Web Publishing Group

Recently, I had to implement an events calendar on a website I was working on. My first idea was to find an open source package written in PHP. I did some Web searching and found the following:

• VCalendar
• WebCalendar
• iCalendar
• PHP iCalendar

After thinking about this a bit more, though, I opted for an online calendar. The two that I like best are:

• Google Calendar

and

• SpongeCell

Both of these calendars allow you to create a frame that you can insert into a Web page. I chose the SpongeCell calendar because it allows you to specify background and text colors. This capability makes it look like the calendar is actually part of my website website.

Another reason I went with this approach is that these calendars have more features than the PHP calendars. For example, they both will map a location.

These calendar services are really very good. Unless you need a very specialized calendar, there’s really no reason to build it yourself anymore.

Google offers free Google AdWords for nonprofits:

Google Grants provides eligible organizations with in-kind keyword advertising using Google AdWords so you can connect directly with your target audience. Through simple, short text ads that run on Google.com, thousands (or even millions) of people can learn about your organization online as they are searching for related information. When someone enters keywords (short phrases specifying a particular search query) into Google.com, ads targeted to those keywords appear alongside the search results.

For more information, go to the Google Grants page.

While PHP has enabled even the most novice programmer to build Web applications, the result is often poorly-coded websites that are a bear to maintain. I should know. I’ve worked on this kind of project myself.

The problem is that building a proper software infrastructure for each project is a time-consuming process, and the cost of doing this is prohibitive. Enter PHP frameworks. Frameworks aim to provide this infrastructure, allowing developers to focus on the application code and not the underlying code that makes it all work.

The way they do this is by using the MVC (Model-View-Controller) architecture. Models are representations of your data structure, i.e. how your data is stored in the database. Views are template files that tell the framework how to display the data. Controllers are the code that retrieve and modify the data in your database and cause data to be displayed in a view.

There are many different PHP frameworks, but I’m only going to discuss two here:

1. Cake. Cake is perhaps the most widely-used PHP framework to this point. This framework has been in development for quite a while and the website has quite a bit of information to get you started. The Cake Showcase lists many websites—some of them quite complex—that use the Cake framework.
2. MODx. The MODx website describes this software as “equal parts custom web app builder and content management system. It lists a couple of features that I think might make it more useful for the application that I have in mind—a trade magazine website. These are:
   • Rich text editors, which should make it easier to add articles and other content.
   • Custom content types, which the website says allows you to transform your content into XML, PDF, and other formats. I can envision using this feature to offer RSS feeds.

Both say they support AJAX, another requirement for this project.

I’m a bit concerned about the learning curve associated with basing this project on an application framework, but if I can use this approach in the future, then I should be ahead of the game. We’ll see.

There are several good content-management systems or publications, such as Vignette, that will satisfy just about any content-management need that a publishing company could come up with. The problem? They’re expensive—both to set up and to maintain.

These are definitely not solutions for small publishers. A friend of mine worked for a publisher who installed Vignette, and his company spent tens of thousands of dollars for the software and then tens of thousands more on consultants to help them install and configure it.

An Open Source Solution
That being the case, wouldn’t you like a solution that’s proven and powerful, but most of all cheap? Well, how about free? I’m talking, of course, about one of the many open-source (read: free) content-management systems currently available.

My favorite is Drupal. I’ve used it on several sites, including the IEEE Southeastern Michigan website and the ARRL, Michigan Section website. Unlike many open-source projects, Drupal has a lot of momentum behind it, the developers are continually improving it, and it’s relatively easy to get support should you need it.

theONION is a magazine that uses Drupal to publish an online version.

Several magazines already use Drupal to publish online. They are:

• Linux Journal
• Snowboard
• theONION

Drupal even a module that is geared towards making the basic content-management system into a publishing system: E-Publish. E-Publish lets you organize a group of nodes into a publication, your publication can have multiple editions, and you can organize each edition by topic. I haven’t used E-Publish yet, but it looks very good. One of the sites that currently uses E-Publish is PR Watch.

Camping Out
Another open source package—one specifically designed for publications—is Campsite. It has features specifically needed by publications, including the ability to accomodate multiple contributors, editor review, issue publishing, and subscription management.

A site currently using Campsite is the Post-Herald Online, a publication in western NY. Another is el Periodico, a Spanish-language newspaper in Guatemala.

I haven’t used this software, either, but I’d love to give it a try. One project I’m currently considering is establishing a community-based online newspaper here in Ann Arbor, and I think this software would fit the bill nicely.

System Requirements
Both Drupal and Campsite are built on LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) technology. These are all open-source software projects, and many web hosts support it. What this means is that you can easily find both a web hosting company to host the site. And since many developers (including Web Publishing Group) also support this technology, it should be easy to find a web developer as well.

Of course, as Heinlein pointed out, “There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch (TANSTAAFL).” You will have to pay a web developer to install and customize the software, and you will have to allocate resources to maintain the website. In the end, however, you’ll be way ahead of the game. These solutions are easier to install and easier to maintain—and a lot cheaper, too.

If you’d like to explore one of these options, please feel free to phone me at 734-930-6564 or to e-mail me at danr@webpublishinggroup.com.

If you run a website for very long, either you or your client will want to do a survey. Magazines, for example, often want to do readership surveys to see how well their content is meeting readers’ needs. Organizations like to ask questions about their services.

Many of them sign up with a service like SurveyMonkey. This online service does make it easy to set up and run a survey, but beyond a very basic survey, it costs money. Fortunately, there are a couple of open-source software packages that will do many of the same things.

The one I’m most familiar with is phpESP. Like many open-source projects, the design is quite spartan and the documentation could be improved. BUT, it does work.

Not only does it have the tools to design a survey, it will generate reports for you. It will even do cross-tabbing. This latter feature is very useful for analyzing a survey’s raw data.

Another open-source package that I’ve seen recommended is PHPSurveyor. I just recently found out about this package, and while I haven’t used it, it looks to be a little bit more finished product than is phpESP. I think I’ll try this out on an upcoming project.

I’ve been blogging for quite a while now. My  amateur radio blog, for example, has been online for nearly four years now. In addition to my ham radio blog, I also  blog on automotive testing at AutoTestNews.Com.

But even though I’ve been at it so long, there  are always new things to learn. For example, I’ve recently discovered to cool, new tools: Performancing for Firefox and Zookoda.

Performancing for Firefox is a Firefox plug-in that lets you edit entries using your Firefox browser.  I’m using it right now to edit this entry, in fact. Now, using a single window, I can edit entries for all my blogs.

Zookoda is a web service that lets you set up e-mail lists for your blog readers who don’t want to bother with RSS feds. What Zookoda does is subscribe to your RSS feed , format the data and e-mail it to subscribers.

Once you register on the site,  it guides you through the setup. You can tell Zookoda how often to send e-mails and when to send the e-mails. Zookoda will even create a bit of JavaScript that, when added to your blog, displays a subscription form. I think this is a great way for you to keep in touch with your readers.

You can subscribe to this blog right now by simply entering your e-mail address into the form at right. Thanks!