ThemesWiki.org is a new website designed to provide users with comprehensive, free guides for designing Web Themes and Templates. This site intends to ease the web design process by providing tutorials for a large number of systems at a common location.

It is often difficult to find a resource that is focused on providing quality, relevant and free information for designing themes and templates; specifically one that covers a wide range of applications. This is where ThemesWiki.org intends to step in. Launched initially with tutorials covering over 20 Content Management Systems, ThemesWiki.org is expected to grow into an exhaustive resource for the theming community, with users generating most of the content.

“ThemesWiki.org promises to fill a much needed gap in the theming and templating community” said Ric Shreves, author of the Packt book, Drupal 5 Themes. “It is a source of information that cuts across systems and provides designers and developers a place to share ideas and approaches outside of the walled gardens of individual project sites.” Shreves, a partner in Water & Stone, an open source web development company, went on to say that “Mambo, Joomla, Drupal, Plone, Modx — whatever — none of the clients really care and frankly it matters less and less as time goes by. What we should be concerned with is the end result, and that is where this site comes in.“

ThemesWiki.org is part of an ongoing process at Packt to develop unique methods of contributing to the Open Source community. Notable other initiatives include the website on free installation tutorials, www.InstallationWiki.org, and the annual Open Source CMS Award that has a total prize package of $20,000 to be divided among several winning projects.

ThemesWiki.org has been developed using the open source MediaWiki software package and has initially been populated using chapters from Packt books. ThemesWiki.org is free to use and open for everyone to contribute to. It is expected to grow and expand over the coming months with more tutorials added by users.

For more information, please visit www.ThemesWiki.org

The next book by PACKT Publishing is going to teach you the basics of modern JS framework
for designing and creating web application’s user interface. This framework is called Yahoo! User Interface Library and it’s distributed freely under the terms of the BSD licence.

Thanks God we can say that the old times when each developer made his own hyperawesome functions for user interfacing has nearly gone. Fortunately the handsome and cute complex frameworks are coming, solving a lot of the problems one must deal with during developing the user interface. From very simple to complex libraries, from plain addons for HTML pages to state-of-the-art systems. Yahoo! User Interface (YUI) is one of the second ones - big, complex and powerful, such as Dojo or ExtJS (ExtJS starts like YUI extension, btw). You can get an imagine about its possibilities from its demo page. When you decide to step one level above the dealing with ad-hoc JS hacks for each project, then YUI is a perfect starting point, whether you use it or not.

If you wanna enter the amazing world of the UI frameworks, the book Learning the Yahoo! User Interface Library is a must-have thing. This book isn’t for total beginners, you have to meet some pre-requisities, such as knowing
JavaScript, CSS, HTML and so on.

The author begins his book with a brief introduction into the YUI world - what is it, what is it for, why YUI - he talks about the cross-browser compatibility and introduces the basic parts of YUI, describing the basic techniques in YUI, such as code inserting, component using or setting up their parameters. All of these techniques are illustrated on a simple example: INPUT field extended by a calendar.

One of the classical problems a web developer can deal every day with is the different default styling with different browsers. You have to use so called „CSS Reset“ to make your applications look (more or less) the same way. YUI has tools for CSS resetting too. Long story short: It’s a set of cascade styles, which
sets overall attributes to common (and predictable) values across the browsers. YUI provides the CSS for font resetting and grid layouting too. And all of this is described in the second chapter.

The third chapter describes the fundaments of the inner logic of YUI, such as namespaces, DOM utilities and event-handling model. The description isn’t much deep, so you will not drop out during reading about the
seventy-fifth method for children search. Just the logic of the DOM and a couple of the often
used methods are described.

YUI deals, of course, with the web applications fundamental engine - yes, I mean AJAX. The chapter four is all about AJAX and the Connection manager, which plays a big role within the client-server communication in YUI, providing the XHR encapsulation the same way like the rest of YUI does. The author uses two examples -
simple RSS reader and login system - to cover this theme.

The fifth chapter joins two different things which should stay separated, I mean. The animations and the browser history management. The animations are a basic of the graphics effects or the animated widgets (like the accordion widget), but the Browser History Manager (the second part of this chapter) provides the correct function of the browser’s BACK button in the AJAX-based applications and should be discussed in the chapter four, I guess.

The chapter six has a simple title: Buttons and trees. The author describes the Button component and its derivates (such as the Select List Button) and the TreeView component with its building, styling, dynamic drawing, dynamic changes of tree and other useful things. The talks continue in the next chapter with the Menu navigations and using the popular Autocompleter. The chapter eight describes visual parts for logical encapsulating user interface’s elements, such as containers or the tabs, including miscellaneous panels, windows, dialogs or tooltips.

The YUI-way of Drag-and-drop is described in the chapter nine. It covers all the mouse movement operations, from a simple „drag the object over the desk“ (to the basket, for example) to all the graphics elements with draggable, movable, turnable... parts. And this theme is the end of the visual YUI parts described in the book.

In the last chapter, number ten, the author doesn’t describe any user interface element, but he deals with an important thing too. He writes about app debugging with the Logger class.

And then, suddenly, the book ends with the index. I really miss at least one page separating the text and the index, with some kind of summary, some tips for further reading, some useful links, or such. A book with such long and intensive text as this one have would definitelly deserve some „chill-out“, wouldn’t it?

But in global I give this book five stars. After many (void) attempts I’d been trying to make me reading (and understanding) the ExtJS documentations I’ve finally got a book which doesn’t bore me out like all the tutorials and „the first steps in the XYZ“ always do. I cannot say anything against this book: it’s just perfect buy!

I would recommend this book to all people interested in the web applications. YUI is really a good first step to better web applications and this book is really a good introduction to YUI.

The source codes used in this book you can download for free from the PACKT website.

You can buy this book directly from the PACKT for about 40US$ (and remember: Free shipping!)

Learning the Yahoo! User Interface Library – Wellman, Dan – PACKT Publishing 2008, 360 pages

A must-read book for all Czech web creators: Shu-Wai Chow PHP Web 2.0 Mashup Projects , by Packt Publishing

In this time Czech people-behind-the-web are holding big discussions about Web 2.0, solving issues such if the Web2.0 is based on the rounded corners and glossy colors or if it’s based on the communities. The Czech webzin Lupa has announced its „annual awards for the memorable Czech webs“ - with almost the same names like in the past year. The Czech data owners still develope strange methods and legal agreements against „the Data Thieves“... In this frowsty atmosphere a new book appears which can bring a fresh air in the Czech web. Yes, I’m talking about the „PHP Web2.0 Mashup Projects“ book, issued by Packt Publishing. You can buy it directly from the Packt web pages for 36 dollars (or 33 Euros, it’s pretty strange exchange, isn’t it?)

The book begins with a verbose introduction into the mashups’ world. The author says: „Web mashups are exactly what they sound like - web applications that merge data from one or more sources and present them in new ways. Very often, the data owners encourage and facilitate third parties to use the data. In many cases, this facilitation is made possible by the data owners providing application programming interfaces (API) to their data. These APIs follow standard web service protocols and can be implemented quickly and easily in a variety of programming languages, including PHP. (...) The question of who owned data and what they choose to do with the data became a big issue. Why in the world would companies invest millions of dollars to gather their data and their database systems, but then freely give it away for others to use? The answer is by opening their systems, mashup developers help increase the reach of the data owners.“

In the second chapter the author demonstrates the creation of the first mashup - Amazon and UPC database joint. The two often used protocols are demonstrated on this example mashup - XML-RPC and REST. The author describes the XML-RPC requests and responses a format in the very understandable and detailed way, interlaced with short pieces of PHP code. He also shows how to use XML-RPC class from the PEAR repository. In the next part there is the REST protocol described, in the same manner like XML-RPC (means „clearly and detailed explanation“), finished by the own REST client class and the own XML responses parser (via the SAX). In this moment everything is ready for introducing the UPC Database API and the Amazon AWS API. All necessary methods are introduced and described. In the last part of this chapter, named „Mashing Up“, all of this information is used to build an own mashup. This mashup takes an UPC/EAN code from the goods, looks for this code in the product database and tries to find that thing in the Amazon shops. If the searching is successfull, the picture of desired thing is showed (if available) and user can add it into the basket, fully automatically, by the API methods. In the book a well-documented source code is listed, but only the „necessary parts“, not the padding around.

The third chapter has a provocative title „Make your own search engine“. But don’t worry, it’s not the Google competitor. It’s the Microsoft’s and Yahoo’s search engines mashup. Do you remember the „meta-search-services“? This mashup looks exactly like them! In this chapter the author describes and demonstrates the SOAP interface usage (detailed and clearly again). In the Chapter Four we get a video jukebox. The idea of this video jukebox is simple - mashup takes the information about recently played songs from the Last.fm and looks for appropriate video clips on the YouTube. This mashup is built with the PEAR libraries and uses the REST protocol and the XML, XPSF and RSS formats. Anyway - this chapter is available from the web too, like the sample chapter (PDF)

The fifth chapter shows a not-so-clean method for mashup data acquiring. It describes a mashup which informs the user about the highway accidents by SMS. The main problem is to get data from California Highway Patrol service (they behave like many of the Czech data owners), because their web doesn’t provide any usable way to get the data. So the author shows a technique called „screen scraping“, incumbent on grabbing HTML document, making DOM tree and picking required data. It’s a very interesting chapter.

The book ends with the sixth chapter, in which the author mashes up the Google Maps and the Flickr. His mashup shows the underground stations on the London map. The user can click on the marker of an concrete subway station and the mashup service provides photos of this station (from the Flickr). The main theme of this chapter is the REST protocol with the RDF and JSON data formats, using the tools like the SPARQL, RDF API for PHP or the loved AJAX. All of this is well explained again, freely flavored by the PHP code examples.

The resume is here. I’ll start with the negatives: On several code examples there are typographical quotation marks instead of proper „computer quotation marks“. I thought for a while about the meaning of the things such as $a=«String». I would also prefer a „live“ demonstration of the mashups described in the book, maybe on Packt web server.

But the positives predominate: The book is readable and well-arranged. The text is short enough to hold reader’s attention, but full of valuable information. A reader who knows how the REST or XML-RPC works can skip over relevant parts (or go through just for memory refreshing), nevertheless he finds a lot of interesting things in the book. The book is no „How To Make A Mashup - Step By Step“ instruction manual, so don’t expect you will write an amazing and superb mashup in the afternoon immediatelly after reading through. The most important thing for mashup creating is the idea WHAT and HOW mash up (the same problem which a barman must solve before mixing cocktails). The book is no step-by-step manual, as I have already mentioned. It provides an overview of API’s possibilities, it shows methods „how-to“ and, last but not least, inspires one to its own activity!

So, it has inspired at least me. I must say this book was the last impulse making me to provide the ApiMania website (the list of the Czech and Slovak APIs and mashups).

I hope it will inspirate others too...

Vyšel Release Candidate nové verze frameworku Prototype 1.6.0.

Nová verze přináší, již klasicky, některá vylepšení, která mají zvýšit výkon a opravit chyby. Změn a vylepšení je mnoho, týkají se všech částí Prototype (Events API, DOM API, AJAX API, Class API, Functional API). Prototype se snaží splnit požadavky standardů JavaScript 1.6 i WHATWG 1.0 (např. metoda indexOf u polí už nepřepisuje nativní metodu, pokud ta existuje apod.)

Prototype 1.6.0 - informace
Prototype 1.6.0 RC download

Pligg , opensource klon populárního Digg-u, je na prodej. Informoval o tom TechCrunch .<–break–>
Předmětem prodeje je doménové jméno, website a kontrola nad účtem u SourceForge.

Pligg má údajně 10.000 registrovaných uživatelů a byl stáhnut 60.000x.

Důvodem prodeje je, dle slov autorů Pligg-u, zaneprázdnění tvůrců a nedostatek času.