Steve Smith of Ordered List felt the WP Administration area needed a little ‘freshening up’ and wanted the utility to feel more like an application, and less like a traditional website. So he went ahead and took some time off his busy schedule to design a new look, codenamed Tiger following the Macintosh-esque design in its OSX Tiger.

So folks just to showcase the difference here’s what out admin interface looked like pre-Tiger:

and here’s what it looks like now with the awesome Tiger extension:

Sweet yes? You can download Tiger from Steve’s beautiful webblog here.

A friend asked if I knew of a good web calendar software a few days ago. I didn’t. But then I reminded myself of what another friend showed me a few months ago, some groupware software he wanted to install on my server. So I Googled around and found it. It’s called eGroupWare and it’s a one stop solution to your virtual office needs. It’s got everything you can think of, calendar, address book, messenger, wiki and more. It comes in a pretty package too and best yet it’s FREE. They have a working online demo if you’re curious.

Everything works nice. In fact I haven’t seen anything quite like this before. I’m definitely thinking about selling my desk and moving my office online!

If scripts and codes intimidate you I have some good news. You don’t have to be a good programmer to build a fully functional website. I was never really good with codes but I have a high level of curiosity. In short, I download code snipplets from other websites and modify them for my own. Hacking these scripts to suite your needs can be challenging, but it’s not half as hard as writing them up line-by-line yourself. For those of you who don’t like to search for things there are tons of online repositories where these scripts are held. Most of these repositories have thousands if not tens or hundreds of thousands scripts in store, ranging from code snipplets to full-featured web applications to help you build better functionality for your website.

One favorite place that supplies most of my scripting needs is Hotscripts.com and the reason they’re my favorite is because they offer a good range of variations, from ASP to XML, covering fields as broad as news publishing to rare things like zip code locators.

So next time you’re in need of a good programmer sans the budget, hire Hotscripts.com for FREE!

WordPress is the official successor to b2/cafelog and was developed by Matthew Mullenweg. WordPress is a personal publishing platform built on PHP and MySQL and is licensed under the GPL.

To put it another way, WordPress is a freely downloadable blogging solution that you can have up and running on your own site within 10-15minutes (slightly longer if you’re new to PHP and MySQL). This is no ordinary blogging platform though. This one comes with some really neat features. Like instant publishing without the need to regenerate static pages and intelligent text formatting. Spam protection with an integrated blacklist and open proxy checker. Support for multiple authors with their own individual logins and user levels. Themes, don’t get me started about the themes, there are just too many to choose from. For more features and examples of the themes checkout the WordPress Features and WordPress Themes pages.

WordPress is being used by thousands of sites all over the web and is currently used to run this site (we love WordPress ‘ x ‘ ). So, whether you’re a novice looking at setting up your own blog or a hardcore Internet veteran looking for something with a focus on web standards, that is both solid and aesthetically pleasing then get yourself a copy of WordPress today and start blogging in style.

Vanilla is a break-through in forum software. It focuses on what’s important, the discussions, rather than categories. It introduces a fresh forum experience with better structure designed to help the users. It’s also free. Nothing beats Vanilla. Every webmaster with a decent forum membership should consider swapping. Vanilla is delicious to the eyes.

From their website:

Meet Vanilla: a new kind of web forum

With Vanilla we wanted to break the mold created and followed by just about every other forum on the web. We sat down and thought about what we liked, and more importantly, what we didn’t like about web forums. We wanted emphasis on the discussions rather than the statistics. We wanted to stop using MSN or AIM to send secret messages to other forum members; We wanted to be able to save the common searches. Basically, we wanted the thing to work for us instead of against us. Most importantly we wanted it to be free and we wanted it to run on just about every web server out there. So, Vanilla is a PHP / MySQL solution that is 100% open-source. You can take it and alter it and use it free of charge. The GPL is your friend.

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