I am again getting laid back. It was almost in early August , Invisionpower announced the release of their Community Content System 1.0.0, which is more or less a Content management system / CMS built upon the backend of the base forum software.

With the sad state of the discusstv website, it has been many days since i have actively worked upon a Invisionboard forum, besides installing or updating for clients. A full feature description can be found here .

From what I have read, it basically uses the forum /community users db to decide how to handle the permissions for new pages that can now be created based on the existing structure. It also to come extend allows you to design the pages , controlled by the Css and uses a block / allows blocks to be created, for displaying some external content or ads etc. The blocks also allows you to now type in php code or display rss feeds, and also possibly use any external plugin.

As I am yet to use this, i believe it is a nice addition but it would probably make many of the old modifications defunct . The pricing is currently just 35 USD but thats probably just a starting price.

I have been involved with the ODP for quite some time now.  But lately I have been spending substantially more time with my web development business as not only it pays the bills but also was my passion all the time. ODP is and will remain to be another passion, but somewhere down the line I feel ideologically stumped . In my tenure I have seen many people arrive at this scenario for varying reasons and probably this is just another of those.  I don’t feel urged to quit , but i don’t at the same time feel motivated to go back and edit right now either.

Ever since I started editing I have been vocal about my reasonings and intentions .  I have edited , maybe not hugely in numbers some random 2500 or so edits , but I believe i also have participated in various discussions and verbal to and fro’s. In all this time, I have felt the need for quality editing as opposed to quantity – part of which is due to my involvement in my business and also my laziness , but a major part also to adhere to the Guidelines we always speak about. I like reading through old forum discussions, newsletters and instructions and formed some ideas of my own  from those.

But seemingly not all of them are to be followed – as determined by the current powers that be . With the modernization trend going on , the ODP is slanting towards a more “customer centric entity” which will supposedly need to look and cater to the vocal traffic on the web . Quality Check , although bookwise is the good thing to do , is less of a concern . In my time period I have seen the rise of need for grooming up smaller editors to larger zones without proper checking , from Metas ,  Editalls, Admins even when notified about it .  And in the recent past , I have also come across incidents where we are told that in written communications, we should think of catering more towards the vocal population on the web as opposed to the Editor community and layman visitors – which we used to be told as our Primary Interest Group .

I know what I am speaking off can easily be considered as blasphemous . But hey , this is MY blog .

We do custom scripting, development of shopping carts. Something I have noticed many times that requirements of shopping carts and ecommerce websites for different clients vary . While some may like a feature rich website along with a feature full admin panel, there are some clients who are more at ease with a simplistic approach and do not always very high end web store necessities. For clients who have a fixed idea on what they want, and even know of ready made shopping cart software such as osCommerce and Zencart or xCart etc, we do not usually offer a custom php mysql shopping cart solution. We rather suggest that we customize their open source application to match their look and feel or make it work as they want with maybe even some plugins and modifications / contributions.  But that was yeaterday , or last year .

With the advent of Magento , with its amazing look and feel , frontend , backend and readymade featuresets, I am totally blown off – have very little thing to say – why someone should not have it . Whatever I can say or something you may hear elsewhere , I can say is less ; It’s features speak volumes of its amazingness. With allready 500,000 downloads completed in January, and being mentioned in various developer blogs worldwide, over 115K registered community users, support forums in over 10 languages it would be foolishness not to follow it more closely and actively participate in its growth and build up one’s portfolio on the platform. And thats exactly what I have taken up to do .

Magento Ecommerce