Abbas’ Blog

I am happy to announce our new CPG Dev Team Blog. Here is an excerpt from coppermine home page

We started this blog to put forward our experience, knowledge and views on technology, programming and opensource. This blog will highlight coppermine project, its development and features. But hold on, this blog will not be entirely about coppermine and will have topics including php, other opensource applications, world wide web, anything related to technology and sometimes developers and their life.

The authors of the blog will be all team members of cpg. I wish all team members a Happy Blogging!

Well i am late on this. GSoC 2008 ended with the mentor summit held at Google HQ on 25th-26th Oct 2008. I was not able to attend it but two of my fellow team members namely Thu Tu and Sander Weyens made to it. They had a good time there and they interacted with developers of other open source applications.

I was mentoring Nuwan Sameera whose code is now ready to go in coppermine core. His code will bring in some beautiful ajax effects in cpg1.5.x. I hope that the code gets merged into the core soon.

I am now awaiting the summer of code T-Shirt which should have reached me by now. It appears that the tshirt got lost somewhere midway. But no problems as google will be sending a replacement for it. I hope that the replacement reaches me.

Signing off from GSoC 2008 and looking forward to a wonderful summer of 2009.

The other day i was chatting with my team mate Shk.Aziz Poonawalla and he inspired me to do a plugin for coppermine which should convert the uploaded documents (txt, pdf, doc, ppt etc..) to Scribd iPaper format and then display them using the Scribd document viewer.

So i went ahead and created such a plugin for coppermine. The plugin requires PHP 5 and CURL on the server and you should register an account on Scribd Platform to get an API key and secret phrase. After installing the plugin whenever a document is uploaded to cpg - it is copied (uploaded) to scribd server as well (behind the scenes). Scribd converts the document to iPaper format on its server and assigns a document id to it. Now when the document is viewed in cpg, we display the Scribd document viewer and supply it the document id. This displays the document in a nice flash viewer.

For further instructions and to download the plugin please see the forum thread.

The other day i had some free time and thought why not try my hand at converting a wordpress theme to coppermine one. I chose Fieldofsand which is a free wordpress them designed by Smarter Templates and started the conversion. Fortunately i did quite well and published the theme for coppermine community.

You may find quite a few HTML/CSS issues with the theme as i am primarily not a designer but developer. If you are a coppermine user then you might want to check the demo of the theme here. You can download the theme from sourceforge download page.