FCS Websites recently launched another of our heavily customised Zen Cart shops for a Nottingham business selling organic skincare, jewellery and baby products. The front end templates have been completely changed, social networking links and attractive icons added and the admin system has our Paramita theme applied to make it more pleasant to use.

We have had great feedback on the modified system and have recently added lightbox style popups for information links instead of standard pop up windows. With all these modifications made, Zen Cart is able to compete with commercial shopping cart systems in terms of usability and attractiveness – a far cry from the standard templates which came from the 1990s!

This is what makes our Zen Cart ecommerce sites a cut above the rest – customised templates, bespoke designs and a much more usable control panel. Contact FCS Websites to get a quote on a new or upgraded Zen Cart.

Ferret’s Domain is now running on WordPress 3, which seems like a significant increase in smoothness since the last version. All the plugins I use carried on working much to my relief.

I’ve also been checking out theme frameworks. This month I have seen:

WooThemes
commercial framework and template – extremely slick and transforms the control panel/front end. Uses the 960GS grid system CSS framework. Very high attention to detail and the admin interface is very pleasing. The front of the site was changed to an events based format, which really impressed me.

Atahualpa
Difficult to spell, very easy to use, free and everything can be dealt with from the control panel with no file editing required. SEO improvements over a standard WordPress install. Atahualpa saved me some serious hours on a client project this week so comes highly recommended.

Thesis
Commercial, very powerful framework that allows you to replace anything in your WordPress install with a different layout or coding. Good for SEO too. Probably a bit over the top for most projects, and a more flexible CMS would possibly be better in some cases.

BuddyPress
Install WordPress with Buddypress and you have a ready made social network in about 5 minutes. Seriously impressed with Buddypress, which saved me hours of customising a normal WordPress install. Good community behind it too, so a big thumbs up.

I’ve found some great apps since switching to Mac, here are some of them.

• Adium – Free multi-network chat client
• Coda – Commercial one window web development app from Panic Software
• Daylite – Commercial calendaring, contact management and email integration – apps to do all this come with OSX but Daylite just ties them together really nicely.
• EasyBatchPhoto  – Commercial image editing app with all the useful tools – resize, watermark, rename etc.
• Evernote – Free app/service that works with web browsers and mobile phones, letting you clip text and images from webpages and sync everything to the Evernote servers so you can access it from anywhere. Great for filing all the stuff that will useful ‘one day’.
• iDrive – Automatically backup your local stuff to their remote servers (Free basic account).
• KeePassX – Free password manager to keep all your URLs, usernames and passwords together.
• Little Snitch – Commercial outbound firewall to stop software contacting websites without your permission.
• MAMP – Free Mac, Apache, MySQL & PHP – Local development environment that mirrors popular web server technologies. Develop your site locally for security and extra speed then transfer to the live server.
• Name Mangler – Free batch file renamer.
• Quicksilver – Free task launcher that starts from a key combo – about a thousand times faster than finding the icon and clicking it.
• Smultron – Free fast, simple text editor with code highlighting.
• Speed Download 5 – Commercial download manager.
• Things – Commercial to-do list app that can be used with GTD principles.

• Transmit – Commercial fast and pretty FTP client from Panic Software.
• Unison – Commercial newsgroup reader that redefines downloading from newsgroups.
• Xee – Lightning fast free image browser that’s much more capable than the OSX Finder or Preview.

When “if (is_home())” or “if (is_front_page())” don’t work, there is another way to do it based on the URL rather than WordPress internal variables that might not work the way you expect:

How to Detect the Front (Home) Page of a WordPress Blog | blog.dt.org.

Just got back from a very informative and well delivered talk on what cloud computing is and why it matters at Nott Tuesday, Nottingham’s tech meetup. Powerpoint can be the worst thing ever, but Simon Wardley made his talk extremely entertaining with liberal use of graphs and kittens.

I have heard cloud computing debates before and it usually gets a bit confusing as everyone confounds what they actually mean by cloud computing, and then go off on a bender about security etc. Simon dispelled common myths about the cloud and laid it all out in simple terms, referencing numerous sources and historical events to explain what the cloud is, what it isn’t and why it is relevant. Check out a version of the talk on Youtube below.