I learned from my friend that e107 is a promising open-source contents management system (CMS). It received very favorable comments as well as ever increasing supports from the community in recent few years. I once was a fan of PostNuke and then Mambo. He commented that the project activity of PostNuke has reached a very low level. For Mambo and Joomla, their communities are too commercialized. Xaraya and Typo3 are too complicated, while PhpNuke is not secure enough.

I am interested in finding a CMS that is simple and good enough to build a basic school website. One of my requirement is that it should use PHP and MySQL. The features I am looking for include simple mechanism to add and organize contents, good layout and usability for visitors, and support for Chinese language. From my initial and brief checking, it seems that e107 is a good candidate for me to take a closer look of it.

The following are three PHP scripts for creating and maintaining web-based Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) systems. They are all free of charge and can use MySQL as database in the backend. I also try to google them to see if there are any example websites that make a good use of them.

phpMyFAQ: It is an open source FAQ system using PHP and available for many databases. The following lists a few example websites that I found by googling the term “powered by phpMyFAQ”.

• DRM SDK - powered by phpMyFAQ 1.6.1
• Xtreme Internet Help Desk - powered by phpMyFAQ 1.6.2
• faq.phpwcms-docu.de - powered by phpMyFAQ 1.6.2

ODFaq: It is a PHP script that allows you to manage frequently asked questions. Users can create, edit, and delete entries using a user-friendly web based interface. The following lists three example websites that I found by googling the term “powered by ODFaq”. It may be a good option for some special needs of FAQ systems.

• Digital Space :: FAQs - powered by ODFaq v2.1.0
• Computer Services at the College of Family and Consumer Sciences - powered by ODFaq v2.1.0
• Liquid Frog FAQ’s - powered by ODFaq v2.1.0

Lethal Penguin’s FAQMasterFlex: It is a free, database-driven web-based application for creating and maintaining Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) on your web site. The following lists a demo provided by Lethal Penguin.

• FAQMasterFlex - Powered by Lethal Penguin.

Which one is the best you ask? I would say it depends on your needs. phpMyFAQ features a community-based FAQ system; users can both take and give in the growing of the FAQ knowledge base. It also provides many other features such as statistics about most viewed questions. ODFaq features like a company’s FAQ system for its customers and has a professional user interface on viewing and printing of web pages. Lastly, FAQMasterFlex has a different interface using popping up of small window for viewing FAQs. It may be a good option for some special needs of FAQ system.

What would you do if your home computer did not have Microsoft Word but you need to read a Word document sent from your friends? What would you do if you did not have PDF writer but you want convert your documents into PDF? You might have a number of solutions for these two problems. Here is a quick solution for you: use these two web-based services that quickly and freely convert your documents into PDF. You simply upload the document you want to convert and receive the PDF file.

• PDF Online ~ This free PDF conversion service supports a number of document formats including DOC, XLS, PPT, RTF, PPS, TXT, HTML, and PUB. You upload the document and receive the resulting PDF from your given email account.
• DOCTransformer ~ I know this web service via Robin Good. This web-based service allows you to upload a document file and to have it freely converted to PDF, RTF or to the OpenOffice Write document format.

I want to convert a DVD to a video clip and store in harddisk so that the video can be accessed more conveniently. I go to del.icio.us to search suitable tools and materials. Thanks to del.icio.us, I can quickly find the right tools and finish the task within a few hours. In the old days without the mechanism of social filtering and bookmarking, it might take me much more time to finish the same task. Well, here is what I get to complete the task.

How to rip a DVD: A Tutorial

Ripping a DVD to xvid or divx avi is really quite easy, if you have the right tools. You’ll first need to download DVD Decrypter and Auto Gordian Knot (AutoGK). DVD decrypter allows you to rip the raw DVD video and audio data off of your disk drive, decrypt the CSS protection, and finally remove any other protection schemes, such as Macrovision. AutoGK is a package of codecs and a GUI interface that will take the raw DVD data through an AV processing pipeline to produce a single windows video file.

AutoGK can also be used to convert various other formats of video, such as MPEG1 and AVI sources, into your favourite MPEG4 format.

I want to find a Wordpress plugin that can fetch a number of RSS feeds, mix them together, and output the contents in my Wordpress blog in time order. I have looked at 5 Wordpress plugins for this objective. The following are my initial findings.

RSS-Import (WordPress Plugin) - Import RSS-newsfeeds in your site. I think it is a simple and good plugin. However, it cannot do with multiple RSS feeds at a time. You use it by putting a PHP code like RSSImport(5, “http://www.stevenchoy.com/feed/”, false, false) somewhere in your wordpress template file. If you want to embed a feed content into a page or a post, you need to install another Wordpress plugin such as PHP Exec (need PHP version 4.3.0 or later) that allows running of PHP code in posts or pages. (more…)

Gobby (Version 0.2.2 released on 06.09.2005)

MoonEdit (Version 0.14.1s released on 28.01.2005)

Both are newly released freeware that feature multi-platform text editor for realtime collaboration (i.e multiple users, who are remote from each other, edit the same document together in realtime). I just wonder how can I make the case for a good application of these collaborative text editors.