WordPress 3.0 - A Brief Look

June 2010 heralds the coming of WordPress 3.0, an exciting release as WordPress matures from a blogging platform to a Content Management System ( CMS).

Although it has long been possible to mold WordPress to function as a CMS, version 3.0 will make this even easier.

WordPress users will welcome the greater flexibility for widget placement and the ability to create custom post types. I can see many corporate users going gaga over the MultiSite functionality, technology coming from WordPress MU, that will mean a central administration area for mulitple WordPress sites, something you could only do on WordPress.com.

Here's a great 18-slide slideshow on what's coming in WordPress 3.0

Web Development and Programming

Prototyping using Pencil and Firefox

A screen mock-up using Pencil Prototyping is the method by which a designer/developer mocks up pages/screens for a web site or some piece of software, to help the design and development team visualize the product. Sketching out on a piece of paper is generally best as at this stage of development there are likely to be many changes and sketching on paper is quick and cheap.

However, if you need to create sketches that are a little more professional, e.g. for a presentation to the Board, then it helps to use a tool like Pencil, a plugin for Firefox, which allows you to build a prototype using actual screen elements e.g. buttons, text fields etc. Using it is dead simple and very quick - just drag and drop elements onto a canvas and edit the properties to suit. I made the one on the right in under a minute.

Get Pencil for Firefox here

Web Development and Programming

Ruby and Rails extension for Dreamweaver

Tags: ruby on rails

Ruby logo If Dreamweaver is your IDE of choice for web development and you're working on Ruby or Rails projects then the RubyWeaver extension is for you.

Here are some of the features of the extension, taken from the RubyWeaver site

Inserts a “Rails” object with tools to automatically insert VTL code into your document (appears in “Insert” toolbar in MX 2004 and up).
Adds .rb, .rhtml, .erb, .rxml, .rjs, .yml, and .sql extensions in Dreamweaver and associates those files with Dreamweaver for editing.
Adds Rails RHTML, Rails ERB, Ruby, YML, and SQL as a new document types in Dreamweaver. Also adds default pages which will open as the new document when these types are selected.
Supports color coding, tag hints, etc.

The extension works with versions MX through to CS4. Download the extension here...

Web Development and Programming

11 steps to creating your first iPhone app

Tags: iPhone

The success stories of iPhone app developers raking in tens of thousands of dollars from their simple app are almost never-ending lately. If you're one of those people who has an idea for an iPhone app then this list is for you.

Smashing Magazine have put down 11 steps here to creating your first iPhone app and one of the readers has included a useful post about the toolkit he used to create his first iPhone game. Check out his post here...

Web Development and Programming