CrossSlide is a jQuery plugin that implements in Javascript some common slide-show animations, traditionally only available to the web developer via Adobe Flash™ or other proprietary plugins. CrossSlide builds upon jQuery’s animation facility, so it is as portable across browsers as jQuery itself (a lot.)

This kind of effect relies on the browser for positioning, scaling and cropping images, through CSS and the DOM. Thus it depends heavily on how the browser and the underlying graphics platform optimize these operations. Compared to native implementations of the same effects, CrossSlide is quite CPU-intensive, but recent hardware handles it without problems. A few combinations of browsers and platform seem to be less optimized than others, namely Firefox (and other Gecko-based browsers) on Mac OS X and Linux. Every other combination I’ve tested shows decent performance: Firefox on Windows; Safari 2 on Mac; Opera on Mac, Linux, and Windows; Internet Explorer 6.

Popularity: 1% [?]

To track the day-to-day happenings of WordPress 2.7 development, head over to the Development Updates blog.  We’ll be discussing the ongoing admin UI changes and the new features slated for 2.7.  Add your comments and join in.

Here’s a quick rundown of some of the features that have already gone into 2.7.

- New admin UI based on the crazyhorse experimental UI branch with new menus and navigation
- New edit post page that allows dragging and dropping of meta boxes. Boxes can be expanded and collapsed as before and now also completely hidden.
- Ability to hide columns on the content index pages
- Inline editing of posts and pages on the content index pages
- Comments XMLRPC API (Who wants comment moderation on the iPhone? Me.)
- Reply to comments from the admin
- Keyboard hot keys for managing comments
- Threaded Comments and new wp_list_comments() API
- Sticky Posts
- Automatic plugin install and integrated plugin browser
- Automatic upgrade of WordPress
- HTTPOnly auth cookies
- New HTTP request API
- A new SSH2 filesystem abstraction for updates and installs over sftp

Popularity: 2% [?]

Daytum is a home for collecting and communicating your daily data. Begin tracking anything you can count and display the results immediately… or just look around and see what other members are recording.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Handling the legal aspects of doing business has got to be the most dreaded part of freelancing. Most of us have very little knowledge in this field without taking the time to do some research, and even then it can be confusing and frustrating.

Of course, this isn’t one of the core functions of your freelance business, and it’s easy to see any time spent on legal issues as a loss in terms of available working hours. For this reason it’s good to take advantage of the legal resources that are available to freelancers.

Popularity: 4% [?]

If you’ve been keeping up with Ian Stewart’s ThemeShaper blog this summer (if you haven’t, you should be looking deep within yourself to ask why not), you’ve seen loads of documentation for his WordPress framework, Thematic and the various child themes which inherit their power from Thematic’s mothership functionality.

Anyone who builds a quantity of WordPress sites throughout the year would be crazy to not already have their own baseline theme, much like anyone who re-uses the same dozen structural classes would be crazy not to deploy their own CSS framework for each project. Streamlining is a way of life when you’re charging by the hour.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Feed Pauser
Feed Pauser is a plugin I wrote to address a issue I have been facing for a long time, the option to delay publishing a post to a feed. Feed pauser, pauses a post from being made available through RSS.

Auto-Close Comments, Pingbacks and Trackbacks
Automatically close comments, pingbacks and trackbacks on your blog. This helps reduce the amount of spam aimed at old posts. Now you can keep comments / pingbacks / trackbacks on certain posts open.

Servage Referral Widget
The web host Servage allows it’s users through a link to their website/coupon code to refer it’s users to their services.

Notifixious
This plugin allows you to notify your readers on their Instant Messaging (AIM, MSN, GTalk, ICQ…), Email or SMS when you publish new posts! It also adds a widget to your blog to allow your users to choose on which channel they want to be notified!

WP Google Apps
This plugin allows you to manage WordPress users via Google Apps accounts. The Authentication use Google Apps Gmail.

World Clock Widget
The world clock widget is a javascript clock. It can be easily set to display date and time of different timezone.

Facebook Sharer
Adds a little javascript and css to the header, and then a “Send to Facebook” link at the bottom of the blog post.

List Pages Plus
Alter the output of the wp_list_pages() function’s HTML.  Add in your own classes, insert text into link title, add additional tags surrounding title.  Parents and Children are set seperately for greater flexibility.

Email Spam Protection
Obfuscates your email. You need to enter the shortcode in your post.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Since I released my naked, bare-bones, blank-canvas, starting-point WordPress theme ‘Starkers’ back in January, a huge amount of people appear to be using it as the basis for their own projects, and it’s become much more popular than I ever imagined. As a result, I’ve finally updated the theme to be fully compatible with the latest (at the time of writing) stable release of WordPress: version 2.6.2.

Popularity: 1% [?]

If you’ve ever collaborated with other people on a project, you know the frustration of constantly swapping files. Some do it by email, some through file upload services and some by other methods. It’s a pain in the neck, and every designer and developer knows it. Revision control is an excellent way to combat the problem of sharing files between workers.

Most web-developers have probably worked with some sort of revision control system, but designers may find it a foreign concept. The most obvious benefit of using revision control is the ability to have an unlimited number of people working on the same code base, without having to constantly send files back and forth.

But designers and developers can both benefit from using revision control systems to keep copies of their files and designs. You can instantly browse previous “commits” to your repository and revert to earlier versions if something happens.

This article reviews some of the top open-source version control systems and tools that make setting up a version control system easy.

Popularity: 2% [?]