After looking into it more deeply I’ve found that Magento is much more sophicated than Cubecart, supporting product options, grouped and related products, multiple stores, discount codes, “seo friendly urls”, and customer whishlists, all “out of the zip archive”. However after working with it for a few weeks now, it’s becoming more and more obvious that Magento is still only a baby. While it’s seemingly bursting with amazing features, some of them seem incomplete and most seem to have been designed from the viewpoint of the programmer rather than the end user, resulting in Magento being more complicated than sophisticated.

Here’s a few problems I’ve had with Magento already:

• There’s no way of viewing all the products in the store by manufacturer
• The urls aren’t all seo friendly, in fact filtering/layered-navigation makes very seo unfriendly urls
• New administrators are given no role by default and so can’t log in to the admin panel
• The CMS system is bollocks. There’s no parent-child relatinships for a start
• Themes/skins are far too over complicated to make and edit
• The documentation is nowhere near complete, for end users or developers

A couple of final thoughts:
There is definitely something to be said for the simplicity of Cubecart.

I think part of the major problem with these open source but commercial web applications is exactly that:- while they are open source so the community can edit and modify the source code to meet their needs, they are commercial. I think this results in much less contribution from the community and most of the contributions that are made are commercial.

Well I have M$ Office 2008 installed on my iBook G4, and it’s painfully slow to open and it hogs pretty much everything. So I spent a while looking for somekind of plugin for Firefox to open Word and Excel documents inside Firefox, like you can do with IE on Windows.

Only one such plugin exists, Word Browser Plugin not surprisingly opens Word documents in browsers such as Firefox, but not very well - it doesn’t like tables. Since I mainly want to open timetables, this is a problem. Apparently no other plugins exist for this purpose so I gave up and continued to use Office to view the timetables.

However a couple of days ago I stumbled accross Quick Viewer Droplet, an AppleScript by Apple. Quick Look is a part of OS X, that allows you to preview documents from within Finder such as Office documents without opening Office or whatever program is used to open them. This in itself partially solves my problem - I could use Quick Look to open the timetables without need to grind my iBook to a halt by opening Office, but Quick Viewer Droplet cuts out Finder and previews files in Quick Look directly, so that Firefox can be set to automatically preview Word Documents and Excel documents!

Amazing, isn’t it?!

rating: ****
usefulness: 10
ease of use: 10
minimum user level: novice
download: Quick Look Droplet (11 downloads)

I’ve tested it with Safari, Firefox, and Windows Internet Explorer.

In order for this theme to appear any differently from the original Kubrick, you need to have the dymanic tabs plugin installed and activated, and your tabs set up. Click here to find out how.

Kubrick tabs is meant as an example to show what can be done with the dtabs plugin. Only minor alterations to style.css and header.php have been made to the default Wordpress theme (Kubrick), and the addition of style_ie_fixes.css, images/tab_left.jpg, images/tab_unselected_left.jpg, images/tab_central, images/tab_unselected_central, images/tab_right, images/tab_unselected_right, and images/tabbar.jpg. Therefore the “working” of the theme should not be affected, but if you experience any problems unique to Kubrick tabs, then please reply to this post for support. Kubrick is developed by the Wordpress team, so any support needed with Kubrick should be pointed towards the Wordpress forums.

Download Kubrick tabs (48KB) (746 downloads)

History

Version 1.5

• Tweaked header image to match original dimensions
• Set tab width to auto ajust to fit contents

Version 1.4

• Updated to Wordpress Default theme 1.6 shipped with WP 2.3
• Added support for disabling dTabs plugin

Version 1.3

• Updated to support dTabs 1.0.1

Version 1.2

• Updated to the latest version of Wordpress Default theme released with WP 2.1
• Updated to support drop down menus introduced in dTabs version 1

Version 1.1

• Added support for custom headers (introduced with WP 2.0.5)
• Added full support for Windows Internet Explorer including IE7

Version 1.0

• Initial release.

• Description
• Recent Changes
• Requirements
• Installation
• Updating
• Uninstallation and deactivation
• Themes pre-enabled for dTabs
• Adding dTabs to your theme
• Example
• Download
• Donate
• Known Issues
• Future
• History
• Support and Feedback

Description

Provides a function to output a user controled dynamically tabbed navigation system with optional drop down menus in Wordpress. Basically, it makes adding dynamic tabs to your Wordpress blog/theme easy.

…more info

• dTabs can be easily added as an option in themes.
• Tabs can be made for the posts page, the front page, individual posts, categories, pages, the archives, the bookmarks, and external links.
• Tabs for categories and pages have optional dropdown menus of their sub-categories/sub-pages, while archives and bookmarks have non-optional drop down menus.
• Tabs are set up by the user via administrator preferences, while their properties and appearance can either be set by the user via administrator preferences or within the theme’s css.

Recent Changes

Version 1.2.2 29/04/2008

• Fixed a bug introduced in version 1.2.1 that prevented tabs with non-word characters in their name being selected (reported by Joy).

Download the latest version

Requirements

As of version 1.2, dTabs requires Wordpress Version 2.5 or greater for full functionality.

Installation

1. Extract dtabs.zip on your local machine.
2. Upload dtabs.php to your Wordpress Plugins directory.
3. Activate dTabs in the Plugins section of the admin control panel.

Please note that if your theme is not pre-enabled for dTabs you need to paste a snippet of code into your theme before your tabs will appear on your blog, alternatively/in addition you could ask your theme’s author to pre-enable your theme.

Updating

To update follow the instructions for installation, writing over the old dtabs.php in your plugin directory.

Uninstallation and deactivation

To uninstall dTabs, click on uninstall on the Manage > Tabs admin panel. This will remove all of dTabs’ settings and deactivate the plugin, if you would like to keep your settings for future use, then simply deactivate dTabs on the Plugins admin panel as you would any other plugin.

Themes pre-enabled for dTabs

Kubrick tabs

Please feel free to add any more themes to list by commenting on this post :-).

Adding dTabs to your theme

To insert the tabs into a theme which is not pre-enabled, just copy and paste the code below into a template file corrisponding with where you wish your tabs to appear (most people will probable use header.php). The only requirement is that it is placed within the body html tags (ie somewhere after the <body> tag in header.php, before the </body> tag in footer.php, or anywhere in any other template file).

<?php if (function_exists('dtab_list_tabs')) { dtab_list_tabs(); } ?>

If the dTabs plugin is activated, this code will output your tabs. If it is not then it does nothing, your theme will display as normal, (minus your dynamic tabs).

The only thing left to do is add css formatting to your tabs and drop down menus, mainly so that a) the selected tabs are displaid differently to the non-selected tabs, b) that the drop down menus are positioned correctly in relation to their tabs, and c) that the tabs are displayed on the same line (ie if you want a horizontal navigation menu).

A good starting point for this is checking out the CSS section on the Manage Tabs admin preference pane. Ticking Automatic css generation will display some example css for you to work on. While the box is ticked the css will automatically be inserted into the header of every page in your blog. If you are pre-enabling a theme for public release then you will need to insert the css for the tabs into your theme’s css file.

The tabs will appear in your html as a list of links in the following format:

The links will be wrapped within <ul> tags with a class of tabbar:

<ul class="tabbar">
	<li class="tabselected"><a href="Tab1 URL/Path/Permalink" id="tab1_tab">Tab1 Label</a></li>
	<li class="tab"><a href="Tab2 URL/Path/Permalink" id="tab2_tab">Tab2 Label</a></li>
	<li class="tab"><a href="Tab3 URL/Path/Permalink" id="tab3_tab">Tab3 Label</a></li>
</ul>

By default this will create an unordered list of tabs - a vertical dynamically tabed navigation system.

dtab_list_tabs() has three parameters which enable you to modify it’s output:
dtab_list_tabs('before=""&after=""&outputjs=1')

• before
  (string) Optional: text/html to place before each link. There is no default.
• after
  (string) Optional: text/html to place after each link. There is no default.
• outputjs
  (boolean) Optional: 1 outputs javascript with the tabs, 0 doesn’t (so that a javascript file can be included with the theme, which is more efficient than sending it with each page). The default is 1.

Any drop down menus will simply be a list of links to any subcategories for that tab enclosed in div tags with a class of “dmenu” and an id of “tab name_menu” eg:

<div class="dmenu" id="Downloads_menu">
<ul>
	<li><a href="subcategory 1 url">subcategory 1 name</a></li>
	<ul>
		<li><a href="subcategory 1.1 url">subcategory 1.1 name</a></li>
		<li><a href="subcategory 1.2 url">subcategory 1.2 name</a></li>
	</ul>
	<li><a href="subcategory 2 url">subcategory 2 name</a></li>
	<li><a href="subcategory 3 url">subcategory 3 name</a></li>
</ul>
</div>

To check for the name of the current tab (using a pre-enabled or manually enabled theme with the dTab plugin installed and activated) take a look at the source of any post/page/category/etc and the name of the current tab will be contained in a comment just below the html for your tabs.

Examples

• The tabs on this site were made and are managed using dTabs.
• Kubrick tabs - a Kubrick (WP’s default theme) pre-enabled for dTabs

For examples of slightly more advanced css than that in the Tabs Options pannel, take a look at the css files in Kubrick tabs or on this site (style.css/style.css.php).

Download the latest version

Donate

Known Issues

I have experienced problems after restoring my database from a backup. This problem is due to the way in which Wordpress stores data for plugins and how certain scripts export this data when making backups. There isn’t much I can do to prevent it, but the problem can be fixed by reseting your tabs.

Future

Any suggestions? Let me know

History

Downloads Per Day

Version 1.2.2 29/04/2008

• Fixed a bug introduced in version 1.2.1 that prevented tabs with non-word characters in their name being selected (reported by Joy).

Version 1.2.1 20/04/2008 (456 downloads)

• Fixed a bug introduced in version 1.2 that prevented menus fading out for tabs with non-word characters in their name (Reported by Mike and Morgan).

Version 1.2 2/04/2008 (664 downloads)

• Improved improved support for static front pages
• Updated javascript to properly support Safari 3 (and dropped support for Safari 2)
• Updated javascript to fade drop down menus in and out
• Made javascript output optional (so a javascript file can be included with themes)
• Depreciated dtabs_echo_dtabs, replaced with dtabs_list_tabs
• Removed Tabs Options pannel
• Moved automatic CSS generation option to Manage Tabs Panel
• Dropped before and after admin options
• Rewrote default CSS, making it more complex but producing half decent looking tabs
• Used register_activation_hook to set up tabs upon activation
• Introduced activation message
• Introduced ability to uninstall
• Integrated into WP 2.5 UI
• Made other minor changes to streamline the interface

Version 1.1 18/12/2007 (1045 downloads)

• Added full support for static front pages
• Added suport for automatic update checking
• Prepared for internationalisation
• Fixed several empty array bugs (reported by Joost Verweij and others)

Version 1.0.4 16/10/2007 (390 downloads)

• Fixed ambiguity bug (reported by Julian) introduced with 1.0.3
• Fixed a bug also introduced with 1.0.3 that prevented dTabs from recognising sub categories

Version 1.0.3 15/10/2007 (6 downloads)

• Added support for WP 2.3

Verson 1.0.2 - 17/08/2007 (240 downloads)

• Fixed the zero bug (reported by Gregg Mendez) where in certain circumstances a “0″ was added within tabs’ links tags - invalidating the html.
• Fixed the slashes bug (reported by AJ) so slashes are stripped from tab labels
• Rearranged the order of tags for tabs so that before and after parameters are applied within the list item tags, to enable Gina’s suggestion to allow tabs to stretch and expand - i.e. dynamic css.
• Minor update to default css

Verson 1.0.1 - 03/04/2007 (496 downloads)

• Fixed behaviour for page tabs so that they cannot be confused with categories of the same id number.
• Put tabs in an unordered list - replacing the <div> tags with <ul>s and <span> tags with <li>s.

Verson 1.0 - 09/02/2007 (479 downloads)

• Added simple dynamic menu functionality - tabs that link to categories and pages can have a css/javascript drop down menu listing any subcategories, sub-pages, archives, or bookmarks in a hierarchal tree.
• Fixed the problem with the default tab present upon installation or after resetting the tabs so that it can be selected.
• Fixed the bug caused by database changes brought in with WP 2.1 (reported by James) where pages were no longer listed in the Modify > Tabs admin pannel.
• Added ability to make tabs for pages, subcategories, archives, and bookmarks (previously it was only super-parent categories and pages).
• Improved the method by which the current tab is selected - now all tabs linking to the current page/post/category and it’s parents are taken into consideration, and the closest match is selected.

Verson 0.911 - 14/08/2006 (645 downloads)

• Fixed behaviour for blog/main page tab so that it can be selected and so the link points towards the blogs web address (instead of the website’s root directory).

Verson 0.91 - 06/06/2006 (327 downloads)

• Added options > Tabs admin panel, with the following features:
  • Optional automatic (basic) css generation/example.
  • Optional automatic css output into any theme.
  • Option to create vertical tab interface (as opposed to horizontal by default).
  • The ability to add html before and after each tab (just like you can in the templates).
• Also added the option to control the formatting of selected and non selected tabs using their id instead of class, allowing the custom formatting for each tab.

Verson 0.9 - 10/03/2006 (28 downloads)

• Update to manage > Tabs admin panel, including the addition of a drop down list of available tabs to make setting the plugin up as easy as possible.
• Fixed behaviour with categories: current tab now reflects the parent category instead of the current category.

Verson 0.8 - 09/02/2006 (10 downloads)

• Initial release

If you would like to request any particular features for this plugin then feel free to leave a comment. Please note that while I will try my best to help, development of the plugin is very time consuming so unless it’s a tiny adjustment don’t expect any fast results

Support and Feedback

If you’re having any problems or need any help then please feel free to reply to this post for support regarding any aspect of dTabs.

If you’re using dtabs successfully than I’d love to hear about it! Reply to this topic or send an email to dtabs [at] dynamictangentconceptions.dtcnet.co.uk .

If you’re not overly experienced with webhosting etc, be aware that most packages labelled “Business” or even “Small business” have webspace and a transfer limit vastly beyond the needs of a small business.

While the £10 per month most of these “small business” packages cost gets you fantastic support, it’s paying for masses of resources you simply don’t need. From my experience, small business websites manage very nicely with only a couple of hundred MB webspace and as a rule of thumb ten times that amount of bandwidth.

However it seems that many of the webhosts out there are content in basically ripping customers off in order to minimise their work load and maximise their efficiency. After looking into setting up my own hosting company I can understand this decision, but I can’t help but feel that they are relying on the ignorance of the masses to vastly oversell their product.

It’s worth looking for cheap hosting and definitely compare the packages of several hosts but the most important lessons I learned were:

1. Check the host has a physical postal address which is not a PO Box
2. Check they are a registered company in your country (UK residents can use the Companies House Web Check service)
3. Find a package that suits your needs
4. Check they have a similar server configuration to your old server

The first two help to build up confidence that the company is real and can be called to answer your country under your laws for any wrong doings.

See my little rant above for an explanation of the third

The forth just saves downtime and errors when you upload your site. I found one of the servers I was placed on didn’t have su_exec turned on, which to be honest I’d never heard of before, but it meant that my php scripts didn’t have group permissions and could only write to files set to world writable. After I knew of this potential problem, when transferring my other sites I just put a request that they be place on a server with su_exec enabled.

I later found some other people in a similar situation and learned that Lee Curtis, the owner/manager of UKWebGroup had attempted to sell UKWebGroup in November and since around that time had not been providing any un-automated services like renewing domain names or replying to support queries, while still accepting money for these services.

All this information used to appear in the form of a topic in a forum upon searching Google for “UKWeb group”, but that forum seems to have deleted the topic, probably for legal reasons, so I’ve set up a group (aptly named UK:Web Group) on Google groups with a copy of the transcript from that forum.

I just hope the potential customers/victims find the information before giving them any more money.

It was one of those gems that you don’t realise you need until you stumble across it, and then don’t realise the value of until you loose it. I mean, the threat of cookies shouldn’t require a tinfoil hat, we know they are mostly used in our best interest to personalise our experience of websites and increase efficiency blah blah, and while there are some organisations that try to use them to track our browsing habits, which can seem a little too infringing upon one’s freedom, at the end of they day despite the possibly selfish and greedy motivations, it’s only so they can provide more suitable content to meet our needs, yes to enable them to make more money, but nevertheless to meet our needs. Yet I still found an empty hole in my life upon discovering that SafariPlus was not compatible with Leopard - I had lost this control.

I searched high and low for an alternative, the best I could find was PithHelment, which is a great plugin for it’s many other features, but it’s ability to delete all cookies on exit by default proved simply not to work (at least under Leopard), so I spent many sleepless nights pondering what to do. Ok I maybe exaggerating a little, I mean what actually is the worst thing that can happen with cookies? The only real problem I can see is loosing control over your own information. Why should a website store information about me for future reference without my permission? …or share my browsing habits with anyone without my permission?

Anyway so I decided to see if there was an easy fix staring me in the face, starting by looking at SafariPlus’ Info file, which I changed it to XML a la the other plugins in my InputManagers folder - Growlmail and SIMBL, which amazingly, after a restart of OS X, did bugger all - so I gave up. However I later installed Inquisitor, and magically SafariPlus worked (…kind of). My guess is that Inquisitor changed the permissions for the InputManagers folder or something similar, but whatever it was - SafariPlus lives again!

(I said “kind of”, because it’s a little buggy - as in you can only save new favourite cookies one at a time by ticking one and then clicking on the Animation policy tab and then ticking the next one and then again clicking on the Animation policy tab and so on, but I can live with that.)

To be fair Inquisitor probably did most of the hacking, but I’d like to think my “hack” of the Info file helped too. So the buggyness is a bit rubbish, but the fact that SafariPlus is once again kind of working gives me hope for the future

(edit: ok SafariPlus isn’t deleting cookies on exit, but you can successfully delete all non favourites manually.)

SafariPlus (184 downloads)

• Description
• Requirements
• Installation
• How enable automatic update checking in your plugin
• Download
• Donate
• Future
• History
• Support and Feedback

Description

Allows Wordpress plugins to automatically check for updates without them needing to be stored in the WP Plugin Repository.

Download apuc_v1.zip (8KB) (289 downloads)

You may be wondering I made this plugin when WP automatically checks for plugin updates anyway. I’ve been thinking of including this functionality in dTabs for quite a while now, but I stopped development when it was annouced that WP 2.3 would support update checking. However it has become apparent since it’s release that WP 2.3 can only check for updates for plugins stored in the WP Plugin Repository (i.e. GPL only) so I decidied that I would prefer to retain control over my plugin and develop the functionality for myself. I was orginally planning to simply include this as a part of dTabs, but as it grew in complexity and size I decided that it should be an optional componant which other plugins could be free to use.

User info

So why should I install this plugin?

To recieve a notification when enabled plugins have updates.

How do I know whether the pluggins I use support update checking?

Check the list of plugins on the Updates subpanel of the Plugins admin panel, all enabled plugins are listed here.

What should I do if a particular plugin does not support update checking?

Try politely requesting that the plugin author take a look at this page and point out that they only need add one line to the plugin file and host a small text file in order to support checking for updates

Won’t it take up loads of resources and slow down my blog!?

The plugin only checks for updates upon viewing the admin panel, so it won’t affect your readers at all. It adheres to a strict schedule checking for updates of each plugin at predefined intervals to minimise it’s use of resources, but inevitably it may add the odd millisecond to the loading time of admin pages.

How is my privacy protected?

APUC downloads data regarding the latest release of a plugin from a server and compares it to the installed version locally, so that no information regarding you or your blog and it’s setup is sent anywhere.

Developer info

Why should my plugin support APUC?

To notify it’s users of new releases - helping to ensure everyone is up-to-date and therefore minimising support requests for old versions, while maintaining control over the storage and distribution of your plugin. It’s a clich?ɬ©, but I guess the question is why should you not support APUC, since all it takes is the addition of one line of text to your main plugin file and for you to host a text file containg the latest version number. Easy!

Requirements

This plugin requires Wordpress Version 2.3 or greater.

Installation

1. Extract apuc_v1.zip on your local machine.
2. Upload apuc.php to your Wordpress Plugins directory.
3. Activate Automactic Plugin Update Checker in the Plugins section of the admin control panel.

How to enable automatic update notifications in your plugin

Simply add Version Check URI to the top of your main plugin file (after Autor URI) which points to a readable file (e.g. a html file) containing the following
Latest version: 1.1
(obviously insert the actual latest version number)
The only requirement is that your version number is in the form of major.minor[.revision[.build]] etc (basically as many or as few numbers separated by full stops as you like), and this has to match the version number in the top of your main plugin file. The plugin then simply compares this version number to that of the installed version and alerts the user when an update is available, providing a link to the plugin URI as specified in the main plugin file.

Alternatively you can specify a specific download URI along with the latest version, but this is completely optional:
Latest version: 1.1
Download URI: http://www.yourpluginuri.com

Additionally you can specify a schedule for update checking (again completely optional):
Next check value: 10
Next check unit: days
Next check unit can be set to days, weeks, or months. If you don’t set either of these values, the plugin will automatically check for updates after one day, one week, one month, and then every three months.

Download apuc_v1.zip (8KB) (289 downloads)

Donate

However, please note (in the nicest possible way) that making a donation will not guarantee the inclusion or development of a particular feature (it probably won’t hurt either though ;-)).

Known Issues

Let me know

Future

Any ideas welcome!

History

Version 1 18/12/2007

• Initial release

If you would like to request any particular features for this plugin then feel free to reply to topic or send an email to apucsupport[at]dynamictangentconceptions.dtcnet.co.uk . Please note that while I will try my best to help, development of the plugin is very time consuming so unless it’s a tiny adjustment don’t expect any fast results

Support and Feedback

If you’re having any problems or need any help then please feel free to reply to this post for support regarding any aspect of the APUC.

dTabs 1.0.4
Kubrick Tabs 1.4