web2Project is a Free Open Source business-oriented Project Management System (PMS) powered by PHP and RIA, providing an interactive and effective way of managing projects via a web browser.

Some of the key features of web2Project are:

* A secure web-based infrastructure capable of managing any number of projects, companies, departments and users;
* A one-stop shop for all project information to avoid confusion and reduce risks;
* Role-based permission system to give the Project Manager fine-grained control over sensitive data;
* Project and group-wide Gantt Charts;
* A unified calendar - with iCalendar support - showing all relevant tasks and events;
* A modular infrastructure which allows the addition or removal of modules to customize the features according to your requirements.

The 2.2 release came with a bunch of useful updates for the Project Managers, System Admins, Developers, and General Users. Released under GPL license.

Published at Enterprise PHP

AnyChart announces the availability of AnyStock, a new Stock and Financial Charts component. AnyStock is a cross-platform tool for implementing visually appealing, interactive stock and financial charts, in custom web and desktop applications.

"We´re proud to announce the launch of AnyStock", said Alex Batsuev, AnyChart lead developer. "Our team has created an effective, extremly flexible tool for those dealing with stock market, Forex, commodity or investment market or any other time-based data. AnyStock allows to solve sophisticated business tasks and create user-friendly reporting interfaces."

AnyStock is an XML/JSON Flash based solution that offers a comprehensive set of tools for creating rich interactive visualization of date and time-based information. The component is easy to integrate and customize. It includes a wide variety of technical indicators and financial chart types, all of them being combinable. The ability to review long term and large data sets can easily be handled with scroll, pan, and zoom controls. Adding news events - analyst opinions, insider trading, dividends, and key developments - helps to analyze information effectively.

Published at AJAX Magazine

This Guest post is by Michele P. Rouse of SQL Certification Blog :

In my experience the top DB platforms are Microsoft and Oracle. I have come to learn that MySQL is trusted in start-up companies and DB people who know this platform could make higher salaries, but I honestly rarely ever encountered MySQL in job searches.

One reason I like MS SQL Server is because it also includes the SSRS BI platform which is powerful and popular. DB folks who know SSRS (SQL Server Reporting Services) have become very sought-after candidates in many companies. In most cases, companies end up needing to buy licenses for third-party BI (Business Intelligence) applications that may cost a lot of extra money.

With SQL Server, BI and ETL (extract, transform, load) tools come with the initial license. I understand that maybe the interest in databases is mainly to understand DB construction, however you can't predict when or if you branch out and find out more.

Published at PHP Community Magazine

Wordpress is more than a blogging platform, and here is one of its amazing application : Support tickets and Bug tracking. Quality Control is a Wordpress theme which allow you to turn a basic WordPress installation into a simple and straight-forward ticketing system. With Quality Control users can create tickets, assign statuses, milestones, categories, and tags. Other users can then interact with the tickets, updating their state, milestone, or any other property.

The theme require a lot of customization to make it usable for real world applications, and support the basic workflows for ticketing support systems, however I think it's a great platform that you can build on and customize easily.

Get Quality Control from wordpress themes, demo available online at http://getqualitycontrol.com/demo/.

Published at PHP Community Magazine

Austin TX, December 16, 2010 - Last month it was announced that Vindicia and Zuora had raised $20 million each from venture capitalists. This is on top of the combined $42 million the companies have already raised. This story may have gone unnoticed by many outside of the online billing industry, but the ramifications of these significant investments affect almost all industries.

Both of these large investments coming in within the same week are a sign that venture capitalists have figured out something that most businesses still have not. They know that more and more of the economy is moving to a “services” model and the ability to offer diversified, on-demand billing solutions is critical to the future of E-commerce.

The companies that will excel in the near future are the companies that are first to embrace the evolving demands of modern consumers. Customers are no longer content to settle for “one size fits all” products. The modern consumer wants, if not demands, to dictate their online purchases to buy only what they need and not what they don’t.

Take the rise of car share services such as Car2Go. Due to fiscal restraints and higher expectations in customized services, modern customers are choosing to pay for a car only when they need it.

Published at e-Commerce Magazine

Shopzilla Europe, the shopping search engine, has unveiled the European winners of its annual Circle of Excellence Awards. The awards recognise the top performing online retailers that provided outstanding online customer experiences throughout this past year, as rated by their customers.

The 2010 Shopzilla Circle of Excellence winners are:

UK:
ActiveBeauty.co.uk; beautyflash.co.uk; Cartridge Save; CheapSmells.com; Crucial.com; Livefoods Direct Ltd; Paws247.com; Surfdome.com; theplasmacentre.co.uk; WatchShop.com

France:
1001 Bijoux; AboutBatteries.com; AllezDiscount.com; Cloggs; CoudreetBroder.com; Crazyphonic; Digit-Photo.com; La cabane en ligne; LEPAPE; MacWay; Madeinsport.com; Maison Tasset; Maisonic
Mikalo; Ruedespiles; Session Music; Spartoo; Tinkco; UBALDI.com; Univers Broderie; zooplus

Germany:
buttinette; Session Music

These retailers can now proudly display the Shopzilla Circle of Excellence badge on their websites for the next year.

Published at e-Commerce Magazine

Magix is a complete Enterprise Web Application Framework by Winergy Inc., built around the ideas of O2 Software Architecture, containing a complete MVC Framework, O/RM kind-of library built around Active Types, a complete extensible Ajax Framework, and a modularized loading mechanism to dynamically load content in Ajax Calls or normal postbacks.

Magix features include :

* A complete Managed Ajax Library (Magix.UX)
* A complete MVC Framework
* A complete O/RM library, built around the Active Types design pattern form the O2 Architecture
* Fostering Domain Driven Design concepts (DDD)

Below the press release :

Wine Marketing Innovators Giving Away Their "Filet Mignon" Software

Glen Ellen, CA December 17 – What are they thinking? Glen Ellen, CA based, Winergy Inc, has just freely released their complete web application software. It's the foundation of their innovative WinePad application for wine tasting rooms. Why would this start-up, just three and a half months old, give it all away? Winergy CEO, Thomas Hansen explains, "Winergy is doing this because we see a need for more collaboration between tech vendors and wineries. We've created a platform that can provide a common "language" that everyone can build upon to create more collaboration and solve integration problems."

"We have a unique business mission, we seek only synergies." explains David Ingham, Winergy's Marketing Director, "It's a belief that has proven to be amazingly fruitful for us, simply said, it's the Three Musketeers credo "All for one and one for all."

Published at AJAX Magazine

DHTMLX released the alpha for DHTMLX Touch, an open-source JavaScript HTML5 framework for building web applications with touch UI. It was developed specially for mobile and touch devices, such as iPad, iPhone, Android phones and tablets, etc.

The alpha also offers a Visual Designer tool that allows developers to create mobile web applications within a simple, drag-and-drop interface. For more details and live demos, visit: http://www.dhtmlx.com/touch/

Published at AJAX Magazine

The Tiki Community is proud to announce the immediate availability of Tiki Wiki CMS Groupware 6.1. This update includes over 250 code changes by nearly 20 Tiki Community members. Although these updates are primarily fixes and improvements to existing features, there are several new items that Tiki administrators will be happy to see, including:

* Continued upgrades for WYSIWYG editing
* Default toolbars include a new button to easily select a file (after file upload, if needed), and it's name and link are added to the textarea of that wiki page, forum, blog, etc.
* A new admin panel for Clipperz online password management
* Improvements to CSS inclusion for newsletters
* Many translation updates (from Tiki's interactive translation feature)
* New and improved plugins for third-party media (such as Vimeo, Blip.tv, and YouTube) and generic buttons.
* Updated plugin interface
* New module: Tracker help
* Export or show a wiki page in text-only format (useful to be used with Pretty Trackers)
* Static text fields in Trackers can be sent with wiki-parsed text in notification emails.
* New language.js file added to language folders to assist in translation of text and UI elements used in JavaScript functions.
* and more!

Published at CMS Magazine

The Ext4Yii Framework is a professional PHP Yii extension which provides server-side ExtJS functionality. It is a template parsing system, capable of rendering embedded XML templates into ExtJS JavaScript components. Among many additions and improvements, the Ext4Yii Framework version 0.7 provides the functionality to use customized ExtJS components and the ability to assign implied JavaScript values in Ext4Yii templates.

Verison 0.7 is the second release of the framework, which has been internally re-written for better performance, error handling and template parsing. Below a short list of new features :

* Implied JavaScript Notation : which can be used to instruct the template parser to render inline JavaScript values.
* Context Menus : easily create context menus for virtually every component in the Ext4Yii Framework.
* Customized and 3rd party controls
* Other additions : several plugins for the TabPanel control, GridRowExpanderColumn model for the GridPanel, and mong many other additions...

As for this release, Ext4yii will not be available under GPL anymore, however only commercial and evaluation license are available. More information at http://www.ext4yii.com/site/index.html

Published at PHP5 Magazine