Archive for the ‘useful scripts’ Category

Collection of Flat File CMS

Tuesday, April 28th, 2009

I was looking around for a flat file based CMS today so I have gathered a collection of flat-file CMS at our Delicious bookmarks.

You may ask, what is a flat file based CMS?

Most CMS including CMS Made Simple, Joomla, Drupal use a database (commonly MySQL) to store the content. When a page is requested, the page content is retrieved from the database based on certain parameters, like the page id. This content is then combined with a template to produce a page that is returned to you.

In the case of a flat-file CMS, the page content is stored in a file rather than a database.

There are arguements for and against using a flat-file CMS. While the supporter on each side may have their valid points, it is more important to evaluate you own reasons to use a flat file CMS over a database CMS.

In my recent case, these were the applicable reasons

  • Easy to setup and maintain
  • Easy to backup and move around
  • Save space

Do you need to evaluate and install a flat-file based CMS? Fill us in with some details and we can evaluate with you.

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OpenSourcer.com Updated

Thursday, April 16th, 2009

Over this week, our main website is update and migrated to use CMS Made Simple, one of the CMS (content management system) scripts that we can help you install.

From the experiences of installing, using and testing many difference CMS, we found CMS Made Simple to be simple to use and flexible. As with any system, there are pros and cons. A CMS has to be choosen based on the fit to the task at hand. For a somewhat smaller content site like ours, CMS Made Simple fits perfectly.

With the CMS backend, we can manage the content easier compared to before when we maintain the pages  by directly editing a mix of PHP code and template. We also make use of features like global content block and custom user defined tags for some repetitive content blocks.

In this update we added to each script page a showcase of sites using the same open source script that we can help you install. For example, on the CMS Made Simple page we found 2 sites that was built using CMS Made Simple.

If you have a site that is using these open source scripts and would like to be listed, just follow the simple steps on the page itself.

Hope that you find our update useful. Your feedback and suggestion to make our site even better is most welcomed!

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Stop Spam and Read Books with Recaptcha

Tuesday, January 15th, 2008

Recaptcha

Looking for ways to stop spams on your blog, wiki or forum. Using a reCAPTCHA plugin could help.

reCAPTCHA is a interesting idea that gives a new twist to the war against spam. This post will give a quick introduction to reCAPTCHA and you can learn more about it here.

CAPTCHAs are those colorful images with distorted text at the bottom of web forms. Their purpose is to separate humans from spam scripts.

Spammers usually use scripts to spam thousands of post in forum and blog comments. However most scripts are not as clever as human eyes in identifying the characters so they are blocked. Nice try spammers.

reCAPTCHA took this idea a step further. Instead of throwing away the text you had correctly entered, it is actually used to digitalize books. Books are scanned and broken down into words. As users enter the words in the CAPTCHA, the content of a book is slowly being typed out by users all over the world! (Curious about how this is possible? Read about the technical details on how it is done on reCAPTCHA website.)

reCAPTCHA is available as a PHP library and as plugins for WordPress, MediaWiki, phpBB, vBulletin, Joomla, Drupal.

If your blog, wiki for forum is suffering from spam, using reCAPTCHA could stop the spam. At the same time you are joining the worldwide effort to digitize books. What can be more simple!

If you need assistance to install reCAPTCHA, send us a note.

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