builder2

WP Help: A Simple Plugin for Documentations

I’m sure you’ve had a need for something like this. While building WordPress–powered sites and blogs for other people, you sometimes need to provide some documentation for them to use the site correctly. A “style guide” is the first thing that comes to mind—like how authors should format their headlines as well as structure their post content. The WP Help plugin by Mark Jaquith solves problems like this, as described:

Administrators can create detailed, hierarchical documentation for the site’s authors and editors, viewable in the WordPress admin.

Now if you’re building a custom WP site with lots of customizations and tweaks, the WP Help plugin will make things easier for you and your users.

WatchOCR

“WatchOCR is free OCR server for PDFs. Based on Knoppix, WatchOCR uses cuneiform, and exactimage to create text searchable PDFs from image only PDFs. Using the web interface, WatchOCR can be remotely configured to monitor a watched folder for newly scanned PDFs for OCR conversion. Leveraging the power of a liveCD distro, WatchOCR is the fastest way to get an OCR service up and running for your network.”

This seems a very useful way to get high–quality optical character recognition across all services in a network.

Image Sliders

Image sliders, like lightboxes, are just some of the useful presentational tools brought about by the growth in browser technologies and javascript frameworks. If you’re looking for one you can use for your blog, I recently found three robust solutions that should fit most needs: Nivo Slider, Coin Slider, and SlideDeck. You’d be surprised how extensible yet easy–to–setup these jQuery plugins are.

Bulletproof MySQL Backups

Doing database backups for MySQL can be as simple as commandline dumps, but complex deployments can make things well, very complicated. This guide on bulletproof MySQL backups can be very helpful if you think you’ll be going into the complex type of deployments.

PHP: Keeping Things Simple

A lot of PHP programmers with moderate coding experience tend to get into the trap of “frameworks”. Usually, a newbie learns more and knows enough to create his own CMS, after which he “discovers” that a framework solves a lot of repetitive coding. Sometimes, it does. But you don’t really need all that.

Welcome to Builder2!

Builder is a new weblog I will be writing on, with a focus on web technologies relevant to the “web 2.0” developer. This will be a news aggregator of sorts, as well as a repository for relevant reading and thinking. If you’re into AJAX, CSS, RoR, PHP, and all the other acronyms and buzzwords, you just might find this weblog useful. Be sure to be back!