Sometimes, a forum or even a chat is not enough. You want direct communication with someone across the world, with voice and visual support. For quite some time now Skype is one of the leading Voice-over-IP solutions, even having support for connecting to the outside world (=regular phones) and creating phone conferences (=phoning with multiple people).

Add a nice screen-sharing program to that, maybe even a collection of web-based productivity applications and you should be able to discuss and write down your ideas pretty quickly.

Please all vote for the "missing phpWSBB feature". The poll is open until beginning of March, then I'll write the hack and make it public on my homepage.

13 features are awaiting your vote, please choose the one that fits your needs best. Alternatively, the one you might seem to be cool or useful.

We have a winner: It's once more a photo-finish, the forum group restrictions a.k.a. private forums have won. This feature is already in CVS and implemented on kiesler.at so I'll work on improving the interface for it and release a hack.

A lot of people are confronted with a tough decission: Should I go for static pages or should I rather take a CMS for my web content needs? While the comparison between a static web page and a CMS might seem a little bit unfair to the pros, it is still reality and something worth reviewing.

The following article tries to shine a little light on the possibilities of phpWebSite, compared with static solutions that can cope without databases and even without php.

Every once in a while, someone at the phpws forums would like to have a suggestion on how to integrated phpBB into phpWebSite. Then, the usual answer is, to simply take phpWSBB which results in a frown. phpWSBB doesn't have the great features that phpBB has, does it?

Edit The newly-compiled phpWSBB 1.2.0 is now available for download. It contains the private forums hack as seen in CVS with some interface improvements.

Some site owners would like to have a list of members. Like they do in for example phpBB or other community oriented CMSes. Now you can have such a member list, including member statistics, in phpWebSite too.

Note: Please note, that this is a restricted download. This module is only available for Kiesler.at members who have voted for the phpWebSite awards 2006. Please also note, that this poll only runs until start of 2007!

The voting will be only for the category "non-commercial phpWebSite". All the four participants submitted to this category so this should be fair. Please vote for the site which you like the most. If you want, you can of course also comment your decision.

This poll will be running until start of 2007, only registered users can poll.

What can be more thrilling than a nice and fair competition? A competition of skilled webmasters and webmistresses, gifted and proven masters of phpWebSite? Well, I could think of a couple of things. Anyway, here's the plan.

There are three categories: Commercial, Non-Commercial and Creative. Commercial and Non-Commercial sites should be an obvious distinction. But what about the creative ones? This category is for "most creative phpWebSite use" and requires the participating sites to have either a self-made theme or at least one self-made module.

Update: We have a winner! The Femme Fatales got the most votes and thus won the phpWebSite awards 2006. Congratulations!

In an attempt to minimize clutter of the phpWebSite themes landscape, Picturesworld Studios merged their themes to the Kiesler phpWebSite Theme Preview Site. This makes life easier for people wanting to see all of the free available phpWebSites in just one place.

As usual, every theme on the preview site can be previewed with a single mouse click. Every theme is available to be commented as well.

Two similar functionalities put in two distinct modules instead of one big hack. The Link Manager module of phpWebSite neither can show a box with the latest links in it, nor can it show a box with random links in it.

These modules have been in use on kiesler.at for a long time. As there was a request for the ability to show recent links like on my site, I'm releasing them now

Thanks to everyone submitting ideas for the missing hack contest. All in all, I was impressed by the feedback this contest had this far. Now, it is time to vote.

16 requests made it in the next round, please vote for your favorite missing hack in this article.

And the winner is... It's almost a photo-finish. "Different rights to different documents" will be realized, as "Photoalbum bulk-import" is in CVS already anyways.

The third Happy Server Friends community event this far led us into the Rathausstraße 6 in Vienna / Austria. This is the location of the so called Metalab. A place where you can hang around, play with technology, have parties and do all other kind of stuff.

The Metalab was pretty full, we even catched a couple of celebrities. Of course, I had my camera with me -- I don't go anywhere without it.

phpWebSite can do a lot of things. Maintain events, show announcements, provide forums... But is it able to do everything you want in the way you'd like it to?

I'd like to call for a little contest. The winning entry will be realized and published on my homepage. Please read on for the plan.

Edit: It's done. The View Restriction for Documents hack is available for you to deploy.

Most Blogs have them. Comment system that support homepage links. Making this possible in phpWebSite is not that much effort. Just add a template field, a new database field, a bit of php code and there you go.

To make life easier for you, I've lined out the steps required to add a homepage link to your phpWebSite. You can also see this comments enhancement in action on my homepage.

In the business-world, they are loved and hated at the same time. Reports with a hundred pages each, in very short intervals. They can overwhelm you. But with the right granularity, you can get insights you won't be able to obtain in a different way.

I've implemented automated reports for kiesler.at. In the first instance, there will be three reports sent as one new thread in the forum. Every moth, this report will be generated automatically by the user "system".

Googlebot the well-known crawler. A while ago, a new beta program of Google started. Google Sitemaps. There, Webmasters can upload sitemaps of their sites. Thus, pages not even linked properly can be made accessible to Googlebot easier.

Uploading happens with a well-defined XML format, which is specified on the Google Sitemaps homepage. I made a little php program to generate such sitemaps automatically out of the installation of a phpWebSite. You can even specify multiple phpWebSites on the same server and let the program generate a site map for each.

So you've stumbled across them. Open Source CMS systems. And are puzzled. What exactly can they do, how can they help me? Why shouldn't I simply go to a consultant, pay a bit of money and let him/her decide, what to use?

Well, you could of course do that. Or you could inform yourself prior to buying service or doing a site by yourself. I'd like to help you here by providing a collection of some of my favourite phpWebSite installations. You can see there, how they are used, how they look like, how they work.

The Linkmanager seems to be some kind of step-son of phpWebSite. Yes, we have a way to collect links, it apparently is saying. Another feature on the list. But is it actually useful?

One of the great things of the currently hyped "Social Bookmarking Tools" like BlinkList.com (very nice, btw.) are the bookmarklets available there. All you need to do to add your currently visited site to your "Blinklist" (=List of Bookmarks) is click a button on your Links-Toolbar.

One thing missing in phpWebSite are site-wide breadcrumbs. Usability experts agree: Bread crumbs aid getting along with a web site. Think for example about the Control Panel, where you are lost as soon as you click onto an icon.

How do you get back except pressing the back button? That depends on the idea the module author had when coding the module. Now, there's an alternative

Two years ago, fredgsanford asked in the phpwsforums about black themes. Back then, no one had created a black theme. Until now, there's still not too many of those. Actually, I don't know of a theme that's totally black on black but that shouldn't be too much of a problem.

I tried creating a theme that's only gray and black, with a hint of green as an accent. You can download it here for free. Enjoy!

Some people fancy a multi-languaged phpWebSite. Some tried out to simply set up multiple sites. Others experimented with branching. There's even a rather underused dynamic translation built into phpWebSite for just that purpose.

I've tried to set up a multi-language site and was successfull. A little bit of programming skills is almost all it takes to hack the modules you need to be able to hold multi-language content.

If you have a lot of different phpWebSite installation, it can happen that you lose track of your hacks. To cope with this problem, I made a little module that detects a couple of well-known hacks and shows their installation status as a table.

Usage is easy: Just boost it in and click the icon in the Control Panel.

0.1.1 includes fixes by Yves Kündig. He fixed, amongst other thing, the support for phpWebSite installation with prefixed tables.

Social Bookmarking seems to be "the next big thing" since Blogs right now. Always being one to look deeper into current trends, I've taken a closer look at Social Bookmarking systems also and enjoy them. They enable you to share your bookmarks. Not only amongst different PCs but also with a large community.

And they help you get your bookmark list in shape by providing tags. That's where you come in. Do you like phpWebSite? Do you think, it should have more exposure?

Instead of thinking about time in absolute numbers, we often think relative. Like “I bought a new pair of shoes yesterday”, “My car's windshield broke this morning” (sad but true) or “I will start dieting. Tomorrow.”

Time is easier to grab this way, that's why you often find such relative time hints in various blogs and online publications also. Instead of showing an absolute date, vBulletin for example writes “Yesterday, 6.00am”. Google Desktop shows hints like “9 min ago” for its RSS feeds (Web Clips).

You can see those little orange icons all over the web now. RSS is everywhere, people love the really simple syndication. I must admit, I like it also. Google Desktop's Web Clips made me want it in its unobstrusive yet useful way.

So I enhanced phpwsrssfeeds to support forums as well as comments, added a couple of icons on kiesler.at and am very happy with the result.

Statistics are wonderful. They tell you, what's going on. Like how much bandwidth does a site need a day, how many visitors does it have. Or on a smaller granularity: How often has a thread of a forum been viewed and who are the guys posting the most?

Alas, phpwsbb is lacking that also, like so many things. Time to change it, I said to myself. And started coding a top thread-starter, top poster and most views screen for phpwsbb. It's working, just have a look into my forums.

One nice feature of FireFox is the built in search bar. It is customizeable, you can write search plugins for every site imagineable. You are on a phpWebSite support site now, so chances are you'd like to search on it as well.

The good news is, that I've already done the work for you. All you need is to download and install it.

2005 was a very eventful year. Looking back, a couple of things happend that I didn't even think of earlier. I met people who are very important in my life, I created tools that are valueable to people, things went just fine.

I'd like to thank each and every visitor of this very site for his/her ongoing support and would like to review 2005 in this short article.

More and more people switch from regular static homepages to dynamic ones. The so called WCMS (web based content management systems) are very popular because of their ease of use and setup. One module you can see in about every WCMS, be it a stand-alone forum, a portal or even a blog, is a poll module.

I've analyzed 49 sites running the phpWebSite WCMS. I've taken a look at how the site owners use the polls, especially what kind of questions they are polling and how successful they are in doing so.

Building Websites with Mambo is already the third book I'm reviewing from Packt Publishing. Mambo is the CMS that has won three awards in 2005 alone: Best Open Source Solution twice and Best of Show once.

Should you decide to give Mambo a go you might be interesting in having a printed manual for it. Building Websites with Mambo could be just the thing for you.

A few days ago, Wayne from the phpWebSite support forums posted a question. Is there a way of previewing and trying all the different phpWebSite themes without downloading them first? A few hours later, there was.

I've implemented a very simple site using Wiki and the Anonymous Theme hack. The Wiki takes care of a history as well, so everyone can check out which new themes there are available for preview.

The American Telephone and Telegraph Company -- better known as AT&T -- has a natural affinity to voice-transmissions. It comes to no surprise that a company with telephony-roots would encourage and sponsor the developement of a high-quality, artificial voice system.

Still, listening to the Natural Voices demos is quite amazing anyway. Except for minor glitches, Natural Voices intoniation is first class. What's even more amazing: I like the german speech better than the english one. It sounds even more natural to me.

A few days ago, I met with a couple of friends in Viennas' first district. It is probably one of the most expensive places for businesses and also very crowded. Successful advertisements would probably have a very high impact there.

But what about non-successful, even non-working advertisements? Would they be also boosted? Or would people simple pass by and ignore them?

Most hosting plans including MySQL also include phpMyAdmin as a front end. A lot of open source php applications depend upon MySQL as a database backend. Knowing more about phpMyAdmin could thus improve a webmasters experience.

Packt publishing was as nice as sending me a copy of their Mastering phpMyAdmin book for review. I hope you enjoy this review as much as I did reading it!

...and by bombing I don't mean bombing Iraq. No, the term Google Bombing actually refers to something else, spamming Google by doing lots of links with a given anchor text.

In a recent post of the Google Blog, the major player of the search engine market itself defends this practice. It's reflecting the current opinion on the Internet and thus needs to be respected, they write in an article to be remembered.

September, 11 in US probably wasn't just another day. People thought about the World Trade center, the two planes that crashed into it 2001 and the sadness that followed that event. There is a reason why searching for september 11th on Google doesn't lead to a calendar.

But what about Europe, especially Austria? I haven't noticed too much of worries here. US is far away, there's a big ocean between Europe and America. Some people even get adventurous and fly anyway. Like us. We did a helicopter ride and enjoyed it.

A couple of weeks ago, Andrew Patterson started a phpWebSite contest. The judges Sharon Renshaw and Shawn Murray were found rather quickly, people started working on their submissions. The goal was finding a new look for a new portal.

phpWebSite themes is the new project from the creators of phpwebsitemanual.com and will focus on phpWebSite themes. I'm already curious how it will turn out and wish all involved parties the best of luck!

Today at breakfast I had a surprise on my homepage. The Outlaw Group apparently payed me a visit! Instead of the usual Sharondippity-Theme, all I got was "OutLaw Group". Nothing more.

The good thing of course is a lot of saved bandwidth. Instead of the old 3.7K, the dispatcher was only 13 Bytes big. Then again, a static content management portal isn't exactly my idea of a good time.

This is a small testpoll to find out, wether the phpWebSite poll module can handle images in questions as well. The answer to this question is yes, it can handle them perfectly.

Please look inside the article to see it for yourself ;-)

Robots kept fascinating me for years. When I was very young, I got a toy-robot as a present. But I've been disappointed, it was nothing more than a tape player.

Still, I've been monitoring the progress robots -- and especially androids, human like robots -- made. And they never failed to amaze me. The current c't even wrote about an android that interviewed people who passed by. Quite amazing.

I've been asked to review a book. It's called Typo3 Enterprise Content Management, it's about Typo3 and it contains a lot of information.

In this article, I'm trying to find out the focus of the book, the target audience and try to write a bit about its content, too.

Diets are everywhere. Be it modern ones like the Atkins-Diet, where you change your body to burn more fat by eating more fat. Or the Hacker's diet, where you simply count everything exactly.

Other people simply try to eat less and do more sports. Or simply eat less calories.

If you'd ask me about my favourite piece of software, I'd answer Photoshop instantly. Naturally, I'm interested in the surroundings of Photoshop as well. Like Adobe, the Photoshop team or their building.

I've just happend to come across a nice little picture story on PhotoshopNews, which shows the Photoshop team as well as Adobes headquarter in St. Jos / California

phpNuke is a well-known portal solution and the base of a lot of other open source CMS projects. Think about postNuke, phpWebSite or Xoops. I did an interview with Francisco Burzi, the man behind the phpNuke project.

Mr. Burzi tells about his family, his job, the future of phpNuke and his thoughts on theoretical aspects of content management systems.

Thanks to Robert Kennedy for proof-reading!

Native english speakers could consider themselves lucky. They don't have a need for accents, don't know about umlauts, about the -symbol, about the chinese, arabic, korean alphabet, and so on. A few letters, a few numbers, a few special keys there you have your english keyboard. The Optimus keyboard is a design study that does more than that.

Instead of having the letters painted on the keyboard, the keys are little displays. I counted 132 keys, that makes 132 small displays. Obviously, this invention is not from an native english speaker.

The previous issue of the german magazine c't (2005, heft 15) had an interesting short one column article about an fascinating piece of software. It enables to share the graphics card of a second PC with the first one over the network, thus enlarging your real screen estate.

Too good to be true? No, it actually works. You can't expect wonders of course, but it's very nice.

I have just upgraded the local Wiki-Module to the current version 0.3.0. The module has been announced on phpWebSite Manual, but I couldn't find it on the appstate homepage yet.

The big new feature of this version is the Wiki Toolbox, as seen on the image.

kiesler.at experienced 9 hits from AltaVista today. Altavista, the big search engine that was popular before Google came up. Naturally I was a bit puzzled as the search query view of the current Visitors 1.2 beta didn't show any AltaVista hits.

The explaination is rather simple. The hits wheren't caused by search queries. No, they where triggered by a special AltaVista random image link.

For me, phpWebSites phpwsbb forum module has a lot of potential which is largely unused. One step in the right direction would be the display of

• Who replied last and
• how many replies have there been to a thread

in the phpwsbb last forum posts block. It would also be nice to have the latest post label (instead of the thread label) and the editor of the post (if there is one) instead of that of the owner. Well, I hacked phpwsbb again to do just that.

Common websites rely on external webmetric-analysis. How many people came on the site, what did they do, where did they go? The Visitors module took that idea and enhanced the statistics with data only a native application would be able to find out. Who was logged in and when? Which modules did he/she use?

But Visitors is quite a bit away from being a full-fledged datamining tool. While it is possible to see which path a visitor on a certain site took right now there is no generic history analysis as of now. I've described some concepts during the past semesters Data Warehousing 2 lecture.

Synergy has always been a very interesting topic to me. Synergy means: mixing up a couple of things so the result is bigger than the initial ingrediences. Henkel did that for a nice ad I stumbled across linkdump.

Henkel is owner of the well-known Loctite brand. What they did was a synergy of advertising and a reality-show: They glued up a monitor with their glue, put a web cam in front of it and transmit the resulting picture over the net. People worldwide are able to send a message to the screen.