MyWeb - Personalized Start Page

PHPCow has unveiled a new product - MyWeb.

MyWeb is the new Personalized Start Page solution, fully localized, organized into tabs, with each tab containing user-defined widgets that lets Internet users customize content with simple drag & drop functionality.

You can take a look at working demo of MyWeb. Sending your opinion or feature request is highly appreciated.


More details about MyWeb

An easy way of building a personalized homepage as a Standalone service or Integrate with any third party CMS, Blog, Bulletin Board applications, so members of those systems do not need to register again to start Personalizing their homepage.

Personalizing the MyWeb Start Page is the easiest process for users, they can build there own pages and organize content with few mouse clicks and draggind & dropping widgets. Changing languages and appearance of start page is achieved through user friendly dialog. Users don't need to walk through different pages to achieve these goals.

Widgets are organized into the categories on the main menu, that makes it easy to find and use any desired widget. Most of widgets are configurable and users can easily tailor them under there needs.

Reading and Searching the Content

With prebuilt widgets, users are able to organize the latest information from different leading sources, like: CNN, CBS, TechCrunch, ESPN, GigaOM, NY Times etc. It also has a powerful Feed Reader feature to read the feed content, so in most cases users don't need to leave their Start Page. News widgets described above are built based on one of the most powerful "Feed" widget which is designed to retrieve any type of feed, like: RSS(all versions), Atom(all versions), Media RSS and Podcasts. Feed widget is also available for users and it allows them to subscribe to any other feed they are interested in.

Searching the content is one of the frequently used web feature, MyWeb has a number of perfect widgets that allow them to search the web with Google, Yahoo, MS Live, WikiPedia, YouTube, Technorati, IceRocket and other popular search engines without leaving there Start Page.

Benefits

Unified homepage for your visitors and members. This is done without impacting the regular homepage, nor does it become detached from the general look and feel. The system can be installed on a subdomain like my.yourdomain.tld or on a path like yourdomain.tld/folder or any other URL of your choice.

Switching to PHPCow MYWeb brings with it the ability to actually offer everything from weather forecasts, to photos to YouTube Videos for your visitors with no programming experience needed. Let your visitors and members fill their homepage with content of their choice, including content from your network or website through RSS Channels.

Offer a drag and drop functionality to help make organizing your visitor's page a breeze.

Add content to your personalized homepage from any feed you'd like, anywhere on the web.

Pre-configured, Ready-made pages which makes adding pages full of content easier (e.g. news, weather, stock), offer an assortment of widgets and themes to your website visitors.

A universal easy to use feed reader widget for fast content updates from your favorite sites with previous/next buttons, make it easier to get through a lot of content quickly.

Robust and Time Tested Technology ready, to handle few million unique visits on medium level Dedicated Server hosting.

Administrator's Control Panel

ACP gives you a high level of control over all processes related to your dashboard. Manage users, widgets, languages, and content in through a very easy and intuitive process.

Listed bellow are few screenshots from the ACP with brief descriptions.

  • Local Content

    Through the local content interface, you can choose any country from selected region and create content (logically organize feeds into categories) that is related to the selected country, allowing dashboard users to select content not only by topic but also by their geographical preferences.

  • Feed Directory

    Through our Feed Directory interface, you can easily manage content categories and feeds in one place. No need for jumping between pages, as everything you need is composed as a single page application. With its integrated drag and drop functionality you can easily achieve your goals with minimum effort.

  • Widget Management

    Through the Widget Management Interface, you can decide which widget will be available for dashboard users. Install/uninstall can be done with just one click. Also you can easily configure widgets through the same interface as some of the widgets require additional configuration parameters (e.g. API key, User ID).

  • User Management

    User management interface is the main tool for managing all of your users if you are running MyWeb as a standalone service, and using it, you can easily create, edit, activate or disable users.

  • User Integration

    MyWeb is not built only to be used as a standalone service but also offers seamless integration with third party systems such as: CMS, Blogs, and Bulletin Boards and it is this feature which makes MyWeb stand out from the rest RUN Of The Mill products of similar type. With its authentication sharing capabilities you can easily integrate MyWeb with supported systems through the User Interface without any extra coding.

  • Manage Languages

    MyWeb supports i18n and is not limited to only one language; this tool will be your perfect assistant for creating, translating and managing languages to tailor the system to your users needs. You can create one or more languages for each of the countries (for example there are four languages in Switzerland) and easily manage them.

Administrative Tools

Besides dashboard and widget management tools, there are number of useful low level administrative tools which make your life easier during all your daily management tasks. Below are just a few of the useful tools:

  • MySql Toolbox

    MySql Toolbox allows you to manage your database. You can perform necessary database related actions through this easy-to-use interface. With just a few mouse clicks you can: Optimize, Analyze, Check, Repair, Export and even browse a table's content and its structure.

  • CP Action Logs

    Through CP Logs you can monitor all actions of your Control Panel users. You are able to see their activity, as well as search or remove old and unnecessary data.

  • CP Login Logs

    Through this interface you can easily monitor users who have accessed or tried to access your control panel. You can see login status, and examine logged HTTP data.

Development

Not only MyWeb is designed as a Ready To Use solution, but it also offers powerfull and flexible API for widget development, which can be perfectly used as a platform for developing and distributing your own widgets. Besides the fact that the product's code is closed its API is completelly open and documented(documentation will be available publicly soon).

Architecture of the platform is devided into two parts: Dashboard and Widget. These two parts are loosely coupled and thus widgets can be easilly adapted for other environments.

API consists of four core parts

  • CodeQ - CSS selector implementation library similar to jQuery that allows developers to easily manipulate DOM elements;
  • Proxy - provides developers with API methods for fetching data from different sources;
  • Widget - base class for all widgets, provides developers with predefined common API methods to manipulate widget;
  • Components - commonly used components like tabbed menus and pagination;

Process of widget development is very easy and it is possible to create new widgets with few lines of JavaScript code. Below is shown fully functional widget: 

(function() {
    
    function MyWidget() {}
    UDW.registerWidget('MyWidget', MyWidget);
    
    MyWidget.prototype = {    
        
        preferences: [
            {
                name: 'title',
                type: 'text',
                label: 'Title',
                value: 'My First Widget'
            }
        ],
        
        config: {
            name: 'MyWidget',
            iconId: 'mywidget',
            title: 'My First Widget',
            content: ''
        },
        
        onload: function() {
            this.setContent('<strong>Hello World From My First Widget</strong>');
        }
        
    };
    
})();

Among other API features there also exist several core widgets like Feed, TabbedFeed and Search that can be used as a base classes for your own widgets. For example the following code: 

(function() {
        
    function CNNNews() {        
        
        this.base = UDW.widgets['__tabbedfeed__'];
        this.base();
    
        this.config = {
            name: 'cnnnews',
            iconId: 'cnn',
            title: UDW.str('CNN News'),
            content: ''
        };
                
        this.onload = function() {
        
            this.setTagMap({
                'TopStories':'topstories',
                'World':'world',
                'U.S.':'us',
                'Politics':'allpolitics',
                'Technology':'tech',
                'Science&Space':'space',
                'Health':'health',
                'Entertainment':'showbiz',
                'Travel':'travel',
                'Living':'living',
                'Education':'education',
                'MostPopular':'mostpopular',
                'MostRecent':'latest'
            });
            
            this.setInitialTags(['TopStories', 'World', 'U.S.', 'Politics']);
            this.setFeedURI('http://rss.cnn.com/rss/cnn_{tag}.rss');
            this.setLogo('cnnnews', 'cnn.gif', 'CNN News');
            
            this.render();
                            
        };
        
    };
    
    UDW.registerWidget('cnnnews', CNNNews);
    
})();

Will produce cool "CNN News" widget(see image below)

CNN News Widget