Why use WebMatrix Facebook helpers verus just using facebook generator? - facebook

I am wondering why would you use the html helper for something like the like button
then using the generator from facebook

Why use the Twitter helper, or the Gravatar helper for that matter? Or any helper?
WebMatrix is targeted at an audience of learners. This group is barely assumed to know HTML (although I realise that description covers a lot of experienced Web Forms developers too), so providing a reasonably consistent set of APIs to help make use of social networking widgets makes sense to me. It means that the learner can have Twitter feeds and Like buttons on their first site in a few seconds, rather than having to trawl all over the Internet to find out how these things are done, and then potentially getting confused by the developer material offered by these sites. If they achieve a degree of success early on, they will more likely persist with the framework.

Related

Can WordPress handle these functionalities?

I'm a front-end designer/developer whose weapon of choice for the back-end is WordPress. Up to this point all of my projects involving WordPress were fairly basic and it has handled everything beautifully. I just landed a new client that wants some extra functionality built into his next project and I'm hoping some of you WordPress wizards can give me some good advice while I'm putting together the quote.
I'm trying to limit the need for any subcontracting for the back-end functionality, so my question is whether or not WordPress can handle the following (via plugins or light custom manipulation):
The idea behind the site is to be a community calendar based on location that Health Care providers can log in and post their events to, as well as participate in discussions, blogs and all the other WordPress goodness. The specific functionalities that I'm unsure of the best way to accomplish are:
Full featured calendar that members with access can add their own events to - must be searchable by date/type of event/location etc
Event generator module for members that integrates with calendar - includes upload field for images and forms for details event info
Interactive map to filter both of the above by location (I'm assuming this will need to be flash, but I'd rather find another solution if possible)
I know there are other solutions out there that may be more suited to this than WordPress (Drupal, custom build, etc) but if it's at all possible to tackle this as a one man show then I'm going to charge it head-on!
Stack Overflowers and fellow WordPress fans...your insight would be much appreciated. Thanks in advance for your time.
This graph grants your experience with your weapon of choice, but the results are still clear. You can still tackle this as a 1 man show, it will just take a bit of a learning curve to conquer the fundamentals of a CMS more suited to the task at hand. I'm sure plenty of WordPress affecionados will come along and strangle my reputation, but I've worked with both and have found that in terms of flexibility, WordPress is not king, and for the custom coding you are going to have to do (hope you have some PHP?), I feel that you will find it easier to integrate with another platform. This task will be difficult if not impossible to accomplish without writing code, even if there is a set of plugins that appear on the face to match your needs perfectly.
But anyway, since you probably don't really care that much about my opinion, for WordPress, your plugin options look like..
Calendar - Events Calendar
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/events-calendar/
The screenshots don't look terribly promising though.
Most plugins I have found are geared toward being administered from the admin panel, it may be difficult to provide a user interface to such plugins, and it does not look like the event calendar is an exception. An experienced developer should be able to hook into the event publishing code with relative ease, but it could be a frustrating experience for the inexperienced.
For interactive maps, the Google Maps API is very feature rich, and you should be able to adapt it to your suit your mapping needs, regardless of platform.
If you want all of your providers to have their own blog, etc, what was once the WordPress MU plugin, but is now core-bundled WordPress MS (multisite) is what you need.
This again may also prove rigid, and you may encounter difficulty trying to bend the iron of WordPress enabling all your multisite users to be able to post to a common community site. I've only built 2 platforms with MU, so I'm not positive about this.
To unapologetically reiterate my first point, what would be light custom code may turn impossibly frustrating using WordPress.
I like WordPress, and choose it often for my clients. I have never extended it to suit a larger project.
If you do decide to use it, I look forward to hopefully helping you with any questions you may have along the way, feel free to ask.

Using a facebook page as a content management system?

Greetings,
So I am making a website for a friend who wants to be able to make posts onto his facebook page, have these posts (only by him. and preferably their assorted comments) be pulled in on his website.
I haven't done any work with facebook's api before, and I'd most likely be writing this in PHP (maybe wordpress?) but I am open to other languages / frameworks depending on what is appropriate.
possibly too heavy for your requirements, but check out the (free) Community edition of the Liferay portal server and the facebook portlet in particular. I'm not saying it is what you want, but if it supports your requirements out of the box with no coding and a little configuration it may be worth a look.
You might be interested in using Drupal with the Drupal Facebook module: http://drupal.org/project/fb It takes a lot of pain out of dealing with the fp apis, and you can quickly and easily build a site that has a Facebook application aspect to it. You can also write custom modules for Drupal Facebook to extend it into areas of the FB api that it does't utilize.

Events Website CMS/Framework Suggestions

I'm planning to build a website that has the following in the first Phase
Events List
Events Management by admin
Register for events (buy tickets)
News List
Manage News
Support Multi-Language
In the next phase i would like the site to be a social networking site (considering elgg)
I want the website to be light and fast. I've tried Joomla/Drupal. They seem to be slow.
Any recommendations for a framework/CMS?
I've been using Textpattern for a CMS based website I am developing, and so far it seems like it can handle all of the CMS work I push at it while staying out of the way as far as code. It has a bit of a learning curve like most CMS programs, but is pretty easy to pick up. You'll still have to build out the functionality for events (look into the plugin ZemEvents), as Textpattern starts out with just the base install and you add on to it as needed. You may need to handle E-commerce differently though, not sure if there are any plugins for Textpattern that could handle that.
I, personally second LocalPCGuy’s recommendation since Textpattern is, in my eyes, the most underestimated CMS in the market. I especially love it for its simple XML-like templating tags.
Talking about easy templating you might also want to check out the Python based Django framework. This is, by far, the fastest framework/cms I ever came across.

Cakephp and facebook

I have a site built with cakephp (1.3), where users can manage lists of items.
I now want to develop a facebook app that will work with the data of my web-based site.
The facebok-app is to replicate many of the web-site's functionality (basic CRUD and more), so I would like to reuse as much code as I can from my current cake- just use a different layout, or maybe change the views.
My question is: from a software design perspective, what's the best way to go about that? Some ideas I had in mind are:
Add branching code in my actions to behave differently if it's running as facebook iframe
externalize lots of action-logic into libs, and create different actions for the facebook app which will reuse those libs, as well as views
Would love if you can come up with other ideas.
Rather than munging your core functions, could you not develop a generic 'hook' in system and then develop your facebook functionality in a separate API to take advantage of the hooks, this would be more scalable long term and keep both apps logic separate.

GWT SE friendly application

How can I develop 'Search Engine Friendly' web app in GWT? Take an example of StackOverflow itself, it's a web app and should be SEO friendly allowing users to search from search engines. If someone wants to develop same app in GWT. How can one make it SEO friendly?
GWT contains a single HTML file. How can we allow its inner content to be visible in SE?
Any suggestion or comment, will really help. Thank you.
Make it crawlable ... this could be helpful http://code.google.com/web/ajaxcrawling/
As someone who has done this before, I want to warn you. If you are going to do a small application and want to be searched by google, great. http://code.google.com/web/ajaxcrawling/ will work. If you want to build a tool that includes bing, then you will be out of luck. You are better off breaking up your navigation with HTML and embedding your GWT in one of the pages.
Until all search engines can handle this, you will spend precious resources trying to work redirection and carefully reviewing search engine results.
When building an SPA, you don't have to do anything specific for Google anymore. Google's AJAX crawling scheme has been deprecated been Google.
You just have to make sure your website serves your users well, and that it is convenient to use. Google will crawl it in a way relatively close to your user experience.
Should you want to do more, however, you can use Prerender. I would recommend checking that article:
https://moz.com/blog/optimizing-angularjs-single-page-applications-googlebot-crawlers