Tips and Tricks-July 2006

In the last year or so, I have gotten interested in a couple of open source programs. Here is the Wikipedia definition of open source software: 

Open source software refers to computer software available with its source code and under an open source license. Such a license permits anyone to study, change, and improve the software, and to distribute the unmodified or modified software. It is the most prominent example of open source development.

The two fairly major pieces of software that I tried were a forum, PHPBB and content management software, Mambo and Joomla. They were written in PHP and used a database called MySQL. I was able to set both up using the free software. Some of you may remember the forum when I set it up for PCC. Unfortunately the server it was on at my house died and I haven’t had the time to replace it and get the forum running again.

The content management software that I tried was Mambo, which morphed into Joomla soon after I started to play with it. This particular type of content management software allows you to set up a web site that is based on a database—the content is put on pages from the database. That means that people who add content do not have to know about HTML. In addition, content can be published and removed automatically.

Right now I am using it to set up an “Electronic Newsletter” for use where I work. In both cases, it has been a bit of a challenge to learn about the software because there are not many resources. I think there is one book on PHPBB and two on Mambo (one later was rewritten for Joomla). While the developers are pretty good at writing software, they are not quite as good about documentation, so using this software requires a fair investment of time.

With both types of software, numerous modifications or add-ons have been written that add functionality to the basic product. Examples include such add-ons to content management as calendar software, helpdesk functions, newsletter management, e-commerce and more.

Where am I going with this, you might ask? The result of this has been that now when I am looking for software to accomplish some specialized tasks, I look for open source software. Recently, my husband has been complaining about how tough it is to deal with all the digital photos that we take. He renames each file to reflect the date and the event—we still have heated discussions about the length of the filenames, but that’s fodder for another article. He would like to find an easier way to do it.

I decided to do a short search of possible utilities for this, starting with open source software. I found a couple of programs within a few minutes of going to SourceForge.net by searching for file renaming utilities. Keep in mind that some of these are works in progress and you may have to do a little reading to get them working. Here’s a quick look at one I found.

It has the rather unwieldy name of Metamorphose File and Folder Renamer. Because the program has many features, I won’t go into great detail about the functions, but it allows you to replace the entire name of a file or to select a portion of the file. You can insert dates and times, numbering or text in any position within the name. So if you have a set of files from your digital camera named “image001.jpg,” “image002.jpg,” and so on, you can select the entire group of files and rename them to “2006-01-15-Birthday-001.jpg,” 2006-01-15-Birthday-002.” You can use the existing numbers or set up your own.  If you are renaming music files, you can pull a piece of information from the file, such as the title. There is a preview window so you can see the effects of the parameters you are setting before you do the rename. Get the program from Sourceforge.net at http://sourceforge.net/projects/file-folder-ren.

Need a way to convert documents to PDF files, but don’t want to spend big bucks to buy Adobe Acrobat? Again, open-source software can provide the answer. Try PDF Creator, http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcreator. It is basically a printer driver on steroids. You can output any document you can print into a PDF. There are a few options available such as adding your name and a subject. I did not have an opportunity to test it with anything too exotic, but it does work and may allow you to convert stuff to PDFs that you wouldn’t otherwise be able to. I did generate a PDF from a picture in PaintShop Pro and it worked perfectly. It doesn’t give you a lot of options, but it’s free and provides enough functionality for most people who don’t need all the features of Acrobat.

There are thousands of similar resources. Be sure to use system restore before you install, so you can retreat gracefully if anything causes a problem. One of the nice things about open source is that you will find forums for each of the products, including both negative and positive comments, a list of bugs, a place to request new features and support. Get out there and experiment a little.

PC Community, P.O. Box 3127, Hayward, CA 94540-3127
Copyright 2005

Banner Photo by Charles Scamahorn