Sometimes, a forum or even a chat is not enough. You want direct communication with someone across the world, with voice and visual support. For quite some time now Skype is one of the leading Voice-over-IP solutions, even having support for connecting to the outside world (=regular phones) and creating phone conferences (=phoning with multiple people).

Add a nice screen-sharing program to that, maybe even a collection of web-based productivity applications and you should be able to discuss and write down your ideas pretty quickly.

Please all vote for the "missing phpWSBB feature". The poll is open until beginning of March, then I'll write the hack and make it public on my homepage.

13 features are awaiting your vote, please choose the one that fits your needs best. Alternatively, the one you might seem to be cool or useful.

We have a winner: It's once more a photo-finish, the forum group restrictions a.k.a. private forums have won. This feature is already in CVS and implemented on kiesler.at so I'll work on improving the interface for it and release a hack.

A lot of people are confronted with a tough decission: Should I go for static pages or should I rather take a CMS for my web content needs? While the comparison between a static web page and a CMS might seem a little bit unfair to the pros, it is still reality and something worth reviewing.

The following article tries to shine a little light on the possibilities of phpWebSite, compared with static solutions that can cope without databases and even without php.

Every once in a while, someone at the phpws forums would like to have a suggestion on how to integrated phpBB into phpWebSite. Then, the usual answer is, to simply take phpWSBB which results in a frown. phpWSBB doesn't have the great features that phpBB has, does it?

Edit The newly-compiled phpWSBB 1.2.0 is now available for download. It contains the private forums hack as seen in CVS with some interface improvements.

The voting will be only for the category "non-commercial phpWebSite". All the four participants submitted to this category so this should be fair. Please vote for the site which you like the most. If you want, you can of course also comment your decision.

This poll will be running until start of 2007, only registered users can poll.

What can be more thrilling than a nice and fair competition? A competition of skilled webmasters and webmistresses, gifted and proven masters of phpWebSite? Well, I could think of a couple of things. Anyway, here's the plan.

There are three categories: Commercial, Non-Commercial and Creative. Commercial and Non-Commercial sites should be an obvious distinction. But what about the creative ones? This category is for "most creative phpWebSite use" and requires the participating sites to have either a self-made theme or at least one self-made module.

Update: We have a winner! The Femme Fatales got the most votes and thus won the phpWebSite awards 2006. Congratulations!

In an attempt to minimize clutter of the phpWebSite themes landscape, Picturesworld Studios merged their themes to the Kiesler phpWebSite Theme Preview Site. This makes life easier for people wanting to see all of the free available phpWebSites in just one place.

As usual, every theme on the preview site can be previewed with a single mouse click. Every theme is available to be commented as well.

Two similar functionalities put in two distinct modules instead of one big hack. The Link Manager module of phpWebSite neither can show a box with the latest links in it, nor can it show a box with random links in it.

These modules have been in use on kiesler.at for a long time. As there was a request for the ability to show recent links like on my site, I'm releasing them now

Thanks to everyone submitting ideas for the missing hack contest. All in all, I was impressed by the feedback this contest had this far. Now, it is time to vote.

16 requests made it in the next round, please vote for your favorite missing hack in this article.

And the winner is... It's almost a photo-finish. "Different rights to different documents" will be realized, as "Photoalbum bulk-import" is in CVS already anyways.

The third Happy Server Friends community event this far led us into the Rathausstra�e 6 in Vienna / Austria. This is the location of the so called Metalab. A place where you can hang around, play with technology, have parties and do all other kind of stuff.

The Metalab was pretty full, we even catched a couple of celebrities. Of course, I had my camera with me -- I don't go anywhere without it.