Web Dev Notes

FastCGI has been officially released for IIS6 with full Microsoft support!

Patrick Reilly writes:

Microsoft is embracing the PHP community and to help bootstrap early adopters of PHP on Windows, we’ve been validating the popular PHP applications on Windows and publishing walk-throughs that give step by step instructions on how to setup and install the most popular PHP apps on top of FastCGI and IIS/Windows.

You can download FastCGI for free at http://www.iis.net/php. FastCGI makes it possible to host PHP applications on Windows.

If you’ve been following my Top 11 Posts category, you’ll notice that phpBB is and remains one of the most popular topics of this blog for the time being! Seeing as many of you have shown interest in the subject and are looking elsewhere besides the official phpBB website, I can only assume you are looking for mods!

If you search Google for phpBB, you’ll find that phpBBHacks is the #1 result that is not on the official phpBB site. This is because phpBBHacks is awesome! If you are looking for phpBB mods, I highly recommend you visit this website which has tons of resources available.

If you’d like to start working with phpBB, there are plenty of free resources available to you online at phpBB.com and phpBBHacks.com. If you’re the type of person however who likes to have a book as a reference, I recommend phpBB: A User Guide. This book will help give you the skills to manage your own online discussions and community.

I have recently discovered a new website which has earned a spot in my Google Reader after providing several great articles! The website is z-oc.com by Guilherme who is a software developer who makes prototypes for Sony Ericsson mobiles. Recently he wrote an article regarding How to Manage all your Email Accounts with Gmail which I wanted to share here because it is certainly valuable information!

The process described by Guilherme requires three main steps:

1. Forward your current addresses to Gmail
2. Define an email management policy
3. Set-up Gmail to assume different identities

The full instructions for each step can be found here.

One thing to note is that this approach will allow you to easily manage all of your email accounts within a single Gmail account. It will not however prevent people from knowing you are using Gmail when you send a reply. What do I mean by this exactly?

Lets consider you email bob@cheese.com. Now imagine Bob set-up his bob@cheese.com account to forward to gmail. When bob replies to his email from within Gmail, some users (depending the email system they use) will see the reply being from bob@cheese.com whereas others will see the reply as being from bob@gmail.com on behalf of bob@cheese.com.

Is this bad? Depends! If you run multiple websites on multiple domains and have many different email addresses to check constantly, it could definitely save you TONS of time by having them all forward to one account where they can be managed! It’s also great if you have an old email address which you want to stop using, because when you reply to messages from old emails, you can set Gmail to reply from the new address replacing the old one.

If however you don’t want people to know you use Gmail, then don’t use this method. Why would it matter if people found out you were using Gmail? I personally don’t mind at all but perhaps you feel using Gmail makes you look less professional or perhaps you don’t want people to know your actual Gmail account name!

What method do you use for managing your email? Let us know and we’ll post a link to your article!

phpBB Blog 2.3 is a software add-on for phpBB which turns your forum into a blogging system. The latest version has been running stable now for over a year so it may be an interesting option to explore if you are interested in setting up a blog.

I’ve personally never tested this system so would be interested in getting reader feedback from anybody who has. I’ve personally always assumed it would not be as fully featured as other systems such as Wordpress which are also available for free and have thus avoided it. However, despite this I have recently heard a great deal of positive information about phpBB Blog so those hardcore phpBB fans out there may really be interested in trying out this sytem first.

The system works with phpBB 2. If anybody has tested with phpBB 3, please leave a comment to let us know if you encountered any problems.

Thanks!

I found this great little tool for those who use Digg.com. Visit the link and find out who’s digging you!

• Who’s Digging You

Firebug is a plugin for Firefox which is a must-have tool for any web-developer. With Firebug you can edit, debug and monitor HTML, CSS and JavaScript live in any web page. That’s right, you can edit your page live while visiting it! If you aren’t always editing your website from the same computer its very possible you won’t have a local copy. This means making small adjustments or tweaking a CSS files involve uploading the same file to a web-server hundreds of times in order to test and verify the results. Firebug makes this process so much easier. Just edit your website live until you are satisfied, then upload the final changes to your web-server so that all visitors will see the changes.

Firebug also gives you some other very powerful functions. We’ve all been frustrated with elements on our page not lining up properly because of some problem with our CSS file that we have yet to identify. Firebug will actually show you visually all of the offsets, margins, borders, etc, that you have set so you can easily identify the source of any problems.

Another great function is Firebug’s network activity monitor. Firebug will not only tell you how long your pages take to load, but will break this down between the elements on the page which therefore allows you to identify any bottlenecks slowing down your site!

If you are writing any JavaScript for your website, you will also love Firebug’s debugger, which lets you pause your script at any-time to check the state of anything set in the code, such as the values currently held by variables.

If I haven’t convinced you yet that this is a great tool that will speed up your web-development, then visit http://www.getfirebug.com/ now to find out even more about Firebug. Take a look at the screenshots which show Firebug at work!

Yesterday I wrote about an Alt-Tab Replacement offered on the Microsoft Power Toys website. I mentioned how this is a great tool for speeding up development when you are working with many windows open on your desktop. While the Alt-Tab Replacement helps you find your windows more easily, it doesn’t help organize them. There is however another Power Toy which may interest many developers…!

Virtual Desktop Manager is a tool which runs in your task bar, allowing you to switch between four virtual desktops. Each desktop is your actual desktop, though you can give each a unique background. The main purpose of the tool is to allow you to stay organized if you are a heavy multi-tasker.

How is it useful? Well, when you Alt-Tab, you switch to the next window. With Virtual Desktop Manager, you group windows on up to four different desktops. You can then set hot-keys to switch between them. For example, I have set ALT-1 to switch to my first desktop, ALT-2 to my second, etc… If I am developing a website, I will definitely want to test the site in Firefox, Internet Explorer, Netscape, Opera, etc… With Virtual Desktop Manager, I can use my set hot-keys to switch to any grouping of windows I have defined, rather than just to the next window. ALT-1 can bring up my desktop with all my Firefox windows, Alt-2 my desktop with all my Internet Explorer windows, etc…!

• Download Deskman.exe (Virtual Desktop Manager)

Once you download and install the tool, you may wonder how to activate it as it seemingly disappears. Right click your task bar at the bottom of the screen, select toolbars, select Desktop Manager. Desktop Manager will then be activated and you can modify your settings via the controls in the task bar.

When you’re doing web development, you probably find that you usually have tons of browser windows open. Whether you are writing a blog and are researching references, are working on a website and are testing in in different browsers, or just plain surfing the web or multi-tasking, your screen probably becomes cluttered with windows quickly.

If you are using Windows XP, which most of us still are and will be for a while, you may be jealous of the way people using Windows Vista get to Alt-Tab. When they wish to switch active window, they get a preview of what the window actually contains. If they have multiple browsers open, they can see which website is open in each and quickly select the one they want.

There is no longer any need to be jealous! The same functionality is now available for Windows XP absolutely free!

• Download Taskswitch.exe (Alt-Tab Replacement)

Taskswitch.exe is part of Microsoft PowerToys for Windows XP.

PowerToys add fun and functionality to the Windows experience. What are they? PowerToys are additional programs that developers work on after a product has been released. - Microsoft PowerToys for Windows XP

phpBB is an extremely popular forum system written in PHP and available for free. There is no reason to ever pay for a forum system so long as phpBB is around, it is extremely powerful and offers all the same features as any commercial product. The latest version, called Olympus, has been available as a beta since June 2006 and supports things like sub-forums which were some of the lacking features.

An internet forum itself is a place where your users can hold discussions. This means users are constantly generating new content which will help increase visitor loyalty and traffic to your website. Having a forum on your website will help you create a community of users which is what you need as a solid foundation to help your website grow.

phpBB is also a great learning tool for those interested in learning PHP since it is an open source project. Browse through the code and see if you can make any changes to successfully customize your forum!

PHP-Nuke is a content managment system similar to Joomla, which gives the administrator the ability to easily post news and manage a community of users.

The latest version of PHP-Nuke (version 8.0) is available for $12, however, all previous versions (7.9 and earlier) are available for free and are still complete, fully functional systems.

In my opinion Joomla is currently a more professional, powerful and advanced system in comparison with PHP-Nuke. PHP-Nuke does however provide one significant advantage over Joomla; it comes packaged with phpBB! phpBB is a great forum system which is fully integrated into PHP-Nuke. Forum systems are available for Joomla, but must be installed separately as components and none are of as high quality as phpBB. There are ways to “bridge” phpBB with Joomla, however this is no simple task.

If you plan on running a community website which will have a high traffic forum, then PHP-Nuke is an excellent option for you! If you plan on running a large site based on content however, Joomla is much better at managing this.