Vibrant Solutions

Now that I am building a few CMS sites I usually insist that people use Firefox and not just because it renders pages better and all the other security reasons but because of the wealth extensions and especially the ones that make using and not necessarily surfing the web really useful.

So here is my list of great firefox extensions that make using any CMS system or blogging app more useful.

Deepest Sender
Why not just build your blogging app into firefox and remove the need to log into your site or sites all the time.  I use it all of the time and in fact I only really ever visited the admin section of my wordpress installation to make  site changes.
Although it has a limitation in that you cannot directly upload images through the interface this is not usually much of a problem.

Web Developer Toolbar
Quite simply the daddy of extensions, few the CSS of a page, visually debug most of the elements of a page, view cookies and so much more.  Essential.

1Passwd
Airoboform for Osx, fills forms and logs passwords.

Firebug
Explore the javascript, CSS and HTML of any page and debug them in a nice way.

GooglePedia
View the relevant (normally) wikipedia article to the phrase or word you search in google.  Although be careful hours can be lost.

Copy Plain Text
Allows you to choose to either normally copy the text selected in a page or just to copy the text as unformatted text.  Well handy for striping out other peoples old font tags and spans etc.

Dummy ipsum
Helps when you want to see the layout of a page, but have no copy to place in it yet.

Resizeable form field
This is really handy but only in the way that it should be installed by default.

Farkode
Fills in where your CMS system fails by giving you right click access to loads of common HTML tags.

Colt
Should be built in really

Xinha Here
Replaces a normal text area with a good (well not as good as FCKeditor but almost) online wysiwyg editor.  Really handy for places like ebay where the editor is not compatible with firefox (why oh why do they not sort this out!! )

There are more, but most are specific to a particular service or website and not really relevant for what I need to do but please comment and update.

Web Design

It is difficult to buy stuff for presents anyway, but most people are pretty easy, perfume, smelly soaps, lighters (don’t even ask) and I’m pretty much done.  However how do i buy a gift for my brother, hes a techy guy who earns enough to buy whatever he wants so the gift needs to be something odd, or at least different and so i decided to get him the neuros open source media center so that his old hacked up X-Box can finally get the boot.

But there are a lot of other ideas here

Entertainment

I have been playing around with a few of these gallery, popup window replacements and although they seem to do a lot really well I feel that there is not one place where I can go to see the advantages of one against another. 

For instance; Thickbox is great for showing inline and iframed content but I had some difficulty in getting the script to work correctly with AJAX html content, but with iframed content why use AJAX?

Also none of the scripts below can get anything close to showing a HTML page with a JAVA virtual tour in it without crashing Firefox on Windows very badly - And Exclusively Firefox on Windows, (versions 1.56 - 2.0 and the latest JAVA from SUN - I even tried it with Microsofts JAVA - that had no luck) Firefox, Safari, Konqueror and IE 6 - 7 handle the operation without any problems.  All I can assume is that there is an issue with JAVA and firefox on Windows it seems like a leak somewhere but I can find no answers anywhere on the net if anyone can help it will be most gratefully appreciated.

So get on with the Lightbox Alternatives already…

The Original Lightbox.js 2.02 has to be mentioned, but now in comparison to the others it is heavy on the code and pretty limited really as it only displays image and groups of images.  Although the animation produced when activating a window is still really impressive and not matched with as much ease in any of the other scripts with the exception of Litebox which is a recode of the original but much lighter and the version I tend to use most when just showing galleries. Although only for the nice animation effect Lightbox does not automatically resize a photograph to the users open browser window which Thickbox does.

Now we get onto the other scripts that add HTML content functionality to the idea and for most uses these should within the next year or so totally replace popup windows from browsers and create a whole new set of problems for users (or not).

The most famous ones are Thickbox and GreyBox, ThickBox is in my opinion a bit more rubust and offers more options - although I am quite at a loss why you would want to use AJAX to bring up another page in the box when iframe content works fine.  But Thickbox offers a few more compelling reasons to choose it over any of the other alternatives.  Those are the fact that it will resize and image to the users viewing size, automatically centering the box in the middle of the screen and that the CSS is really easy to alter.  Also the online documentation is about the best for any of these scripts and its HTML linking methods make a bt more sense than using Greybox.

Thickbox also supports Galleries of Images with next and previous buttons whilst to my knowledge Greybox does not.

Greybox only really beats Thickbox because of its inbuilt animation (Greybox is styled after osX popup dialogs so Im almost already sold!) which makes it easier to implement in a site if animation is required.  The Greybox Redux project brings the size of the script down to reasonable size without losing much of its functionality.  But I must say that the documentation is very poor with either of these scripts and trying to do anything but the default is difficult and will take some searching on the web and in the script files.

Other alternatives are Prototype Window Class that basically does everything that GreyBox does but adds a robust skinning concept to the mix and different animation techniques.  This one is well worth playing around with if your site is heavily styled and seems to be stable enough for mainstream use although the linking technique is a bit more difficult to handle than any of the previous scripts, but not too difficult to work out.

There are obviously hundreds of others but these are my most used at the moment, if anyone has any suggestions fell free to leave them and Ill update the list.

AJAX

We took an office excursion to see Rancid at the Brighton Dome last night, the show was everything it could have been.  They played fantastically and surprisingly a lot of the tunes were from their early albums which was great to see.  Some obviously took their camera fone along and the first video from the night can be found at you tube.

Music

We have just finished the first release of the online presence for Encore Travel. A high quality travel agency for top level executives and celebrities. This site features a multimedia interface created with XHTML and Flash elements and the use of some very nice pop up windows for the photographs featured on the site.

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