Facebook is one of the most popular social networking site with over 2 million members from every corner of the globe. There are countless 3rd party add-ons, widgets and plugins to enhance and enrich your Facebook experience. Here are some useful applications and extensions to spice up your Facebook account.
1. Facebook Toolbar - A very popular Firefox add-on that tightly integrates your Facebook account with your web browser. You can do search, upload and download photos, messages directly from this toolbar.
2. FriendMobilizer - This excellent application provides access to Facebook from wide range of smartphones and PDA's.
3. Facebook Desktop Client - A handy desktop application keeps you connected with Facebook and provides all updates, alerts right on your desktop.
4. LiveUpload - An excellent plugin for Windows that integrates with Windows Live Gallery facilitating direct uploads of photographs from Windows Live Gallery Beta to your Facebook account.
5. OutSync - A unique application that updates and syncs your Microsoft Outlook contacts photographs with that in your Facebook account.
6. Wordpress Fotobook - Want to keep all your Facebook photo albums on a single Wordpress page? Then use this handy Wordpress plugin to seamlessly import all your albums in your Facebook account.
7. Friendbar - A Facebook toolbar for Microsoft Internet Explorer. You can update your status, send scraps, share videos and web pages and can get alerts through this toolbar.
8. Wordbook - This Wordpress plugin integrates your Facebook account with your Wordpress blog and vice-versa.
9. Netvibes Widget - One of the popular widgets that lets you see your Facebook profile and friends from your personalized Netvibes home page.
10. Google Notifications Gadget - Integrates Facebook alerts into your Google Desktop application. Supports fluid resizing sidebar with internationalization support.
Saturday, March 28, 2009
10 Useful Facebook Tools and Add-Ons
Monday, March 16, 2009
10 Best Free And Open Source CMS For Web Developers
Web development has seen many changes in last decade. Some of the technologies has completely revolutionized this process. Prominent among them is use of content management systems (CMS). These systems provides a core-engine on which a site runs giving easy-to-use interface for web administrators. No coding from scratch is required. Just install it and your site is up in few minutes. Here are some of the best content management systems.
SilverStripe: This is one of the most flexible and easy-to-use content management system for editing the web sites. It's free and open source CMS that can be extended easily with plenty of add-ons like Sapphire Framework. SilverStripe is supported by plenty of modules, themes and widgets to give your site the desired look and feel.
Drupal: Yet another excellent free and open source content management system. Drupal is well known for its stability and large support community. You can find tons of themes, widgets and add-ons for this web development framework. Drupal also supports powerful user management system that includes authentication from various services like Jabber, Blogger, Live Journal and many more.
Joomla: Award winning open source and free content management system with easy-to-use interface. Like Drupal, this CMS also has a large support community. Joomla is well known for its extensions that add sophisticated features to an existing core-engine. Some large organizations of the world use Joomla as their CMS.
Frog CMS: This free and open source content management system is one of my favorites. Light weight, clean interface and very flexible. Frog CMS is based on Radiant CMS that worked on Ruby on Rails. This CMS requires PHP5, MySQL or SQLite3 for its working. A must try for every budding web developer.
Plone: A sophisticated multi-platform (Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, FreeBSD, Solaris) content management system with tons of features. Ideal for power users who want to make large dynamic web site. Plone comes with clustering capability and intelligent caching proxy integration. It also supports hardened role-based security model.
CushyCMS: No installation is required to use this innovative content management system. You just have to create an account for integrating your existing web site with CushyCMS system. Once the integration is done, you can directly edit the site code from within its user friendly interface. The integration process just takes a minute by supplying your FTP details for site connectivity. You can assign different roles (designer, content editor) to your web development team for restrictive access to your CushyCMS account.
Mambo: A flexible, free and open source CMS with large support community. Mambo is available for multiple platforms (Linux, Windows IIS, Mac OS X, FreeBSD). You can find tons of plugins and add-ons for this excellent content management system. Mambo is known for its stability and powers millions of sites. You can download additional language packs to add support for multiple languages.
Typo3: An ideal content management system for large scale distributed systems involving intranets. Offers tons of add-ons from its rich Typo3 extension repository. If you are working on a multi-location dynamic web portal with a large development team, this CMS is your best bet. Typo3 has a strong support community that provides quick answers to new users. 
dotCMS: A light weight and extremely flexible content management system. dotCMS supports content versioning and rollback in case something goes wrong. This powerful CMS also supports AJAX Photo Galleries,RSS Feeds, Streaming MP3 Player, Social Networking, Video Player / Galleries, Google Maps Integration, Online Form Creator / Handler and much more.
modx: This CMS is also one of my favorites because of its excellent interface that makes even a newbie developer feel at home. modx CMS has full support of Web 2.0 Ajax technology. modx has perhaps the best rich text editors for easy and fast web site coding. You can also switch to strict XHTML 1.0 coding format to meet the quality standards required by your project.
There are dozens of free content management systems available on Internet. The list presented here is picked randomly and in no way represent the popularity of any content management system.
