The Hub

I was searching the internet lately for a lightbox that is lightweight and easily customizable along with being able to group images together. I came across ColorBox which is a lightweight lightbox solution with alot of customization.

One of the main things I liked about this is that it is themable and you can use one of the already built ones which work nicely with IE6 since it doesn’t require PNG Fix because there is no transparency. The developer also take advantage of CSS Sprites to reduce HTTP Server requests, the plugin also loads ajax, inline and iframed content. For the more savy Javascript User it has few event hooks so you can manipulate the core to certain extent.

Twitter one of the most popular social networking tool is down once again, while there website is down there is no information as to what is going on there status website. Good thing the status website is hosted by tumblr.

When creating a plugin for any open source system it is always good to check if what you have in mind is already created and also a good starting point is to check out other plugins already made for the system. My first Frog CMS plugin came about while browsing the forum and seeing a discussion about tags. The original plugin was created by someone else but in its early stage I joined in the thread and improved on what was originally created.  In the end Tagger was the product of the that thread.

Tagger was necessary for the original “The Hub” that was built on Frog CMS, the articles that were created on there needed a way to organise them. Now lets get started with how to approach making plugins for Frog CMS.

Continue reading “Frog CMS: Creating a plugin”

After seeing how useful Tagger has been for the Frog CMS community, I have decided to release a new plugin that will make it so easy to share layouts and snippets in Frog CMS. This plugin was made due to seeing users using Frog CMS asking about themes for Frog CMS and some were made but the installation took time to work out so I have decided to create a packager to make it easy for all to use.

Continue reading “Themr”

I have been searching the web for sites that are using Frog CMS to inspire others to start using it and just to show the power of this tiny but powerful CMS. This CMS does what it says on their website and even more since it is so easily extendible for any user who has intermediate knowledge of PHP.

Sam Bowler
Creative portfolio website showcasing the work of freelance web designer Sam Bowler.

Continue reading “Frog CMS websites that inspire”

Tiny but very impressive, Frog CMS has been paving the way for small websites. The core features are impressive but with its easy to use plugin system and simple to use API you can extend this CMS to cover your needs for a medium sized website. In this series of articles I will explore some of the extended plugins which have made a good impression on the community and made a whole difference to many websites.

For this first article I will be taking a closer look at a plugin called Email Template . From the plugin author’s website you will find installation instructions which is clear and easy to follow. For my example I created my own form and customized it to fit the website it is on.

Continue reading “Frog CMS plugins that make websites more effective”

We have updated The Compressor with the missing YUI Compressor features. Now you can minify, preserve semi-colons and disable optimisation on the Javascript files that you want to compress. For the future we will be adding in more features one of which is preserving uploaded files to create a zip file with the uncompressed and compressed file.

We hope you enjoy using this tool and recommend it to friends.

We have launched our Javascript and CSS compression tool based on YUI Compressor called The Compressor. We have made it easy for you as a end user to compress a list of files and have less HTTP requests. The tool also lists all the uploaded files at the begining of the compressed file. You have the option to request a zip version of the file if you preffer this format. This tool is built upon our own framework called Simple Engine which is a fork of Green Framework.

Continue reading “Launch: The Compressor”

jQuery has been around for some time now and it has become the javascript framework of my choice, It allows me to now worry too much about writing a bunch of code to meet my target goal. Less is more and solutions that allow you to work faster, better and more productively is definately a good solution.

Continue reading “jQuery Clear Input”

There are plenty of color picking tools out there and all gets the job done, but here is one with a difference. Clean looking, clean from adware and spyware, easy to use and lightweight, yes it is definitely lightweight.

Continue reading “Free Color Picker with style”