The third Happy Server Friends community event this far led us into the Rathausstraße 6 in Vienna / Austria. This is the location of the so called Metalab. A place where you can hang around, play with technology, have parties and do all other kind of stuff.

The Metalab was pretty full, we even catched a couple of celebrities. Of course, I had my camera with me -- I don't go anywhere without it.

phpWebSite can do a lot of things. Maintain events, show announcements, provide forums... But is it able to do everything you want in the way you'd like it to?

I'd like to call for a little contest. The winning entry will be realized and published on my homepage. Please read on for the plan.

Edit: It's done. The View Restriction for Documents hack is available for you to deploy.

Most Blogs have them. Comment system that support homepage links. Making this possible in phpWebSite is not that much effort. Just add a template field, a new database field, a bit of php code and there you go.

To make life easier for you, I've lined out the steps required to add a homepage link to your phpWebSite. You can also see this comments enhancement in action on my homepage.

In the business-world, they are loved and hated at the same time. Reports with a hundred pages each, in very short intervals. They can overwhelm you. But with the right granularity, you can get insights you won't be able to obtain in a different way.

I've implemented automated reports for kiesler.at. In the first instance, there will be three reports sent as one new thread in the forum. Every moth, this report will be generated automatically by the user "system".

Googlebot the well-known crawler. A while ago, a new beta program of Google started. Google Sitemaps. There, Webmasters can upload sitemaps of their sites. Thus, pages not even linked properly can be made accessible to Googlebot easier.

Uploading happens with a well-defined XML format, which is specified on the Google Sitemaps homepage. I made a little php program to generate such sitemaps automatically out of the installation of a phpWebSite. You can even specify multiple phpWebSites on the same server and let the program generate a site map for each.

So you've stumbled across them. Open Source CMS systems. And are puzzled. What exactly can they do, how can they help me? Why shouldn't I simply go to a consultant, pay a bit of money and let him/her decide, what to use?

Well, you could of course do that. Or you could inform yourself prior to buying service or doing a site by yourself. I'd like to help you here by providing a collection of some of my favourite phpWebSite installations. You can see there, how they are used, how they look like, how they work.

The Linkmanager seems to be some kind of step-son of phpWebSite. Yes, we have a way to collect links, it apparently is saying. Another feature on the list. But is it actually useful?

One of the great things of the currently hyped "Social Bookmarking Tools" like BlinkList.com (very nice, btw.) are the bookmarklets available there. All you need to do to add your currently visited site to your "Blinklist" (=List of Bookmarks) is click a button on your Links-Toolbar.

One thing missing in phpWebSite are site-wide breadcrumbs. Usability experts agree: Bread crumbs aid getting along with a web site. Think for example about the Control Panel, where you are lost as soon as you click onto an icon.

How do you get back except pressing the back button? That depends on the idea the module author had when coding the module. Now, there's an alternative

Two years ago, fredgsanford asked in the phpwsforums about black themes. Back then, no one had created a black theme. Until now, there's still not too many of those. Actually, I don't know of a theme that's totally black on black but that shouldn't be too much of a problem.

I tried creating a theme that's only gray and black, with a hint of green as an accent. You can download it here for free. Enjoy!

Some people fancy a multi-languaged phpWebSite. Some tried out to simply set up multiple sites. Others experimented with branching. There's even a rather underused dynamic translation built into phpWebSite for just that purpose.

I've tried to set up a multi-language site and was successfull. A little bit of programming skills is almost all it takes to hack the modules you need to be able to hold multi-language content.