There are many Elgg plugins to help you add additional functionality to your Elgg core. The idea of this post was not to put together “the best” list of Elgg plugins, only it’s a list of 10 Elgg Plugins that I have found to be extremely useful. I have used and tested each of these plugins with the most recent version of Elgg which at this time is Elgg 1.1. All have installed and worked perfectly and have been a great advantage to the Social Networks I have used them with. I hope they will do the same for you! 1. Default Widgets This plugin gives you the ability through a web interface to control the default widgets for new users profile and dashboard. This is an extremely helpful plugin because you can’t always assume that your users will know how to customize their profile & dashboard pages. (even though [...]

Web Messenger is an open source live chat support software available under the Eclipse Public License v1.0. Basically what you can do with this software is have some sort of button or image on your website for “Live Support”, when your visitor clicks on that button up pops up a window where this open source chat messenger comes in action. There are many services which can give your website this type of functionality, but with a high monthly charge. Finally there is an open source solution that you can customize on your own and not be bound to a contract! Here are the details you should know about this open source product: Server requirements A webserver or web hosting account running on any major Operating System PHP (5.x and above) with MySQL support MySQL 5.0 and above Supported browsers Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.0+ Mozilla Firefox 1.0+ Mozilla 1.4, 1.7 Opera [...]

OpenCart is an open source PHP based e-commerce platform for building an online store. It has many of the basic functions that other open source carts have, it’s search engine friendly, and it has a visually appealing backend interface. The community behind it is relatively small still so there are still only around 80 total extended contributions that you can add on too. You can check out the demo and give it a test run yourself. You will notice that the backend has a really nice simple design and is very very easy to use. I did some research in their forums and looked through some of the site examples that were running OpenCart. I found 3 really good websites that give good examples of the abilities this cart system has. 1. Gorgeous George 2. Beautyspot 3. Lytmed.dk After looking at these sites it made me even more interested in [...]

The author over at Top Notch Themes recently put together a cool blog post where he talked about Ubercart and why you should use it for your ecommerce solution. I personally am using Ubercart for my own ecommerce sites as well as all of my clients. I think it’s a great cart system and because it is made for the Drupal CMS it’s even better. Here are the 7 reasons that Steph listed in the article: 1) Big names are using it Prominent companies such as AOL and Warner Brothers Records has been using Ubercart for a while. More recently, Lullabot launched an Ubercart site for their conference registration. 2) Stable release for Drupal 5, significant progress on Drupal 6 version Ubercart for Drupal 5 has been at a stable 1.x branch since the beginning of June. While it’s not yet stable, there is a dev version out for Drupal [...]

Are you needing to build a website for a Real Estate agent? Or, are you actually a real estate agent yourself and are looking for a content management system that gives you specific tools for real estate? The Joomla open source content management system has 2 specific extensions that are open source that you could use. CMS Realty Joomla Extension This extension integrates your Joomla CMS with the Open Realty 2 open source php script. This component will allow you to integrate Open-Realty 2 into Joomla and have users syncronized between the 2 scripts. The Open-Realty admin area is incorporated into the Joomla admin area and it can also be accessed through the Joomla front end if desired. The component has most of the Open-Realty links pre-defined making it east to create Joomla menu items to each page. Custom parameters can also be set to allow direct linking to specific [...]

If you are looking for a book/manual to help you understand Zen Cart better than I recommend Zen Cart – E-commerce Application Development by Suhreed Sarkar. Zen Cart has alot of options and little bells and whistles and no matter what level of webmaster you are, it can be difficult to use, maintian, and develop. This manual will help answer many important questions you will have with your Zen Cart store. I have purchased a Zen Cart manual before, but this one is much better than the one I used previously. Here’s what book covers: Installing & Basic Configuration of Zen Cart Installing is one thing, but the basic configurations are another. Many developers, including myself have bypassed many of the basic configurations Zen Cart offers simply due to ignorance. You also learn exactly what Zen Cart has and can do right off the bat so you know what you [...]