Sometimes, a forum or even a chat is not enough. You want direct communication with someone across the world, with voice and visual support. For quite some time now Skype is one of the leading Voice-over-IP solutions, even having support for connecting to the outside world (=regular phones) and creating phone conferences (=phoning with multiple people).

Add a nice screen-sharing program to that, maybe even a collection of web-based productivity applications and you should be able to discuss and write down your ideas pretty quickly.

Please all vote for the "missing phpWSBB feature". The poll is open until beginning of March, then I'll write the hack and make it public on my homepage.

13 features are awaiting your vote, please choose the one that fits your needs best. Alternatively, the one you might seem to be cool or useful.

We have a winner: It's once more a photo-finish, the forum group restrictions a.k.a. private forums have won. This feature is already in CVS and implemented on kiesler.at so I'll work on improving the interface for it and release a hack.

A lot of people are confronted with a tough decission: Should I go for static pages or should I rather take a CMS for my web content needs? While the comparison between a static web page and a CMS might seem a little bit unfair to the pros, it is still reality and something worth reviewing.

The following article tries to shine a little light on the possibilities of phpWebSite, compared with static solutions that can cope without databases and even without php.

Every once in a while, someone at the phpws forums would like to have a suggestion on how to integrated phpBB into phpWebSite. Then, the usual answer is, to simply take phpWSBB which results in a frown. phpWSBB doesn't have the great features that phpBB has, does it?

Edit The newly-compiled phpWSBB 1.2.0 is now available for download. It contains the private forums hack as seen in CVS with some interface improvements.

Some site owners would like to have a list of members. Like they do in for example phpBB or other community oriented CMSes. Now you can have such a member list, including member statistics, in phpWebSite too.

Note: Please note, that this is a restricted download. This module is only available for Kiesler.at members who have voted for the phpWebSite awards 2006. Please also note, that this poll only runs until start of 2007!

The voting will be only for the category "non-commercial phpWebSite". All the four participants submitted to this category so this should be fair. Please vote for the site which you like the most. If you want, you can of course also comment your decision.

This poll will be running until start of 2007, only registered users can poll.

What can be more thrilling than a nice and fair competition? A competition of skilled webmasters and webmistresses, gifted and proven masters of phpWebSite? Well, I could think of a couple of things. Anyway, here's the plan.

There are three categories: Commercial, Non-Commercial and Creative. Commercial and Non-Commercial sites should be an obvious distinction. But what about the creative ones? This category is for "most creative phpWebSite use" and requires the participating sites to have either a self-made theme or at least one self-made module.

Update: We have a winner! The Femme Fatales got the most votes and thus won the phpWebSite awards 2006. Congratulations!

In an attempt to minimize clutter of the phpWebSite themes landscape, Picturesworld Studios merged their themes to the Kiesler phpWebSite Theme Preview Site. This makes life easier for people wanting to see all of the free available phpWebSites in just one place.

As usual, every theme on the preview site can be previewed with a single mouse click. Every theme is available to be commented as well.

Two similar functionalities put in two distinct modules instead of one big hack. The Link Manager module of phpWebSite neither can show a box with the latest links in it, nor can it show a box with random links in it.

These modules have been in use on kiesler.at for a long time. As there was a request for the ability to show recent links like on my site, I'm releasing them now

Thanks to everyone submitting ideas for the missing hack contest. All in all, I was impressed by the feedback this contest had this far. Now, it is time to vote.

16 requests made it in the next round, please vote for your favorite missing hack in this article.

And the winner is... It's almost a photo-finish. "Different rights to different documents" will be realized, as "Photoalbum bulk-import" is in CVS already anyways.

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.

If you have a lot of different phpWebSite installation, it can happen that you lose track of your hacks. To cope with this problem, I made a little module that detects a couple of well-known hacks and shows their installation status as a table.

Usage is easy: Just boost it in and click the icon in the Control Panel.

0.1.1 includes fixes by Yves Kündig. He fixed, amongst other thing, the support for phpWebSite installation with prefixed tables.

Social Bookmarking seems to be "the next big thing" since Blogs right now. Always being one to look deeper into current trends, I've taken a closer look at Social Bookmarking systems also and enjoy them. They enable you to share your bookmarks. Not only amongst different PCs but also with a large community.

And they help you get your bookmark list in shape by providing tags. That's where you come in. Do you like phpWebSite? Do you think, it should have more exposure?

Instead of thinking about time in absolute numbers, we often think relative. Like “I bought a new pair of shoes yesterday”, “My car's windshield broke this morning” (sad but true) or “I will start dieting. Tomorrow.”

Time is easier to grab this way, that's why you often find such relative time hints in various blogs and online publications also. Instead of showing an absolute date, vBulletin for example writes “Yesterday, 6.00am”. Google Desktop shows hints like “9 min ago” for its RSS feeds (Web Clips).

You can see those little orange icons all over the web now. RSS is everywhere, people love the really simple syndication. I must admit, I like it also. Google Desktop's Web Clips made me want it in its unobstrusive yet useful way.

So I enhanced phpwsrssfeeds to support forums as well as comments, added a couple of icons on kiesler.at and am very happy with the result.

Statistics are wonderful. They tell you, what's going on. Like how much bandwidth does a site need a day, how many visitors does it have. Or on a smaller granularity: How often has a thread of a forum been viewed and who are the guys posting the most?

Alas, phpwsbb is lacking that also, like so many things. Time to change it, I said to myself. And started coding a top thread-starter, top poster and most views screen for phpwsbb. It's working, just have a look into my forums.