Open Source Resources for Web Application Developers

Customer support is very important to a successful web application. No matter what web application you have developed, you need a easy to use customer support system for your users. So that they can contact you easily when they have encountered any problems. And then you can provide them quick responses.

HelpDesk Pilot is a web based Help Desk and Trouble Ticket System. With a robust email parser Helpdesk Pilot enables you to turn customer emails into tickets. You can reply to many tickets at once using the Mass Reply feature. Ideally you can send mass reply to all tickets that have raised the question, bug or issue. Every action on a ticket by any member of the application is tracked. This activity log is available below every ticket, ordered chronologically.

I found Installing Helpdesk Pilot is very easy and takes only a few minutes. It runs on any server supports PHP and MySQL. The user interface looks very clean and intuitive on both the admin and customer area. I am sure you are able to provide better customer service and turn requests around much quicker with Helpdesk Pilot. Overall, it is one of the best web based help desk systems you can find.

There are over 11,000 active customers in over 60 countries using Helpdesk Pilot. You can see some big names, e.g. at&t, verizon, IBM and etc… It is free to get started with  Helpdesk Pilot by taking a 15-day trial hosted on their servers. Why not give it a try?

Requirements: -
Demo: http://www.helpdeskpilot.com/helpdesk/demo.php
License: 15-day Trial

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A New jQuery plugin: imgPreview allows your users to preview an image before clicking on it and, out of necessity, will preload the image so when a user does click through to it there is no waiting time.

The image preview shows up in a tooltip-like box appearing alongside the user’s cursor when hovering over a link. The plugin is entirely unobtrusive; it does not require any hooks to target specific links (no non-semantic classes); it will automatically detect the anchors that are linking to images and will only apply the preview effect to them.

Additionally, it allows for quite a high level of customisation with Callback functions as well. You can also specify a thumbnail prefix for images. So, it won’t take too long time to load larger images.

Requirements: jQuery Framework
Demo: http://james.padolsey.com/javascript/new-jquery-plugin-imgpreview/
License: License Free

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Have you migrate your feeds hosted on Feedburner to Google’s servers yet? We have just completed the migration one week ago, and It looks like my feeds are working normally. All of us should perform the migration as soon as possible because Google has announced that they expect to get all the feeds transferred by February 28, and after that day Feedburner feeds will start reporting a 404.

Feed Compare and Feed Analysis has released new versions that support migrated Google Feeds recently. You can analysis the growth of your own feed and compare it with your competitors. However, if you have not completed the migration yet, they are not working for you. So, what are you waiting for?

Source: http://www.blogperfume.com/feed-analysis/
Source: http://www.feedcompare.com/

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Jamie was looking around many of the tutorial sites there are hardly any Calendar systems. Therefore, he has developed a Calendar System using MySQL and Script.aculo.us. There are 3 main parts, the Javascript, the HTML and the PHP script. You can change the date with the form and it will update the calendar without having to reload the entire page, AJAX style.

Setting up the Calendar System is easy. Simply copy the entire calendar into whatever directory you want. Create your database and import the “databaseSQL.sql” file into it, this will create the default data for running it. And then, alter the “databaseConnection.php” file to show your connection details.That should be it.

Requirements: Prototype, Script.aculo.us Framework, PHP, MySQL
Demo: http://nodstrum.com/wp-content/plugins…
License: License Free

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The SitePoint online CSS and HTML references have been available for some time now, and have already become a valued source of free information for web designers and developers around the world. Recently, Sitepoint has announced a shiny new look to the SitePoint Reference Site and the highly anticipated first release of JavaScript Reference Information.

The look and feel of the old reference site has been completely replaced with a brand new slick, easy-to read design, including interactive examples, improved navigation, page layout and much more…

Source: SitePoint CSS, HTML & JavaScript Online References

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Stephen Bau has been looking for a means of rapidly developing interactive prototypes for his site designs. He has been building a library of commonly used HTML elements, combining these with CSS for typography and layout.

He finally created Fluid 960 Grid System Templates (960 pixel fixed width, 12-column fluid width and 16-column fluid width) which have been built upon the work of Nathan Smith and his 960 Grid System using effects from the Mootools JavaScript library.

These templates are offered free of charge in accordance with the applicable licenses for 960 Grid System and Mootools.

Requirements: -
Demo: http://designinfluences.com/fluid960gs/
License: GPL, MIT License

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jQuery ListNav Plugin supplies an easy way to unobtrusively add a letter-based navigation widget to any UL or OL list. An easily stylable (via CSS) nav bar appears above the list, showing the user the letters A-through-Z.

Clicking one of the letters filters the list to show only the items in the list that start with that letter. Hovering over a letter (optionally) shows a count above the letter, indicating how many items will be displayed if that letter is clicked. Other options give you control over the basic functionality.

ListNav works great on long lists. It supports multiple lists on the same page. And it has been tested on IE6, IE7, Firefox 2 and 3 (Windows and Mac), Safari (Windows and Mac).

Requirements: jQuery Framework
Demo: http://www.ihwy.com/Labs/Demos/Current/jquery-listnav-plugin.aspx
License: MIT, GPL License

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Some time ago, we have featured FancyZoom which is designed to view full-size photos and images inline without requiring a separate web page load. After few months, Orderedlist rewrote it in Prototype with some small changes.

First, He didn’t like that it used AJAX. FancyZoom in Prototype tends to lean towards the side of rendering everything and then showing and hiding, rather than loading stuff with AJAX.

Second, Cabel built his from scratch with no use of any JavaScript libraries. That is cool and all, but he almost always have Prototype and Scriptaculous included. Cabel’s version without Prototype is two scripts that weigh in at 36k. Orderedlist’s version with prototype is only 12k.

Third, Cabel’s implementation only works for images and it loads them via AJAX (to save initial page weight). He thinks that the zoom interaction is pretty interesting so he didn’t want a version limited to just images. FancyZoom in Prototype supports pretty much any html you can throw in a div (images, text, flash, etc.).

Fourth, and final, is that he liked Apple’s rounded corners, as opposed to the original fancy zoom’s square edges.

Requirements: Prototype Framework
Demo: http://orderedlist.com/demos/fancy-zoom/
License: License Free

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Date Picker jQuery Plugin allows users select a date or a range selection of dates easily. It hasa lot of options and easy to fit in your web application. It supports multiple calendars in the component. We can mark dates as special, weekends, special days. More importantly, we can easy to customize the look by changing CSS.

Implementation of DatePicker jQuery Plugin is easy. You just need to attach the Javascript and CSS files to your document. Edit CSS file and fix the paths to images and change colors to fit your site theme, and then select the elements in a jQuery way and call the plugin.

Requirements: -
Demo: http://www.eyecon.ro/datepicker/
License: License Free

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Few months ago, we have seen one of the best free flash galleries – dfGallery. There are a lot of great features. It allows integration of most popular photo sharing sites like Flickr , Picasa , Photo Bucket and Fotki along with background music.

Now, dfGallery 2.0 has just released. The reason for this gallery to be cool is not just its UI but the way it is built and architected. They have an amazing theme engine built to support custom themes with multiple skins for each. The administration console built on CodeIginter lets you manage multiple galleries and albums of different types.

This is just the alpha release and they expect lots of feedback to get this to its best possible.

Requirements: Flash
Demo: http://dezinerfolio.com/demo/dfgallery/dfg2/test_embed.html
License: Apache License 2.0

• 9 Comments