Aarron Walter

Expanse is yet another cool, home-brewed web application that fills a gap in the Content Management System market. It is marketed to artists, and small businesses who need to have control over their content without spending a fortune on an enterprise solution. It’s a tightly designed, standards compliant CMS that makes extensive use of JavaScript and Ajax in the admin tool to create a very intuitive user interface. It appears to do a few things well, rather than trying to do everything half-heartedly. Their demo gives you the chance to test drive its core feature set and get a sense for the quality of the interface.

At $30 per site license, it could be a great option to use as a base for client sites, allowing a designer/developer to create a great skin for the application, and charge for customization and setup.

There are two JavaScript utilities I can’t live without when it comes to developing Content Management Systems: Tiny MCE and Prototype. Tiny MCE creates a robust and customizable WYSIWIG editor on your textarea form elements allowing users to write copy with formatting, links, and images. It’s used in many popular projects like Word Press (which is powering this blog!) and Drupal. A word of caution that there are known library conflicts between Scriptaculous and Tiny MCE.

Prototype can be used to do very simple, elegant form validation as is demonstrated on my contact page. Dexagogo demonstrates this with great detail and offers a demo download for your learning pleasure.

With both of these libraries it’s much easier to develop forms that give your users the power to add sophisticated content while preventing input errors in a user friendly way.

Carson Workshops, the creators of Think Vitamin, puts on short conferences examining hot topics in the Web world featuring a host of luminaries speaking about the various facets of their topic. They often post podcasts of each talk, and their recent The Future of Web Apps Summit is the latest in that series. Kevin Rose, Jeff Veen, and Tantek ?áelik are just a few of the big names who spoke at the recent conference, and all of this knowledge is free for your listening pleasure. The topics cover UI design, the business of building and selling your web application, development practices, APIs, and more.

You can download each talk individually or subscribe to their RSS feed to get them all at once.

I’ve recently written an article for SitePoint entitled “Use Ajax and PHP to Build Your Mailing List”. The article walks readers through the process of constructing a mailing list sign up widget that makes use of the Prototype JavaScript library to send an Ajax call to a PHP script, which then stores the email address in a MySQL database. The result is a very quick, and painless mailing list sign up process requiring no page refreshing or redirects.

The article will be published later this week or next week, and will include a code archive with a completed version of the scripts.

Microsoft has announced on their IE blog that Internet Explorer 7 will be released before the end of the month, which means if you have not yet tested your sites in the new browser you’d better make a point of it soon. If you have been using CSS hacks, such as child selectors, to feed standards compliant browsers different style rules than IE6, IE7 will now understand those hacks and may cause improper rendering of your pages. The best way to handle CSS specific to IE is with conditional comments, not with the various hacks anymore.

A word of caution, installing IE7 will over-write your IE6 installation unless you install IE7 in standalone mode as is described here.