Free WordPress Theme Builder

This site: http://www.yvoschaap.com/wpthemegen/ has a simple free wordpress theme builder that anyone can use,
just update the settings via a nice form on the left side,
with the different options like background and sidebars settings,
you can choose if you want a right side bar,
how the left side bar should look, and you can choose which widgets to load to the left side bar.

After you have played with the main look you can generate the files and download a zip file which contains these files:

• style.css
• reset-fonts-grids-tabs.css
• index.php
• header.php
• footer.php
• sidebar.php
• comments.php
• searchform.php
• search.php
• archive.php
• page.php
• functions.php
• screenshot.png
• images/bg_overlay.png
• images/bg_gradient.png

Or you can download each file seperatly.

This gives you the basic structure for a working wordpress theme, from here you only have left to customize as you wish.

Technorati Tags: theme, wordpress

Implementing MediaWiki

My favorite type of wiki is mediawiki,
I love the ease of use, the huge matrix of extensions available,
and the look and feel of the wiki itself.
backup, restore and upgrade support are also very important reasons to choose a specific wiki software,
and having gone through all this steps in mediawiki, I am very pleased with the ease of use.

Starting from the begining:

what is mediawiki?

MediaWiki is free server-based software which is licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL). It’s designed to be run on a large server farm for a website that gets millions of hits per day. MediaWiki is an extremely powerful, scalable software and a feature-rich wiki implementation, that uses PHP to process and display data stored in its MySQL database.
Media wiki site

Media wiki also saves the versions of the updated files – allowing for easy reverts and versioning of edited files.

The largest sites using medaiwiki:

Design matters

Wiki website doesn’t have to have the MediaWiki standard look,
you can design the look and feel either manually to suite the corporate guidelines or with existing skins.

Novelle’s wiki site:

marvel.wikia.com:

Extensions

Extensions are compilations of PHP code that add new features or enhance functionality of the main MediaWiki core. Extensions are one of the main advantages of MediaWiki. They give wiki administrators and wiki end-users the ability to adapt MediaWiki to their requirements.

The extensions can add capabilities like:

• Embed videos (YouTube)
• WhosOnline – shows you who is currently logged in to your wiki
• Allow embedded flash
• Iframe – to load pages from other site in your wiki page
• Convert to pdf
• Images preview popup window

Integrate into the Organization

• Email address
• Real name
• Nickname
• Language

First steps with editing wiki pages

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki_User%27s_Guide:_Editing_overview

This simple editing tutorial will show you the basic step in editing a new wiki page:

• headings
• lists
• links

Technorati Tags: Linux, mediawiki, php, wiki

WordPress Theme – The Loop explained

I’ve been wanting to learn WordPress theme design for a long time now,
but every time I started reading about it I heard the words “The Loop”,
and never understood what are they talking about.

Well finaly I joust found this great intro to wordpress theme writing,
it’s simple, written for beginners, and explains the basics of what blog template writing is all about.

Matt’s post explains what the loop is – which from what i gather – a simple query that collects all the relevant posts to show,after first calling it with the first line:

<?php if ( have_posts() ) : while ( have_posts() ) : the_post(); ?>

now you start dropping the other wp blocks into place just like lego:

the title,
the date,
the content

and thats it – now the loop will just drop these 3 again for the next post, until it runs out of posts.

From matt’s post:

There have many concerns and question about the template system used in WordPress. Mostly the concerns are with n00bs and the complications of PHP. “I want to change this and that, but don’t know PHP”. I hear this a lot. But the thing is, you don’t need to know PHP to change the Templates in WordPress.

so thanks Matt for helping me to finally understand what its all about

Google and SEO: Matt Cutts videos

Anybody writing a blog or editing a web site knows the importance of SEO for its search engine ranking, search engine optimization is second in importance to a good page content alone.
The words are arranged in the site, the headlines, the page title, meta tags and other on page elements can affect the site’s search engine ranking and basically – count for how many people will see the page at all.
Like the old saying – Its not just what you say, its how you say it.

And that’s where Matt Cutts comes into the picture,Matt works for Google search engine group for a long while now and has many insights into how Google ranking works and what to do if you want to be part of the top 10.
These are a couple of great videos featuring Matt, where he explains and shows many examples as he reviews specific sites for the good and bad elements in the sites SEO wise.

Another great lecture from Matt, although a little old – and yet still very relevant is the SEO for wordpress lecture which is really worth the time spent listening to,
In his Blog Matt gives many links to those who don’t want to listen the full hour it takes,
starting with the power point from the lecture, through a full transcribe of the talk, and even a shorter summery for the full lecture.

Basically since I have started to follow these guidelines,
my web site traffic has doubled itself and that’s the best incentive I can offer to sit and watch the 2 videos as long as they are, so go on and watch them, you’ll thank me later…

Technorati Tags: google, SEO, wordpress

Apache Active Directory Authentication

Apache server is a strong web server that can serve great open source application like Mediawiki which is a great solution for information sharing,
but what if you want to use Mediawiki to share information only for the local office active directory domain members?
Or even only to members of a specific group in the active directory?

In Apache you have a specific module called mod_ldap which allows you to use the Active Directory as an authentication server for your users,
so you can create a secure wiki branch for each department users.

To setup the apache server to use Active Directory as access manager you will need to make sure the mod_ldap was compiled with the apache server and that these lines are in the httpd.conf file:

LoadModule authnz_ldap_module modules/mod_authnz_ldap.so
LoadModule ldap_module modules/mod_ldap.so

If you have a Windows server installed with the xampp install of apache and mysql, you will have the module pre-compiled into the apache server,
however testing that it’s loaded can be done with:

C:\xampp\apache\bin\httpd.exe -t -D DUMP_MODULES
the output should have these lines:
authnz_ldap_module (shared)
ldap_module (shared)

Once you have the mod_ldap modules loaded you can add to the apache configuration file the user authentication support:

Any Authenticated user from the Domain:

<Location /Finance_Wiki>
Require valid-user
AuthType Basic
AuthName “Finance Wiki Access”
AuthBasicProvider “ldap”
AuthLDAPBindDN “CN=proxy_user,OU=sub_group,OU=main_group,DC=some,DC=domain,DC=com”
AuthLDAPBindPassword “proxy_user_pass”
AuthLDAPURL “ldap://pdc.some.domain.com:389/OU=main_group,DC=some,DC=domain,DC=com?sAMAccountName?sub?(objectClass=*)”
</Location>

The AuthLDAPBindDN and AuthLDAPBindPassword settings are for setting a user that will allow the apache server to browse the Active Directory structure,
the user created for this should have the minimum rights possible in the domain.

This specific apache configuration will allow any user from the domain to share the /Finance_Wiki folder, but if you want to allow access for a specific group you need to add this configuration line:

require ldap-group CN=groupname,OU=group.container,OU=main_group,DC=some,DC=domain,DC=com

This is the part that will require the active directory authentication for a specific group.

This way you can prepare a wiki branch for each group in your company to securely share internal files.

Technorati Tags: apache, Command line, desktop, Linux, windows, xampp