fact 30 areas in the back of your brain that process different aspects of the image. The various vision processing areas of the brain are individually recreating the design. So, in a way, the viewer is also an artist...

Applying Lessons from UML to UX

Software Engineering is typically much more formal than User Experience in they way they model an application before development begins. After pseudo code, the Unified Modeling Language (UML) is probably the most widely used modeling language among software engineers. It has...

Is Realistic UI Design Realistic?

When Apple introduced the iPad, along with it came a set of Human Interface Guidelines. The HIG encourages app developers to “delight people with stunning graphics” and to “add physicality and heightened realism…The more true to life your application looks and behaves, the easier it is for people to understand how it works and the more they enjoy using it.”

jQuery

Quaid - JavaScript Library

Quaid is a JavaScript library that works with jQuery to help you write cleaner, more-robust code. You can think of it as a little framework with which to easily build widgets and other stateful jQuery plugins. Quaid provides two main services: a more modular way to write complex JavaScript applications with jQuery, and a robust way to handle errors from async server requests. Also included for convenience is multi-level, cross-browser logging with failover, a small framework for data formatting, and form handling utilities.

How To Organize a jQuery Application with JavaScriptMVC

Jupiter Consulting, a development outfit and the creators of the JavaScriptMVC framework, has posted a guide on organizing jQuery applications with JavaScriptMVC 3.0. Justin Meyer, the author of the post, felt that other guides to organizing jQuery applications failed to emphasize a crucial aspect: breaking up applications into separate and testable components. "The secret to building large apps is NEVER build large apps," Meyer writes. " Break up your applications into small pieces. Then, assemble those testable, bite-sized pieces into your big application."

WordPress

Beginning WordPress Development: A Look at Common Functions

WordPress is a great blogging and CMS platform. It’s easy to use and customize, and there’s basically nothing you can’t do with it. If you haven’t used WordPress, give it a try by installing it on your own computer using a web server package like xampp or WampServer. You’ll need access to WordPress in order to follow along with this guide.

Using TextMate for WordPress Code Cleanup

A Useful Post written by Ian Stewart a professional designer and WordPress enthusiast, on using TextMate commands for cleaning up wordpress code.

New Features in WordPress.com : Linking, Sorting & Paging

It’s that time of year again, when the folks over at WordPress.org start putting the finishing touches on the next version of WordPress (in this case, version 3.1), and the lucky users of WordPress.com are automatically included in the beta testing, giving you all access to new features about a month before they are officially released...

Ruby

A quick intro to writing a parser with Treetop

Tree

A Look Into Ruby’s Object Model

A few days ago, Burke Libbey, a Winnipeg based Ruby and Rails developer, gave a presentation called Ruby's Object Model: Metaprogramming and Other Magic to the Winnipeg.rb Ruby user group. I though it was interesting enough to embed here...

HTML5

HTML5: Seven predictions and tips for a better UX

HTML5 is the new version of yes, you guessed it HTML and XHTML. The bare bones of the websites we build. Browser support is still pretty sketchy which means we won’t see pure HTML5 websites for at least the next year or so but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t know the basics ahead of our first HTML5 site build...

h5Validate - HTML5 Form Validation for jQuery

A jQuery plugin that understands HTML5 forms and knows how to validate them, even in browsers that don't yet support HTML5.

CMS - Drupal

10 Free Drupal Themes for Small Business

Drupal, an open source CMS used by large corporations and governmental organizations such as CNN, AOL, WhiteHouse.gov, Harvard and many others, is a wonderful option for businesses needing a powerful website without the typical costs of having one made from scratch. It's highly customizable to your needs, and with the thousands of free Drupal themes out there, you can build a site that will impress your customers. This is a collection of free Drupal themes that are suitable for small businesses. To learn more about Drupal, start your journey on the official Drupal website.

Case Study: The Web Guidelines

Government bodies and companies face the challenge of creating websites that are optimally accessible to people as well as browsers and search engines. There are internationally recognized agreements for creating accessible websites like WCAG...

Linux

Fedora 14 - A Take On Its New Features

Fedora 14 named after physicist "Robert B. Laughlin" has been released. In my opinion, Fedora is geared more towards developers and system administrators than the ordinary users. However, it is perfectly usable as a Desktop too - baring a few exceptions...

Is Linux FOSS or open source?

The Linux offered under the GPL carries a few surprises under the hood. Specifically it contains some drivers and adapters whose use is restricted, through language in the code, to regular use with specific hardware...