THURSDAY ROUNDUP # 80
This is our web design and web development news series where we share our favorite design/development related articles, resources, tutorials and awesome freebies.
NEW DEVELOPMENT RESOURCES AND TOOLS
FFForm – Free jQuery Contact Form Plugin with Validations & Amazing CSS3 Animation
FFForm is a simple jQuery contact form plugin that can be integrated in any website layout to provide a fully functional contact form. Built with jQuery and CSS, FFForm contact form is compatible with all modern web browsers and mobile devices. It also provides various customization options including animations, field validation and notifications.
RESTFUL API Library for Connecting with OAuth2 Services – Hello.js
A client-side Javascript SDK for authenticating with OAuth2 (and OAuth1 with a oauth proxy) web services and querying their REST API’s. HelloJS standardizes paths and responses to common API’s like Google Data Services, Facebook Graph and Windows Live Connect. Its modular so that list is growing.
Making it Easy to Merge Map and Narrative – Odyssey JS
The odyssey.js library is being developed to help journalists, bloggers, and other people on the web publish stories that combine narratives with maps and map interactions. The library is open source and freely available to use in your projects. It is initially being built to work with most modern browsers.
Fenix – A Static Desktop Web Server for Developers
Fenix is a simple static desktop web server for developers. You can work on multiple sites simultaneously. Serve any number of HTTP projects side by side with Fenix. Fenix serves and receives. View JSON, XML, and other webhook payloads with the request browser. You can create, stop, start, and share Fenix servers from the command line with the free Node.js console app. Now you can turn your desktop into a public web server by sharing a link. Let collaborators/reviewers “touch and feel” the site.
Timesaving WordPress Plugins for Free Download
Since time is so valuable, we are sharing some WordPress plugins that webmasters, developers and bloggers use to save time every day.
We are always trying to enhance our workflow for projects. Here are a few timesaving WordPress plugins that we can use to save time and speed up our process.
Lets You Add Notes and Markers to Webpages – jNottery
Have you ever taken a screenshot of a webpage and used graphics program to mark some important things on it? Or sent your friend a link and instructed him to “Go to the bottom of the page”, or “Check third paragraph in the left column” . Wasn’t it cumbersome and inefficient? jNottery is here to help users with sharing and managing content of your website more effctively! The library’s workflow is fairly straightforward. Whenever you (or your client) add a note to any supported part of a website it will be encoded and saved directly to the URL. Afterwards, anyone can deal with this link as with any other, except that after visiting it, all your notes will show up.
A Modern Form Progress Bar – Fort.js
Modern progress bar for form completion. All you do is add the form and Fort.js’ algorithm will take care of the rest. Best of all, it’s super small.
A JavaScript Library for Google Analytics – Boba.js
Boba.js is a small, easily extensible JavaScript library that makes working with Google Analytics easier. It supports the old ga.js library as well as the new analytics.js library. It has one out of the box function, trackLinks, and makes tracking everything else child’s play.
Animated Circle Statistics Without Images – Circliful jQuery Plugin
Detect the Software a Visitor Has Installed – Software Detect
This is a very simple proof of concept that displays what software a visitor has installed on their computer. It uses jQuery & Flash.
Easy jQuery Plugin to Rapidly Build Dropdown Side Menus
A super easy-to-use jQuery plugin to rapidly build dropdown side menus.
Easy Web Animations – MotorCortex.js
MotorCortex makes web animations easy, providing the ability to describe them through CSS-like syntax and stop messing animation logic with your actual javascript code. MotorCortex.js aspires to mimic the human brain’s motor cortex by providing a new layer of software abstraction that handles and describes the movement of the various elements of an html application in a way that all timed effects doesn’t interfere with the logic (decision making) layer of the software and plus each “transition” is treated as a matter of the whole application body and not of each element alone. And all this with an easy and straight forward CSS-like syntax and a js API that respects and matches all the modern MV* javascript frameworks.
A Fast & Reliable Real-Time Engine – Socket.IO
Socket.IO enables real-time bidirectional event-based communication. It works on every platform, browser or device, focusing equally on reliability and speed. You can push data to clients that gets represented as real-time counters, charts or logs. Starting in 1.0, it’s possible to send any blob back and forth: image, audio, video. And it allows users to concurrently edit a document and see each other’s changes. It’s one of the most powerful JavaScript frameworks on GitHub, and most depended-upon NPM module.
GitHub Profile Card
A web component to show a profile-card for your Github account.
Add Scrolling Effects with Scrollme jQuery Plugin
ScrollMe is a jQuery plugin for adding simple scrolling effects to web pages. As you scroll down the page ScrollMe can scale, rotate, translate and change the opacity of elements on the page. It’s easy to set up and not a single line of JavaScript is required.
How to Set up e-Commerce Site with WordPress
To get started with your own e-Commerce, the first thing that you need to set up is a WordPress website. Why WordPress? Because it is a nice, if not the ultimate, platform. It is easy to set up and maintain, and comes with tons of useful plug-ins and themes. It is consistently updated to present better security and functionality.
FREE TEMPLATES AND THEMES
Free PSD eCommerce Template
Here is a complete free PSD eCommerce template including 13 screens for the desktop version and 6 other screens in mobile version.
Single Page Business/Portfolio WordPress Theme: NeoArtsWP
NeoArtsWP is yet another wonderful single page WordPress theme. Its perfectly suitable for portfolio and business websites where information is to be displayed in a concise manner. With a nice accordion style layout it offers integrated sliders to show case portfolio items, work items and services offered by the website.
Free Responsive Theme for Ghost – Crisp
A minimalist, responsive, and open-source theme for Ghost.
DESIGN FREEBIES
Free Download: 14 Geometric Backgrounds
This freebie pack includes 14 high-resolution geometric backgrounds. 4050 x 2700px, 240dpi high quality Jpg image files. Give your projects a modern and minimal look with these beautiful images. Great for any kind of presentation, free or commercial. Perfect for web designers, presentations, apps or as desktop geometric wallpapers.
50 Free Tessellated Designs
Icebreaker (PSD)
50 Free Outdoor Icons
A set of 50 free outdoor icons created with vector shapes.