Yahoo recently introduced a new service to their Yahoo! Web Hosting. It’s the popular blogging package, Movable Type. One of the features listed for Movable Types is: Speed - Use of FastCGI makes the Movable Type experience on Yahoo! Web hosting services the fastest on the web With the speed of development of PHP, ASP, and other server side technology, it was interesting to see a company, the likes of Yahoo!

I came across an page talking about AHAH (Asynchronous HTML and HTTP). I’ve already done an article on this, but this one caught my eye because of his mention about security. He makes an interesting observation about people with criminal intent. With Ajax a hacker only needs to fake a domain name once. He can then fake browser activity by using Ajax to “refresh” the entire HTML body. Can we say phishing?

We all know that phpBB is prone to a number of security risks. People used to use Google (among other search engines) and search for “phpbb” to find a list of phpBB sites and try their exploits on them. The phpBB development team addressed this problem a couple versions before. They stopped displaying the version number in the footer of the forum. Right now, Google has out right blocked the entire search.

Here is an addition to my previous post on phpBB skins. WebsiteTemplates.com.au claim to be offering phpBB skins but I’ve searched for some on their website and haven’t been able to find them yet. I’m wondering what took everyone so long to start offering templates from phpBB. This is another score for Open Source in my book.

Yakov Fain wrote an interesting article: A Cup of AJAX? Nay, Just Regular Java Please at SYS-CON DEUTSCHLAND. I can agree that big Internet guys [Google] can and should invest some serious dough into supporting screen-refresh-on-mouse-move in HTML-based screens. But when it comes to a regular Intranet business application, when the users/browsers/platforms are known and when the cost of the project development matters, Id stay with a fat client written in Java, or (if you like a fancy GUI) Macromedia’s Flash or Flex.

Guess who’s doing phpBB templates now. Yep, our friends over at TemplateMonster.com are now doing phpBB 2 templates. These templates include the actual templates files, PSD files with the graphics, fonts and icons. From Web Hosting News: “We are always glad to support Open Source projects, especially those of them which are of great popularity thus adding additional value to them??? says Gary Nichols, head of marketing at template Monster.

There has been a lot of buzz about this book, Ajax in Action. I do plan to buy it, or rather get my boss to purchase it for the office :), so I haven’t read it yet. Considering all the reviews it’s been getting, I’ve decided to alert you guys about it. Maybe one of you could purchase it and send me a review. Happy Reading.

Ok, by now I’m guess that we all know what Writely. It’s a wonderful little Web (AJAX) based word processor. Does almost everything that Microsoft Word does and even some things it doesn’t (PDF creation). The guys over at TechCrunch have done an article on it. There have been many blogs entries on Writely, but this one struck me because of the comments on it. Some people are downplaying what the Writely team has produced here.

I found this link somewhere, I can’t remember where. But Li Shen has packaged a nice AJAX wrapper called AJAX Client Engine (ACE). I downloaded it and took a look at it and I must say, it is quite functional. I took a look at his source code and found it to be relatively clean. It’s not too bulky making it a nice thin wrapper and he made it very object oriented.

A blog entry at Ask MetaFilter stirs up an interesting comparison, one which I should have covered a long time ago since it directly affects the way I work.

I’m not trying to stir up a Windows vs. Unix type debate but am interested in your thoughts and experiences, either as an administrator or user.

Personally, I feel that both of these are very powerful forum packages, but let me just mention that vBulletin is and always will be the best and preferred forum software. However, we’re doing the whole free thing, so let’s not even go into the costs of vBulletin. Let’s focus on the two free packages, phpBB and Simple Machines SMF. I have

I have been doing a lot of advanced work on a phpBB forum for over a year now, but I recently stumbled upon SMF. I was setting up a new website in the Joomla CMS for which I needed to have a forum integrated. It was easy enough to integrate the template so that it looks seamless, but I was also looking for a way to integrate the user database of both phpBB and Joomla. At the time their were no components around to do so, but there was a component to integrate SMF with Joomla, therefore I decided to give SMF a try. These are my observations after using both and doing a little bit of research: