How do you credit open source projects correctly? [closed] - open-source

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I'm new to using open source libraries in production code so when it says replicate this license or whatever what is the proper way of doing it?
With desktop software is providing a readme somewhere good enough? What about for a website?

IANAL so none of this addresses legal requirements. The individual license will determine this and you should seek professional advice. My answer speaks only to the ethics of using open source software.
The main principle is that if you use an open source project you should credit that project in a way that could be seen but isn't invasive to your website or app. A "Powered by Python" logo on every Webpage is invasive. A paragraph with a link to the project URL on a help page is quite acceptable (imho).
Desktop applications: on the Help menu put an "About" link that describes the technologies used and gives appropriate credits. IMHO noone reads README files.
Web Sites: if they have a menu, you can do the same thing. Alternatively you can put it as a question in your FAQ. If there's no menu (or possibly in addition to that), you can put a link to that information in the footer (which is small and non-invasive). Eitehr as a separate link or on another relevant link.
Any of the credits should include a link to the project or company homepage.

FYI Some open source project are licensed under a "copyleft" license, which means that any derivative work must also be open source.
You should be careful with that, especially for GPL codes, if they does not explicitly state that you can use the lesser-GPL license and you accidently modified the GPL-ed code (fix a bug, some minor enhancements etc.) you might be up for trouble.
Here is a good read on copyleft: http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/
Legal concerns aside, as with #cletus: putting proper credits in proper places is a good idea.

The best thing you can do is fully read the license that the library is released under and interpret what the requirements are from that. There's just no substitute. From there you can look at other projects that use the same libraries (check out sourceforge.net, where you can also filter projects by license) and see what they do.

This is what we did on a site we were working on:
http://www.cartell.ie/about-us/open-source-credits/

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CMS recommendations for HTML CSS competent noob developer [closed]

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so after a long break from it, I've decided to pick up web development again, and I'm having just as much trouble as ever, trying to pull apart and customise these CMSs. I'm getting a bit frustrated with it.
I'm pretty good with HTML and CSS, and can happily build websites that aren't linked to a Content Managment System (HTML, CSS, Javascript), but the complexity of a CMS seems to be too much for me to work with and understand.
I was hoping someone could recommend a dead simple framework for me to work with. Something that's really simple to understand how it works. I like the idea of a Flat File CMS, So far I've looked at Stacey, Grav and Kirby. I'm told these are simple to work with, but I'm still struggling to customise, and make the templates my own.
Ideally, what I'm looking for would be a cms where I could build the site in HTML and CSS and tack-on variables for things like image grids and menus into the HTML. Anyone heard of anything like this?
Cheers.
Self-hosted Wordpress would be my recommendation. As a 10+ year full-time web developer, I've used many CMSs and this one is always my go-to solution these days. I seem to be constantly migrating clients away from other outdated platforms to Wordpress. Or you can use Wordpress.com if you don't want to go the self-hosted route.
If you work well with HTML and CSS you can make any style or markup changes you require. If you haven't used PHP before, you'll have plenty of time to get familiar with it. Once you are comfortable with some basic PHP, you can begin adding whatever functionality you want to your site via a plugin or by placing custom functions in the functions.php file of your theme.
If you haven't built anything with Wordpress yet, or if you aren't comfortable installing it on your webhost manually, you can use a webhost that has Fantastico to auto-install Wordpress for you.
There are tons of mobile-responsive themes out there that you can use as a starting point for your site, many of which are free. It is recommended to use a child-theme for making your customizations. This will prevent a theme update from erasing your changes. If you are going to use a lot of javascript files it is also recommended to register and enqueue them inside the functions.php file.
It may take some time to familiarize yourself with Wordpress, but it should be well worth it.
For more info on all things related to Wordpress, check out the codex:
https://codex.wordpress.org/
There is also a new Wordpress Code Reference:
https://developer.wordpress.org/reference/
And if you run into any specific issues, first search here on Stack Overflow for the answer–it will usually be here already. If you can't find anything on your specific issue, create a new post with the details and someone will usually be happy to assist you.
Good luck!
You can start with Odoo CMS. It was prettier now on version 9, with more feature and flexibility.
You can download the complete source of odoo, and develop it develop it in local before deploy on your server.

Sitecore, why is so difficult? [closed]

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I am new to sitecore and my company has been using external company to manage their sitecore, which I totally understand, since it involved so much work on the development.
As a designer myself, I found extermely difficult to create a custom page unless I use what's already available. I could use simple page to insert my html codes but again, it's just way too long. In regular case, when you build a html site, you could simply create pages in dreamweaver and view it on your local computer.
I have tried to make a custom page with the presentation control, but each time I called a sub-rendering. the page is just a BLANK.
*so my 1st question will be, What's the procedure to create a custom page? *
I know sitecore suppose to be powerful and there is many api, I really would like to find out why I found it's so difficult......
my background is, designer base with knowledge of html, css, and php. I am not a developer that's for sure. :)
Thanks for taking time read my blah blah..:)
1st question will be, What's the procedure to create a custom page?
To answer your first question, there are some high levels steps you would generally take.
Create a page template that includes any fields or metadata you need to render the page
Create any layouts, sublayouts, or renderings necessary to render the custom page - this is where having access to a developer normally becomes necessary
Assign the renderings and datasources to the instance of your new template (or better yet, assign the renderings to __Standard Values item)
Publish everything out
You should reference the Self-Study to Building a Very Simple Site from Sitecore
2nd question will be, why do we need to call the developer each time when we want to have some feature inputs?
To answer your second question: To get very far with customizing Sitecore you will need to be a developer or have access to one. This can be mitigated to some extent depending on how flexible the solution is they developed. But let's be real - Sitecore is an Enterprise CMS, it's not Wordpress where you can install a theme and a few plugins.
As someone just learning, there are a number of options
Training from Sitecore - this is probably your best bet
Download and play with Launch Sitecore for sample code and examples to build a real website
Check out the Sitecore Marketplace for modules that can get things done for you
Subscribe to and read John West's blog for inside information of basically every aspect of Sitecore
3rd question is, why I can access the CSS?
This question doesn't make sense frankly, so I will assume it was meant to ask "How?" or "Where?" Without any more information about the site in question, you can normally map the URL to the location on disk. For example:
http://www.mysite.com/css/styles.css
This URL might map to c:\inetpub\wwwroot\mysite\website\css\styles.css
I do highly recommend that any code changes, including CSS, be done through your source control system and only be deployed following your standard release management.
Honestly, I don't believe you are qualified to modify and maintain the Sitecore site given your current training and experience level. The first step I recommend is getting that Sitecore developer training and any training available from your vendor on the specific implementation. Good luck!

Are your SASS/Less stylesheets private source code, or public like CSS? [closed]

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Stylesheet languages like Sass and Less allow us to organize our stylesheets like real programming source code, in more modular and manageable ways than raw CSS ever could. Using these languages is still a young art, and I'm curious to learn how other developers use them in practice.
One of the neat features about the openness of the web is that we can learn from others by peeking at their HTML and CSS. However, these new stylesheet languages allow developers to keep their stylesheet source code private and only share the compiled CSS output. The standard compiler settings will often have the stylesheet source folder outside the public webroot.
If you use a CSS preprocessor to develop a commercial (closed-source) website, would you consider the stylesheet's source language (Sass or Less) equivalent to the CSS in terms of openness, or is it proprietary source code?
On the one hand, these languages "only" give us different syntax for writing stylesheets, so their function is the same as the CSS that's already publicly visible.
On the other hand, they could be thought of as "source code" and considered proprietary, in the same way as the Ruby or PHP that drives the site is used to generate HTML.
Looking forward to your thoughts.
Looks like you and I are the only ones following the css-preprocessing tag, I just found this and wanted to share some thoughts.
For the small company I work for, we use the same homebrew CMS to manage every site, and there is a lot of magic involved in creating the css files. I don't use LESS or SASS, but a combination of cssmin and my own code. There are theme settings in the CMS that can affect it, and there are other things like url rewrites that have to read settings from php config files. The output is always there for anyone to see, but I wouldn't consider the code that generates it "open source" any more than the code that generates the html output.
Our CMS is not open source, so our policy is that when and if (hasn't happened yet) a client decides to drop us and "wants his website", we generate a static HTML version for them with absolutely no php source code. So they would get the static version of the css/js as well as static html. They are paying for a service, and not so much a product. We don't sell the CMS, we sell our services building the site and access to those same tools. I'm not sure how well this would bode if it happened, but that's our current policy.
Anyways, this might not be exactly what you meant, but I'm looking forward to hearing more on this if anyone ever finds it.

What should be on the landing page of an open source project? [closed]

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The reason for asking this question is to get a good idea about how best to present an open source project for my own projects. How can one best make a project attractive to potential new users and/or developers? Clearly projects vary in nature and scope so when answering it may be necessary to qualify any suggestions which are contingent on these factors.
It would also be interesting to see some good examples of the best presented projects out there!
Here are some things that I look for on the landing page of an open source project, in approximate order of priority
Elevator pitch: what does this software do
Download link for the latest version
Latest news; what's new in new versions
Documentation link
Link to discussion boards/mailing lists/bug tracker; how to talk about it and report problems
Link to the source code/revision control system
Explain what it does, probably also by explaining the problem it solves. If you can do that in big type (somewhere between the size of a Stack Overflow question heading and the text of the actual question) in 2-3 sentences, so much the better, you can link to the "learn more" page where you do the deep dive.
Make it very easy to download a copy and get started. (A big "download now" link is good. MoFo did this very well with the Get Firefox site and that pattern has spread appropriately. If it's a package install e.g. a Ruby gem, spell out the steps.)
Show where people can go to ask questions, and/or the documentation. You do have documentation, right? (Or you're working on it?)
Beyond that, link to the necessary stuff: code repository for those who want to browse, a more detailed "about" page (that might be part of the documentation), list of contributors (might also be part of the documentation) but the big part is to answer Why and How as succinctly as you can.
Basically, that's the story. Your first page is the first slide or two of your presentation.
For new/potential users:
Overview or outline of what it does (the pitch)
Screenshots or examples of some core features
I think the majority of your returning visits will be from developers using your project; think of what you as a developer might need:
Clearly visible link to download latest build or source
Link to your SCM repository & how to contribute
Link to API docs
Link to issue tracker
Users of your project are interested in this things, in order of purely subjective importance:
Downloading your apps
Knowing what your apps does (project descriptions, screenshots)
Get Help and Documentation
How to report bugs
How to get access to the source and to contribute
How I would do it is to have a huge download link in the first page, with a short description of what your program is (max. 1-2 paragraph). Then there should be a link in obvious place longer description; forum/mailing list and documentations; and how to contribute and to report bugs.
Rationale
Why download links first instead of project description first?
Your user likely come from two sources:
articles referring your project, or your project announcement forums
search engine
In both cases, it is very likely they already have an idea of what your project is about before landing on your page. In the first case, they have read the article; while in the second case, they are searching for a tool similar to your project.
However, for the second case, it is likely that they are still not sure that your project really are what they are looking for; that is why you add a brief project description on the side of the download link. This is to ensure them your project is/is not what they are looking for.
Why "Help and Doc", "Bug Report", then "Contribute"?
That's the order that user will do when they have problems with your program. First, they will look at the help and documentations, then maybe ask a few people in the forums; failing that, now they will file a bug report or feature requests; then if nobody took interest on the bug report/feature request, some will then have have the willingness to contribute.
You can get ideas from:
Open Office: http://www.openoffice.org/
Firefox: http://www.mozilla.com/
Sourceforge: http://www.sourceforge.net/
Google Code: http://code.google.com

Installable CMS similar to CushyCMS? [closed]

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I'm looking for a CMS system that works similar to CushyCMS, but that I can install on my own server?
I love the functionality and ease of use CushyCMS provides for simple, small sites where setting up and installing a traditional CMS (Drupal, Wordpress, TYPO3) are not necessary.
Anyone have any ideas?
Thanks!
Troy
Perch is an excellent lightweight CMS.
For what you're after I'd reccomend ImpressPages CMS
http://www.impresspages.org/
It doesn't use html tags, but its a very easy "drag and drop" style. with clear toolbars available to the site admin, obviously WYSIWYG editing isn't everyones favourite (it's not mine) but for 5 or so pages, it's perfect.
Orbis CMS is an open source alternative to CMSs like CushyCMS. It's built on the same priciples (simplicity, ease-of-use) and features a stylish interface, but is self-hosted and free.
"modify html pages simply by adding a class but that I can install on one of my own servers"
Unify does this very nicely unify.unitinteractive.com it costs $24.49 per domain, simply upload the unify folder to your webspace and add class="unify" to the areas in the html you want editable.
Another one ideal for a site of 5 pages is pulsePro http://pulsecms.com/
If you're looking to write some of your own code/html it might be worth looking at django-cms
Well, I don't know of any yet, but if you want an alternative online service then check out Surreal CMS. You can also try out Simple CMS, but it's still very new (released into beta a day or two ago).
You should look at Zimplit!
SnippetMaster is pretty cool. It's too bad that it's not open-source and free, but at least it has generous and inexpensive licensing schemes (normal, re-brandable, etc.)
It would be nice if it used class names for the content regions, but it uses HTML comments formatted a special way (like IE conditionals) so it's still valid html.
http://www.snippetmaster.com
I built this one www.kitgui.com so programmers can be programmers in their own language / framework of choice and use a REST-style interface to pull content and HTML 5 javascript reference to be able to let clients manage the editing experience directly on the website pages themselves. HTML 5 allows for the cross-site security to occur these days so everything just made sense to do this. In my ecommerce business its all about how fast you can setup things to get them out the door and get paid. KitGUI makes it so easy you can't really appreciate it unless you try it out. This is brand new so I have no idea if programmers like it or not except for my own devs who are biased of course. I know clients do for sure so please give me some feedback on it if you have time to investigate as I worked my ass off to launch it.
Something which is very similiar to CushyCMS is Unify CMS.
They have a demo which you can try before you buy.
You will see that Unify is very similar to CushyCMS and I quote:
You do not need to know PHP, nor do you need to write your code
specifically for Unify. In order to create editable areas on your
site, you only need to add “unify” classes to each element. That’s it.
There is no Database to setup, you just upload the files via FTP (or similar) and start adding in classes where you want to have editable regions. They have repeatable regions as well.
Unify currently costs 24.49 and is backed by a 45 day money back guarantee.
Support is powered by Desk.com
Take a look at Unify requirements and you will see you can run this in almost any server on the planet; well, almost any server :)