I have been doing a bit of work on some Webme plugins recently. All of the plugins I have been working on are available for download in the webworks-webme SVN and live on the Monaghan Medical Centre website.

Dynamic Search Plugin

The dynamic search plugin enables you to search different sections of your website dynamically. You can choose between searching Site Wide or a selection of categories. You can add catagories in the admin area. A catagory must be a pagename and the plugin will search that page and all sub pages. The plugin also keeps a record of the most popular searches and displays a link to them on the main search page.

The entire plugin is written in both PHP and jQuery. The PHP end acts as a backup for the javascript end. It also allows you to use your own search form to display results from this plugin, as I have done on the MMC site.

Download | View Live

Mailing List Plugin

This is a plugin that I released a while ago but I have made a few changes recently. Previously there was PHP form validation which replaced the form itself if you made a mistake. The problem with that was, depending on the setup of your website, it might not work layout wise. Thats why I have replaced it with a nice jQuery alert, similar to the one I am using on Furasta. The changes aren’t large enough to release a new version but I have updated the SVN and supplied a new download link.

Download | View Live

News Plugin

I wrote this plugin trying my best to make it compatible with the Dynamic Search plugin. If you want to create a news page then you just choose news as the page type. To add a new news item you simply create a new subpage of the news page. If you look at the News page in the frontend it will show a summary of all the news items. It is a very simple plugin which has no database, only 4 files and features pagated results. You can also search the News section easily using the Dynamic Search plugin.

Download | View Live

I also did quite a lot of work on a Music Store plugin which works similar to the iTunes Store. The plugin is not live yet but it will be soon and in the end I decided not to release it, for the moment anyway, because it gets very complicated when dealing with paypal access details. If anyone wants a copy for it, at a price, I can tailor it for your exact needs.

I have decided to work on a new full version of Furasta CMS. I have already started on work for version 1.0 which will be a full re-write.

Also Michael Dever will be helping me out and developing some of the code himself. I am very excited about this new version, as it is a full re-write it will give me an opportunity to include some of the features that I have been thinking about for quite a while, such as:

1. Plugin Architecture. Hopefully I can make this work well. I have looked carefully at the architectures of WordPress, Webme and Joomla and I hope to make one that can beat them all in performance and ease of use.

2. Users and Permissions. The CMS will include the ability to create different users, which have certain permissions to access certain pages. This is something which I touched on in v0.1.5 but intend to improve.

3. New Control Panel. The admin area will now comprise of a new, simplified, control panel. The aim here is to create a CP that looks empty, but which is full of content.

4. News Page + Comments Feature. I have wanted this for a while. Once I am confident enough with it I will move my WordPress blog to Furasta to prove that it works.

5. Possibly a simple file manager. Although I am strongly considering using KFM.

6. Re-write of the Smarty syntax. Possibly get rid of smarty all together.

Because of the massive difference between v0.1.5 and v1.0 the website http://furasta.org will have to be reconstructed. But it’s all very exciting. Now less talk and I have to get down to the action, tomorrow, after a bit of WOW.