While they don’t clearly state about the license of the application, the images you draw there are comletely yours and can be downloaded in either standard or high quality version.

Here is a screenshot of the Bomomo application.

Abstract Art using Bomomo

For Criss,  this criteria follows something like this -

• watching a movie which is not exactly JHILAAU
• A successful course of CS ( I’d call it course which i feel to be better than dose of Counter Strike)
• Hacking into some code
• Convincing learning which would make him more productive the very next day
• Sharing a nice time with JANTA or adding something to JANTA’s productivity ( This one is a recursive relation)

Meanwhile, I am working on a redesign of this website. As of now, its using Layers. I have not quite convinced myself with the colour schemes for the new Layout till the moment.

The other project is the website for my college which is definitely a bigger project. I’ve prepared design and layout for this. I’ll be focusing on its elegance and simplicity packed with its functionality.

I hope to get some more time and complete them as soon as possible.

The time is teaching me to have balance between work/projects according to their priorities.

Layers theme screenshots

The brand new version of ‘Layers’ gets you an admin panel to quickly change its settings with a few clicks. You can also use alternate style sheet now. This version gives you the gift of the elegent bright skin along with the legacy dark shine. Again, a few clicks are enough to change this look.

You also don’t need to put any extra effort to check this site manually for updates. This is gracefully integrated into the admin panel of the theme, which checks for a new release once every seven days.

You can download the brand new version here.

If you didn’t know about microformats

A microformat (sometimes abbreviated as uF is a web-based approach to semantic markup that seeks to re-use existing XHTML and HTML tags to convey metadata and other attributes. This approach allows information intended for end-users (such as contact information, geographic coordinates, calendar events, and the like) to also be automatically processed by software.

-wikipedia

In a bit more simpler meaning, if you have a software which can understand a web page written with microformat, it would be possible for the software to automatically recognize the informations like, contact information, geometric information, bookmarks etc.

If it is still not very clear, what will extra benefit will you get from it, just try operator firefox addon once with Layers theme. The theme uses hatom, hcard, XFN, rel-home, xFolk microformats.

The article by otto helped a lot for this update.

No doubt, I love WordPress.

To name a few, Joomla and Drupal are amongst the most popular CMSes. In fact, WordPress (primarily a blgging platform) also crosses boundaries of being ONLY a blogging platform, which certainly has got many powerful features for being considered as a CMS.

So what features should a GOOD CMS have? I am providing here a list of the features, which I believe, make a CMS really a CMS.

1. Dynamic generation of the web content with an optimized database, considering the speed and load on the server.
2. User account management with hierarchy of the user levels, which can be extensible as per the administrator’s wish.
3. A WYSIWYG type IDE for publishing text and other multimedia.
4. Automatic syndication
5. Live statistics with all kinds of information for maintenance and improvement of the content.
6. In site advanced search, for the usability purpose.
7. Should confirm with the web standards, for a nice cross browser compatibility. ( Did I talk about poor IE? )
8. Complete separation between the content,structure and it’s presentation, so that different templates could be applied without disturbing the content.
9. Content tagging and it’s categorization, which is definitely very important for easy navigation through the web site.
10. Build in form wizard, for feedback, contact us types of web forms. Which may be easily extensible with all types of form control elements.
11. Blogging and discussion forum with site-wide user management.
12. Search engine friendly and Human friendly URLs. Both aspects are again very important.
13. With all of these features included, it should super simple, clean, modular and extensible with plugins, templates etc.

Concrete5, is a new and fresh open source CMS which promises to fulfill all of these needs. As the concrete studio blog tagline says “Content management is a human right” they mean it. The CMS is hosted at sourceforge.net with 1390^th rank just in 3 months.

concrete5 logo

Actually Concrete5 has not just become so good, that nobody knew about it. The software was used at enterprise level for which you had to spend some good bucks. The conversion into open source — free software is nicely explained by the lines below on this post.

Here’s what I see. The biggest challenge my crew has is bizdev. We’re not perfect at everything, but we sure can deliver sweet stuff and we improve every day, except for sales.

Continuing this further Franz adds

I’m interesting in seeing what a larger open source developer community might contribute to the project from a code standpoint, but I’m hungry for their evangelism about concrete5 to their clients. I don’t need (or want) to own every dollar that is made off of concrete5. Why not just get out of the way and respond to opportunities as they arise as thousands of people deliver concrete5 powered solutions to their clients?

That’s the practical reason to go “free beer.” The real one is better:

Content management is a basic human right.

A very interesting thing about Content5 which puts it on a very special postion. As written on the contribute page of concrete5 webiste–

Got Cash? – making lots of money off of concrete5 and looking for a way to hit the donate button? Well that’s very generous of you, but we don’t want to create any guilt driven “pay what you can” pricing model. Send some money to one of these charities in our name, and mention concrete5 in your project’s press release….

Concrete5 is right on its path to the success…! This again explains “why open source works”. Visit the website once, take a demo of this CMS, you too will be stunned checking it’s beautiful web 2.0 design and features which make the administration just a matter of a few clicks.

update:

concrete5 is taking part in OSCON 2008 this time which is scheduled to be held on 21st July. ( The very first day of OSCON 2008 ). The topic of the session will be A Walk Through of Concrete5 - The Open Source, Edit-in-place Content Management System Made.. Very interestingly, they write on the OSCON 2008 website

After years of being evil software guys, we’ve seen the light and have gone fully open source.

Well, we can see that full glowing light bulb.

Whenever I went to wordpress.org, I was always wondering why there is no theme tab under the extend wordpress titled page. Now, this requirement has been fulfilled by the good wordpress guys. The user doesn’t have to go under the subversion details too, just one has to register for a new account on wordpress.org (great if you are already having that) and upload it with a few requirements.

The requirements are:

1. A single zip file, with all of the files themes file included.
2. There must be a style.css file containing:
   1. Name (which must be unique to the directory)
   2. Tags
   3. Version (in the format of x.x or x.x.x and must be unique to the theme)
   4. Align classes: .alignright, .alignleft, .aligncenter (see http://codex.wordpress.org/CSS for more details)
3. The screenshot file name must be screenshot.png, and be a real screenshot of the theme, not a splash screen.
4. Licensing must be GPL compatible.
5. No hidden, paid or sponsored links in the theme. Links back to the author’s site are fine.
6. The theme must be your own original work.
7. Adult/mature themes are not allowed.

That looks fine, ( Well I initially released my first theme under the same license which this site is ).

So now we have a central repository of well reviewed themes on this directory. Cheers for that!

1. GPL
2. Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike License

On freenode #cc channel bringatowel helped me solve some of my confusions about creative commons licensing. So things are quite clear in my mind now.

Creative Commons is working with IIT Bombay to create India jurisdiction-specific licenses from the generic Creative Commons licenses. Porting of the version 2.5 documents is completed.

As written on gnu.org about Creative Commons

This is a copyleft free license that is good for artistic and entertainment works, and educational works. Please don’t use it for software or documentation, since it is incompatible with the GNU GPL and with the GNU FDL.

GPL could also work well, but as the design and theme creation is more towards art I am going to consider Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 License. The attribution clause of creative commons looks interesting.

Also mentioned on the same page

Creative Commons publishes many licenses which are very different. Therefore, to say that a work “uses a Creative Commons license” is to leave the principal questions about the work’s licensing unanswered. When you see such a statement in a work, please ask the author to highlight the substance of the license choices. And if someone proposes to “use a Creative Commons license” for a certain work, it is vital to ask immediately, “Which one?”

So I am being specific over here. We have an answer to “which one?”

UPDATE :

After the introduction of new wordpress theme directory, i am thinking about changing the license to GPL. Now that looks sensible!

Logging in

After logging in to your sourceforge account, go to the concerned project page, which will be something like this [http://sourceforge.net/projects/wordmint]

Database Setup

Wordpress requires MySQL database management system for it’s beck-end as it stores all the CONTENT of it’s pages in the database. So we have to get that database setup first.

To set it up, in the admin menu click on Shell/DB/Web. This page contains wealth of information about your Database, Web services and shell. There in the Database Service heading click on Manage Project Databases link. ( If you already have setup a database, in that case the password for all the users will be visible in plain text, so be aware of this fact ). The project databases are not activated by default, they are activated only after you set password for different user permission sets. So set passwords for all the three users listed there.

Wait for sometime and the databases will be active. Keep the username admin and it’s password noted or remember.

On the same page, the phpmyadmin URL would be listed. Press your left mouse button over it. It should lead you to a username password authentification dialogue. Enter your admin username and it’s password. If you have entered the username and password correctly, then you should be taken to the phpmyadmin welcome page.

Delete the three dots ( … ) after the underscore ( _ ) in the Create new database entry cell and replace them with your database name. say ‘blog’, write it there and click on create.

WordPress download and upload on the web server

After setting up the database, download the latest version of WordPress from ‘http://wordpress.org/download/’

To transfer the file to the web server, we can use any of the methods described in file transfers page on the sourceforge wiki. I personally use sftp method. In case of windows Win-SCP is a good GUI client. Upload the zipped folder to the /home/groups/P/PR/PROJECT_NAME/htdocs/ directory. Here P and PR represent first and first two letters of your project unix name. PROJECT_NAME is your project’s unix name.

After uploading the zipped folder, uncompress it there using shell. Now the blog address would be http://projectname.sourceforge.net/wordpress. You could also change the folder name ‘wordpress’ to something else.If you want to integrate WordPress into the root of your domain (e.g. http://projectname.sourceforge.net/), move all contents of the unzipped WordPress directory (but excluding the directory itself) into the htdocs directory.

Configuring WordPress

Inside the wordpress folder find the wp-config-sample.php file. Edit it as described below and rename it to wp-config.php// ** MySQL settings ** //
define('DB_NAME', 'putyourdbnamehere'); // The name of the database
define('DB_USER', 'usernamehere'); // Your MySQL username
define('DB_PASSWORD', 'yourpasswordhere'); // ...and password
define('DB_HOST', 'localhost'); // 99% chance you won't need to change this value
define('DB_CHARSET', 'utf8');
define('DB_COLLATE', '');
As commented in the code, first replace ‘putyourdbnamehere’ with your database name which you created in phpmyadmin. (e.g. pr229903_blog ). Then enter the admin username as was listed on the “Shell/DB/Web” admin page of sourceforge. Now enter the password for the same account and leave the database host to the default value.

The Final Steps

After completing all the above steps, enter the installation address in your web browser’s address bar. e.g. http://projectname.sourceforge.net/wordpress/wp-admin/install.php or http://projectname.sourceforge.net/wp-admin/install.php (in case all the files and folders were moved to the htdocs folder of the web server ).

That’s it!!! WordPress should now be installed. At the end of the installation it will give you a login and a random password. The password is random, so be sure to write it down or at least copy and paste it. Once you’re logged in you can change the password.

For the JQuery port of the fancy menu effect read this post or this post at meta20.net (aka Smooth Menu for JQuery)