Project Pier is a web-based Project Management tool written in PHP. It’s got a whole lot of bells and whistles for a open-source platform, but it does have it shortcomings as well. It all depends on what you want to accomplish with your project management tool, ProjectPier could be perfect, or it could fall woefully short. So let’s get digging:

Ever since they took down drop.io I’ve been struggling to find a site where I could share content/files with my developers and service providers. I work for the IT department of a multinational company and sometimes I require to share content with developers and service providers that are not from my company (and therefore don’t share access to the intranet). I’m sure many people struggle with this, how do I share those large files with my team?

Last week, I blogged about how to start a wiki on your blog. One of the great things about wiki was to run a entire project using a wiki, however a wiki is limited in functionality and a lack of any concrete structure makes wiki unacceptable for certain projects.

If you’re looking to run a full project management suite that lets you look at task, tasklist and milestones. Manage time and resources, provide 1-page updates for stakeholders. You’re in luck because that’s what I’m doing here today. However, before we proceed to the how-to-install, I thought it’s best if we revisit why you’d need a web-based tool for project management and how it can help overcome the 4 major pitfalls of the traditional method of managing project plans via MS Project and emails.

Previously, I posted about using Google apps to take care of your websites email needs. However, there was one nagging issue which always bugged me. My personal account was a gmail account, and if my website email address was hosted on google apps, that meant I could only login to one email at a time. This was troublesome especially if I was expecting an email on both accounts at once.

The workaround that solves this is simple, consolidate your email accounts into one login. This makes things a easier, and allowed me to check my websites emails (keith@keithrozario.com) while still using my personal email (keithjosephrozario@gmail.com).

I’m a bit slow to new platforms, (I’ve just discovered wordpress early last month), but in the battle supremo of the 3 most popular blogging platforms out there, Tumblr does have it’s advantages, and they’re quite many.

Wikipedia isn’t the only Wiki around. A wiki is a generic term us geeks use to describe “A website that allows collaborative editing of its content and structure by its users”

Now wasn’t that a mouthful.

To put it simply, a wiki is a website that contains many articles, and ANYONE can update those articles.

Why do you need a site wiki, well the website gigaom has 15 different uses for a wiki. You can use it for anything from project management to knowledge retention. So having one certainly does score you points with the ladies,…well not really but you get the picture.

Previously I bloged about adding a contact form

to your wordpress powered site. The recommended approach was contact form 7, a clean and simple plugin to implement contact forms on your site. However, there are some limitations, what contact form 7 makes up in simplicity it loses in added functionality. For instance there were no captchas on contact form 7 so you can’t prevent a bot from simply continuously spamming you with messages from a nigerian prince wishing to share his vast wealths with you just because you’re a ’trust-worthy’ person.

Digging into Wordpress is a fantastic blog (and book) written by absolute masters of the wordpress realm. Recently they put up a poll on the best caching plugin for wordpress and the results clearly show that my favorite caching plugin, Hypercache is NOT the de facto standard. In fact it comes in a distant 3rd to w3 total cache and wp super cache. Oh well, I guess it pays to be different. However if you’re a wordpress newbie and looking for some new insights into wordpress, I absolutely recommend subscribing to their blog here.

While Facebook and Google wage holy war for the soul of the internet, the front line of the battle it seems is the login credential area. Facebook with it’s 100’s of millions of users are really making headway in this category. The premise is simple, for new and existing website designers, you can have your users log in with their Facebook credentials rather than your own unique credentials. What this means is that you as a web designer don’t need to worry about keeping a separate module for username and passwords. The extra advantage is even better, users don’t have to fill up crummy web forms to register for your website before actively participating in them. This has proven to improve the user uptake of your service, because it removes an extra step from your web design, users no longer have to register, they can do a simple 1-click login that immediately pulls data of the social network and then populates that into your website DB.

Yesterday I took out another domain at Dreamhost.com, it’s another hosting service that got rave reviews from lifehacker. The costing is quite pricey, but I managed to get a promo code online for a $50 dollar discount. Mind you it’s still on the high side for me, it works out to about $65.00/year, but that includes both unlimited storage and bandwidth , one domain AND a who-is protect on that domain. So overall it’s pretty reasonable. When the promo ends though , (presumably when I renew next year), the price will revert to $8.95/month quite a hefty sum, so dreamhost better deliver.