Uses

Demo

Screenshots

Screenshot 1
Screenshot 2
Screenshot 3
Screenshot 4
Screenshot Backend 1
Screenshot Backend 2

Notes

User’s Score = ∑( QuestionWeight_n * AnswerWeight_n )

The program is very picky about the input (question and route format). If questions and routes are setup and when a user clicks submit, they are not taken anywhere, then there is a syntax error. If necessary, copy the example questions into the boxes and then change the questions and weights manually while leaving the brackets and newlines in place.

Download

LICENSE:
This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED “AS IS”, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

Note: You will need the API URL and API token for your FreshBooks account, see http://developers.freshbooks.com/

Your FreshBooks API URL has a single point of entry, derived from your account URL:

https://sample.freshbooks.com/api/2.1/xml-in

After enabling API access for your account, you’ll be given a unique authentication token. The admin user, and each staff member, has an API token. The admin user’s authentication token can be found on the “enable FreshBooks API” page. The staff token can be found on each staff member’s Profile page, or on the Edit Staff page (for admin only). At this time, staff members have limited access to the API (see the individual method pages for details).

Please note your authentication token is based on your account password. If your password changes, so will your authentication token.

To use this widget, install the plugin and then in the widgets setup admin area drag the “Freshbooks Widget” to a sidebar. Input your Title, API URL, and API token. Note, using the Freshbooks Admin API token will return the number hours billed by the Admin user and all the Staff accounts associated with the Admin account (the entire team), whereas inputing a Staff token will output the hours billed by that staff user only.

Screenshots

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Check with your host provider to turn-off “safe_mode” if this warning appears.

Thanks to developer: Milan Rukavina for providing a PHP5 library for the FreshBooks API. Saves the time of dealing with XML calls directly. Available at: http://code.google.com/p/freshbooks-php-library/

Wordpress 2.8 and up.

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED “AS IS”, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

Often, a sitemap is completely separate from the look and feel of a business website.  So, while the sitemap is a critical starting place to get you thinking about your web project, it doesn’t dictate that your site will be “boring”. On the flip side, a website that is graphically appealing or full of pizazz may still come off as a smoke and mirrors magic trick if the user does not know what information is available or how to find what they are looking for.

Visualization

A sitemap can be viewed in two ways:

1. A list format – this is like a table of contents in a book.

   Think text book:  the information is grouped by chapter and each chapter has a few subsections.  In the web world, we call the chapters ’superpages” and the sections “subpages”.

2. A graphical map format – this is more like a mind map.

   Surprising, this can be dangerous. It looks great to present the end user with a visual map of your website, but during the planning phase of a website, it might become too easy to leave areas of your map too vague or to navigate a user through a series of pages without providing them a “map back” to main content.

Most important for anyone planning a website creation or redesign:  Not throughly planning out your website beforehand is an expensive disaster waiting to happen. Even when you are using great CMS technology.

Users love a new and engaging experience, but from the business world they expect a few constants:

• An “About Us” page: This should always be near a top-level page if not a superpage. It can be named something more clever as long as users will understand that the page is about your company.
• At least one top-level superpage devoted to your company’s products or services.
• A “Contact Us” page: Many times, users only go to your website to get up-to-date contact information. Remember, younger people are much less likely to use a phone book. Make this easy: don’t put up walls around the information your readers are looking for.

A Conceptual Template

• Home
• About Us
  • Our History
  • Our Staff
• Our Services
  • Service A
  • Service B
  • Get A Quote
• Submit Your Order
• Latest News
• Contact Us

Search engines have become increasingly good at recognizing legitimate businesses verses imitators by viewing a website’s sitemap and analyzing the content of each page. A well-structured site means that when a user searches for your company name, or related products and services in your area in order to buy and submitting orders for a specific product, your website is more likely to rank highly.

In fact, depending on your market, your Homepage, About Us, and Contact Us might all be listed in a search engine result so that users have one-click access.

XML Sitemap and SEO

Sitemaps are crucial when planning a website, but they do not have to be set in stone. One important aspect of the technologies we use is the ability for our clients to grow their website. This means that as a company expands and adds a service or adds a second type of service or product,  corresponding pages can easily be added to the website and and the content modified appropriately:

• Home
• About Us
  • Our History
  • Our Staff
• Our Services
  • Service A
    • Type I
    • Type II
  • Service B
  • Service C
  • Get A Quote
• Submit Your Order
• Latest News
• Contact Us

If a site has been structured correctly, search engines will pick-up on the addition and re-index your site accordingly. One last important step in Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the existence of a properly formatted .XML sitemap that lives off-menu in the root directory of your website hosting server.

Check out Steele Agency’s XML sitemap.

As you can see, its a complicated array of URL’s and priorities, where superpages are given top priority and blog posts are given lower priority, which tells search engines to list your Homepage, About Us, and Contact Us pages first in their search listings.

Because this is one thing all the major search engines agree upon, there is a standard protocol for generating and submitting these links, and thus a we can build functions into your website that automatically update and submit a properly formated XML sitemap.

Final Notes

• When building a sitemap, start with a structure that is unlikely to change, but that will allow room for growth.
• Do not get in the habit of changing top-level pages, as Search Engines will take note and assume your content is unreliable and rank your website – and thus your digital presence – poorly.
• The sitemap can contain sections, for example, adding a top-level page call Blog or Recent News is understood as meaning that articles will be posted and displayed in that section.
• Every user experiences your site differently. Some may like your menu navigation and the way it reflects the organization of your content; however some people may prefer a simple organized list posted somewhere off-menu, for example: View Our User-Friendly Sitemap

<?PHP ?>

PHP is a hypertext preprocessor, meaning that its function is to produce something functional; in this case HTML, the markup language that web browsers understand. This allows dynamic information to be reached or calculated and then translated into something a browser understands in real time. Without this capability, websites would be very static, non-interactive, and incapable of providing unique experiences for each viewer. Imagine a world without web-based client logins, bill-pay, or online forums like Facebook and Twitter.

Order Of Events

PHP is a scripting language that is hosted on a server and is executed by the server stack when a website is accessed.

PHP can grab information stored in databases, talk to other computers and programs, and execute its own internal mathematical and logical functions in real time and produce the HTML website you see on your screen. In fact, this page you’re viewing now was highly preprocessed using PHP the moment you visited the page!

PHPrimer

A standard static webpage has the form:

On a web server, a preprocessed web page looks more like:

where $data may refer to information from a database or even a function that adds numbers together. Static HTML is incapable of this functionality. Most importantly, a user’s web browser only sees the result of the executed function. For example, if $data was a function that calculated the number of city residents that ordered a particular meal from a certain restaurant, then the browser would only see:

A simple diagram and a simple example, but a powerful tool in the web arsenal.

]]> http://www.steele-agency.com/2010/01/what-is-php/feed/ 0 http://www.steele-agency.com/2009/11/open-source-drupal-whitehouse/ http://www.steele-agency.com/2009/11/open-source-drupal-whitehouse/#comments Wed, 18 Nov 2009 23:07:33 +0000 Richard Royal http://www.steele-agency.com/?p=880 Something both sides of the aisle can agree on…

Last month, the White House re-launched its figurehead web presence, WhiteHouse.gov featuring among other changes, a switch from a proprietary Content Management System (CMS) to Drupal, an open source CMS. The switch was brought on not by efforts to save money or use a more secure web publishing system, but to better foster communication between the White House and WhiteHouse.gov visitors, according to the Obama Administration.

Drupal is one of the big three open source CMS’s and has built-in functionality for everything from e-commerce to podcasting, and in particular, as the Obama Administration notes, Drupal integrates blogs, comments, polls, user profiles, newsletters, and forums. These are all things useful in encouraging communication between the Government and its citizens, or as Steele Agency notes, a brand and its potential consumer base.

At Steele Agency, we use open source CMS’s like Drupal, Joolma, and Wordpress to provide clients with the ability to easily manage and update their own web content and foster the interaction between staff and customers. Other federal agencies currently use Drupal for various purposes, including the Departments of Defense, Commerce, and Education and the General Service Administration, and the White House’s move only further validates the professional use of open source software. When talking to people about using open source in their businesses, they have concerns over costs, effectiveness, and security. When federal agencies employ its usage it does add a sense of authority, but from a business person’s perspective, its important to note three things:

• Open source software is very cost effective and has no licensing fees
• Open source CMS’s, when paired with Unix server platforms, are unparalleled in speed and reliability
• Though not all open source software is safe (just like proprietary software), Drupul is currently the undisputed security king among CMS platforms.