Ryan Jauregui

Greetings!

Man has the time passed rather quickly or am I just crazy? Things have been so busy, crazy and overwhelming, it seems that I have made little progress with my projects.

So… I have been working with Smarty on my phpZIPdir project as mentioned in my prior post Beginning Development with Smarty. I must say that I really do love that template engine! I have rewritten my code on The Gutter Directory, truthfully I only have about 80% of the code fixed/completed, but by following the “Why Use Smarty” page I am quite sure that I have removed all application logic from the templates which will ultimately make phpZIPdir a fully functional, turn-key application.

I still have a lot more work to do to get phpZIPdir into a release state, but I have read the Smarty Documentation about 2 times through, so I am beginning to really grasp everything that happens behind the scenes, which helps me understand the line between Designers and Coders.

I hope to have some time to code within the next couple of weeks to get phpZIPdir into a release state so strenuous public testing can occur. I will update again when I have made such progress.

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I have helped with a few projects in the past couple years which have used the Smarty template engine as a backbone for their template/presentation framework. It is really useful in projects and scripts because it keeps the PHP code separate from the design of the website. You can read a detailed overview of Smarty at the official website.

Like I stated before, I have helped troubleshoot/design for projects using the technology, but I never really sat down to learn more about Smarty, but today I found some time to continue development on my phpZIPdir project (which I have not touched since the initial code write), so I decided it is time to get Smarty integrated so the product can finally get to its public beta testing stage. I fiddled around with the setup for a couple hours and read the documentation to get myself started. Through quite a bit of trial and error, I have successfully integrated Smarty into about 65% of the phpZIPdir project thus far. Once you get the hang of the syntax it is really easy to move forward.

Once I finish phpZIPdir I will open it up for a public beta, and hopefully I will find a few good testers. I will post more about it when the time comes. I urge anyone interested to in phpZIPdir to take a look at The Gutter Directory to see the latest version in action (with Smarty 65% integrated -although you will not really be able to tell from the front end!). I would like some feedback on it if possible!

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For my business DotResolve Consulting we decided to go with a open source contact manager; SugarCRM: Commercial Open Source. I had started developing my own version which offered about 1% of what SugarCRM can currently do. We felt that the maturity of the SugarCRM software development and the large community input (for module, features, etc.) was a strong reason to pursue installing the software.

SugarCRM: Commercial Open Source is a great starting point for any small and new business with small budgets. Since the product itself is free, it can be installed by a professional and extra fields can configured by a manager, thus saving your company money. Once your company grows into a medium to large business, SugarCRM Inc. offers a Professional and Enterprise Edition of the free open source alternative.

Check out the live demo that SugarCRM, Inc. has on their website. If you decide that you want to get your SugarCRM solution installed and hosted contact me and we can discuss hosting it and installation.

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I found a very interesting and useful piece of code at 3DM Design which allows you to select all checkboxes on a webpage. I found this particularly useful for a leads website that a customer of mine uses.

A big shout out goes to Scott at 3DM Design, as it saved us probably 2 - 4 hours of work. Thank you Scott!

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I have created a tutorial explaining what I had to do to get MooTools Accordion working on my website. Their demo code is for a basic website, so I had to throw in my troubleshooting skills to get it working. Please read the tutorial if you are at all remotely interested as it may give insight to issues it seemed a lot of people have been having.

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