Category : projects

in hacking, projects, software

Use “Admin Templates” for great looking web application MVPs

Over on Hacker News it’s not uncommon to hear from developers with limited design skills, trying to figure out how to bring decent-looking Minimum Viable Products to market. This morning, HN user flipacoin posted in that same vein, having been quoted a minimum of $10,000 in design fees for his web app.

Part of the standard HN recommendation for minimizing design costs is the use of off-the-shelf WordPress templates for your sales/marketing web site and blog. This is a great recommendation if your MVP is just the marketing site, which in many cases the right first step.

But what if you’re further along? How does this help you build your actual app?

Enter the “Admin Template.”

It turns out that ThemeForest* has an entire category of themes called Admin Templates that work great as web application user interfaces.

I originally discovered this treasure trove of off-the-shelf application interfaces while working on the backend for WebinarFlow. Scouring the theme sites turned up quite a few designs that would make for a great homepage, but none that seemed to fit very well for an app. Admin templates, on the other hand, are built specifically for web applications and CMS backends, and make quick work of prettying up most CRUD-style and B2B-type applications.

Most of the admin themes you’ll find on ThemeForest are standards-based very customizable. Most offer a choice of color schemes, fixed and liquid layouts, and a bunch options for typography, forms, tables, buttons, icons and widgets. And most are between 10 and 30 dollars!

I commented on flipacoin‘s post, pointing to the admin templates section on ThemeForest, and based on the strong reaction there, I decided to write up this post and share more broadly.

“The ‘Admin’ templates on Theme Forest are really kind of blowing my mind right now.” — tptacek

Here are a few of my favorite admin templates:

Adminique

Adminique Dashboard - Theme for web application user interface

Admin Control Panel Pro

Admin Contro Panel Pro Theme - web application skin

Adminica

Adminica Theme - web application skin

Yaadmin

Yaadmin Dashboard - Yet Another Admin Theme - web application skin

*Yes, I’m using affiliate links throughout. Hopefully you don’t mind. Fortunately ThemeForest’s admin themes are cheap enough I might make enough to buy one!

If you liked this post please join the discussion on HackerNews and follow me on Twitter.

in projects, software, tools

Help Test RSS Digest 1.1 Beta

I’m close to being able to push out an update to RSS Digest, version 1.1, but I would like to hear from some beta testers before pushing it out to the world. If you use RSS Digest and are comfortable on the bleeding edge, I’d appreciate it if you tested the beta.

The main features are in the reliability and debugging department. In particular, I’ve made enhancements to the scheduling algorithm and have included several new debugging tools.

Sorry, if RSS Digest is working great for you, this release won’t offer much in terms of shiny new features. Rather, my goal for this version is to make it easier to help the occasional user who runs into trouble.

Here are the instructions for installing the beta version of the plugin. (Of course it is always a good idea to make a database backup before upgrading WP or any plugins!)

1. Deactivate the current plugin in WordPress Settings
2. Delete the existing rss-digest directory under wp-content/plugins, or move it if you’ve made changes, e.g. to css
3. Download the beta version of the plugin to your wp-content/plugins directory:

http://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/rss-digest.1.1-beta_3.zip

4. Reactivate the plugin in WordPress

To check out the new debugging tools, go to the new Debug tab in the Settings > RSS Digest page. Check the “Turn on detailed logging” button. Enter your feed, schedule and option information on the main Settings tab. View the log after the scheduled time to see what happened.

Thanks for helping and please use the comments below to keep me posted! I’d like to hear from you whether all goes well or you run into trouble.

in projects, software, tools

Django-uploadify-s3 sample application now available

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about django-uploadify-s3 (DUS3), a Django application that makes it very easy to add browser-based uploads to your Django projects.

If you are interested in DUS3, you will probably also be interested in django-uploadify-s3-example, a well-commented sample project that incorporates DUS3 for HTTP POST uploads to Amazon S3. Please check it out and let me know what you think. Like django-uploadify-s3 itself, django-uploadify-s3-example is posted up on github.

Link: https://github.com/sbc/django-uploadify-s3-example.

in projects

RSS Digest 1.01 Released

Looking for a way to post items from an RSS feed to your WordPress blog in a tidy daily digest? Look no further, because RSS Digest 1.01 is now live up on WordPress.org. Already an RSS Digest user, and looking for new features and greater stability? Run, don’t walk, to your blog’s Plugins page and upgrade to this new version!

New features include the ability to stage your digest posts by setting them to post as draft or pending items, the ability to apply custom tags to your digest post, and additional scheduling flexibility. Fixes include better timezone handling and an enhanced scheduling mechanism. Plus, this latest version is compatible with WordPress versions up through 3.0!

Details | WordPress.org Home | Support

Use RSS Digest to pull in a daily or weekly digest of items from the RSS feed of your choice. You can pull in your Delicious bookmarks, Twitter tweets, Facebook entries, news items, or any other articles, posts or data available via an RSS feed.

UPDATE: The current version on WP.org is now 1.02.

in projects

RSS Digest looking good under WordPress 3

I spent a some time this rainy afternoon playing around with WordPress 3.0 Beta and the latest version of RSS Digest. I put it through it’s paces and didn’t turn up anything unusual, so I’ll be noting 3.0 compatibility when I formally release 1.0 in a bit.

If I get a chance I’ll comment further on WordPress 3 at a later date, but for now I’ll note that the new default theme looks good. Kubrick was getting a bit long in the tool I’ll say.