PHPCow.com: The Official PHPCow Blog & News

New Christmas Release of Personalized Start Page Script

We want to proudly announce new release of PHPCow's Personalized Start Page script. Today we completed final testing round and now it is available immediate download for all our customers.

Release of 1.1 version is really important as far as it includes significant improvements of underlying infrastructure and new exciting features.

New release includes:

HTML Widget management that allows you to create your own widgets through comfortable interface(see screenshots). HTML Widget management panel includes HTML and CSS markup editors that gives you absolute power for designing your own widgets and additionally you can preview widgets instantly on the same screen.

Layout management - now it is possible to manage dashboard layout and redesign it's parts and adjust it to design of your choice. You can manage following sections of dashboard layout: Splash Screen, Left Sidebar, Right Sidebar and Footer. With great markup editor you can easily manage HTML and CSS codes. Most important part of layout management is that you can manage these parts for each locale separately. Importance of this feature is huge because now you can surround dashboard with content(including any type of Ads) that is appropriate for you business.

Dashboard configuration panel(e.g General Settings) have new enhancements that allows you to improve control over initial configuration settings, now you can decide and set default Locale and Theme.

As a bonus this release includes 50 new affordable widgets, 49 of them were announced awhile ago and additionally new universal HTML widget that is intended for showing widgets created by you.

Below are screenshots of new release that briefly shows all significant parts:

SmartMarkUP - Universal Markup Editor and Platform

Yesterday we released new product named SmartMarkUP. SmartMarkUP is a lightweight universal markup editor that we developed as a default markup editor for all PHPCow products, but later decided to open source it and made it available publicly.

This is very important step for PHPCow as far as this is the first open source activity since company was founded and we hope you will enjoy our new small but very useful product.

Brief Description from product's home page:

SmartMarkUP is a lightweight and powerful JavaScript library that allows you to turn any textarea into a fancy markup editor. HTML, CSS, XML, Wiki syntax, BBCode or any other desired markup language can be implemented and/or adjusted to your preferences and business needs. SmartMarkUP doesn't depend on any other JavaScript library and can be integrated with any already existing JavaScript library or code.

For more details, examples and documentation please visit product's home page or Google code repository for all downloads and source code.

39 Brand New Widgets from PHPCow

Today PHPCow developers completed development of new set of high quality widgets that are amazing addition to already existing widgets. These are feed widgets that cover topics such News, Sport, Entertainment, Tech and Business & Finance. Data is aggregated from the world's most significant and popular news sites and blogs. Demo of the widgets will be available soon at PHPCow Personalized Start Page Demo Site. These widgets are part of new upcoming and very important update of the personalized start page script. Before publicly available working and downloadable version you can see screenshots that are shown below:

Developer Documentation and Developer Version for Widget Developers

We want to proudly announce release of awaited Developer Documentation and Developer Version of PHPCow's Personalized start page. These are extremely useful releases that directly benefits people who are interested in developing their own widgets.

Documentation comprehensively covers most significant parts of the Widget API that are important for widget development. Besides low level API details interested developers will find tutorials of developing fully functional widgets that completely covers whole development and deployment process.

Developer Version of widget framework is a minified version of core framework that includes all necessary APIs that is required for building fully functional widgets. Documentation also covers download and installation details of developer version.

If there are additional details that you are interested in please do not hasitate to send us your feedback or questions. Comments to this blogpost are welcomed as well.

PHPCow Template Language – Pagination Module

Continuing CTL topic, I want to introduce new pagination module developed for new template engine. Pagination is a must feature for any content related system. We tried to develop universal module which could be integrated with any other module that requires pagination. Introduced module is highly customizable that gives template authors unlimited capabilities to feet pagination to desired needs.

Simplest usage of the pagination module is shown below:

{mod:cow:pagination uri_pattern="/blog/posts/page/{page_number}" record_count="50" limit="3"}
    {var:pagination.links}
{/mod:cow:pagination}

Shown snippet of code will generate pagination shown on the pictures:

Shown example uses three attributes 1) uri_pattern - Defines URI to be used for paginated results. It is possible to use any URI pattern but there is one simple requirement that URI must contain "{page_number}" special variable. Pagination module will replace this variable with apropriate page number; 2) record-count - that defines total count of particular type of content (e.g. blog posts or news); 3) limit - defines how many items must be shown per page;

There are much more attributes that could be supplied to the module, these attributes give endless customization options to template authors. For example it is possible to change labels for next, previous, first, and last links or change number of adjacent pages.

Supported attributes are listed below:

//URI to be used for paginated results
uri_pattern="{var:env.context}/posts/page/{page_number}"

//Previous/Next links to be shown, defaults to "false"
prev_next="true" 

//First/Last links to be shown, defaults to "true"
first_last="false"

//label for "Previous" link
prev_label="&laquo; Previous"

//label for "Next" link
next_label="Next &raquo;" 

//label for "First" link
first_label="First"

//label for "Last" link 
last_label="Last"

//total number of records (e.g. blog posts or news)
record_count="50"

//how many results must be shown on each page
limit="3"

//number of adjacent pages, defaults to "3"
adjacent="2"

PHPCow Template Language – Modules

Previously I briefly overviewed CTL (see this post). Now I want to introduce another most powerful feature of CTL. This is CTL Module tag.

Think about CTL Module tag as a custom tag. This is a simple tag like construct that allows to integrate new functionality into CTL without harming the core and it requires ZERO configuration. To install module you only need to create correct folder structure.

Module tag looks like something similar:

{mod:cow:tagcloud}
    //rest of content here
{/mod:cow:tagcloud}

Module tags have simple structure. As with other structures it starts and ends with curly braces, followed by “mod:” prefix, followed by “package:” prefix and finally actual module name. Think about package as a simple folder, for the shown example package(folder) name is “cow” and the module name is “tagcloud”.

This is real module which is used in this blog(see right sidebar). We developed this simple but useful module to arrange categories like tag cloud.

As general HTML tags, module tags support attributes. Attribute names are module parameter names and attribute values are module parameter values. See example below:

{mod:cow:comments limit="5" order="desc"}
    <h3>Recent Comment</h3>
    <ul class="tag-cloud">
    {mod:iterator}
        <li>{var:comment.member.name}: {var:comment.title}</li>
    {/mod:iterator}
    </ul>
{/mod:cow:comments}

Shown snippet of code will generate list of recent comments, something like you see on the right sidebar.

In this example we used two attributes, “limit” and “order”. We told module to select five latest comments and order them in descendant order. But, in the example we used one more tag which is a part of module tag specification. This is “mod:iterator” tag. This very useful tag is used to iterate result returned by module, instead of using boring “foreach” structure we used module iterator to generate list of comments.

What we need to develop CTL modules? and is it necessary to dive into PHPCow core API details?

First of all, only thing you need is to extend one base module class. Secondly just begin programming as you do it usually, nothing from PHPCow is necessary except knowing database structure if you are going to enhance PHPCow. In other words you have absolute freedom in you module development.

New PHPCow Template Language(CTL)

It's not secret that PHPCow doesn't have powerful Template Language. All it has is a template processor that supports predefined set of macros. This of course is huge disadvantage because person who builds templates doesn't have enough flexibility in template customization. Various types of blocks introduced in PHPCow are really powerful and flexible building components, but that is not enough.

For version 3.0, we designed and developed completely new template engine with powerful template language, we called it CTL.

CTL is easy to use and flexible language that gives you enormous power to build highly customized templates.

Think about CTL as Smarty for PHP but with few differences: CTL is not programming language; it is easier to use than Smarty; It doesn't require to compile templates to PHP files and finally it is extensible, and offers possibilities to enhance it without harming PHPCow core or already composed templates.

CTL benefits as template authors as PHP developers. Lets see what does it look like, and what useful features does it offers.

Variables

CTL has variable support, for example you can easily use them in your templates:

<html>
<head>
    My Template
</head>
<body>
    <h1>{var:site.title}</h1>
</body>
</html>

In the above example “{var:site.title}” variable will be replaced with “site” objects “title” property value.

Structure of variable syntax is very simple. It starts and ends with curly braces, and is prefixed by “var:” followed by variable name. This is standard notation that is really easy to remembers.

There are number of useful variables that can be used in templates. This way you can easily work with URLs, settings, post/get variables etc...

Functions

CTL functions work as other functions you know. For example, if we need to change case of letters we can use following function call:

My site title is: {fn:ucfirst(strtolower({var:site.title}))}

if value of “site.title” variable value is for example “THIS IS MY SITE”, function call first will change all upper case letters to lower case and than change the case of the first letter. After that on the screen will be printed following result:

My site title is: This is my site

from the example we can see that nested function calls are supported, and this is really grate feature. Though there is one restriction, not all functions can be called. This is partially is because security restrictions, and partially because not all functions return string values.

Structure of function call is easy as well. As with variables it starts and ends with curly braces, is prefixed by “fn:” followed by actual function name. Note that nested function calls doesn't require “fn:” prefix.

IF/ELSEIF/ELSE – Conditional structure

CTL offers support for if/eleseif/else conditional structures. This functionality is quite handy when customizing templates, because some of template parts could rely on some conditions.

<html>
<head>
    My Template
</head>
<body>
{if site.title != "null" and site.title != "bla bla bla"}
    <h1>{var:site.title}</h1>
{elseif site.title == "bla bla bla"}
    Site title is equals to "bla bla bla"
{else}
     we don't have site title
{/if}
</body>
</html>

Example above shows usage of if/elseif/else structure. It supports equals(==), not equals(!=), AND and OR logical conditions.

Syntax is quite simple to learn, and mimics to other known programming languages.

PHPCow Version 3 Preview

Every PHPCow customer is interested in about status of the product's third version. Yes I know, it was very long since we didn't updated our product, but, we work really hard to release next version of our product and I want to introduce some of it's amazing features briefly.

First of all, PHPCow v3 is completely rewritten and it is tended to satisfy most of our current and potential customers needs and in this post I'll be concentrated on features of new Control Panel(CP).

We completely restructured CP and gave it more comfortable navigation and look and feel. You can really easy, just in few clicks achieve your tasks.

We divided control panel into sections and modules, each tab corresponds to particular section. Section itself consists of modules which are grouped in the left sidebar. Look at the picture below:

As you can see from the screenshot, currently we are located in the Administrator's section. This is the starting point after signing into the cp. First page is a dashboard from where you can easily navigate through other parts of the CP.

It is worth to mention that the new CP is completely Ajax based. All pages are built using rich components that allow you to effectively work with tasks that were very hard to achieve in previous versions. For example, bellow is a screenshot of Breadcrumb Management page from Navigation module:

Unlike previous version you can create/manage breadcrumbs without refreshing pages, changes applied to selected breadcrumb are visible immediately and even more you can arrange page components as you like(see popped out container on the right).

What is interesting with this particular example, is that every piece of new version shares same concepts and functionality. We developed powerful framework that gave us enough power to build really amazing control panel with rich user interface.

I'll show more details in the next posts. For now please comment you thoughts and opinions, your suggestions are highly appreciated.

Some Other Screens: