vOfficeware

brown-bag

Awards Management Software for Associations

Due to the popularity of our post on how we helped the Association of Military Comptrollers with their awards program management, we decided to invest considerable resources and launch a stand-alone awards management application.  We just launched AwardsCMS - a one-stop platform to let associations collect submissions, coordinate with judges, and tabulate scores for their awards programs, scholarship programs, and grant offerings. AwardsCMS, backed by the vOfficeware development team, has the quality one would expect from a top grade app.  Between a drag and drop form builder, an intuiti

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Creating Custom Background Image on UINavigationBar using Monotouch

Some iPhone applications do not use the default iOS UINavigationBar. Instead, they may change the background image, or create a brand new custom bar altogether. Many developers find themselves asking how to accomplish this. Searching online and Stackoverflow, there appears to be a lot of confusion with some methods being better than others. I am developing Shopptique in Monotouch, and when I was tasked with changing the navigation bar to the application logo, I too, was stuck. I could not find any solutions referencing Monotouch. This is a screenshot of the application with its standard

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Quick Introduction to HTML5 for Web Developers

What the heck is this HTML5 business after all? As a team of web engineers I'm pretty embarrassed to say we could not truthfully answer this question. This week, I set out to put the question to rest once and for all, and in turn help educate the rest of the team. A special thanks goes out to Mark Pilgrim who wrote Dive into HTML5 which is available in at Amazon*. For those without the patience to view the slides, HTML5 is an ever evolving standard. It constitutes of many features which are supported in part or whole by new devices and web browsers. Those features make life easier fo

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Diophantine Problems

When I was about seven or eight years old, my grandfather gave me a math problem that took me many hours to solve. The problem is this: A movie theater made a total of 1 dollar (100 cents). The men cost 5 cents each, the women cost 2 cents each, and the children cost 1 cent for every 10 that were there. There were a total of 100 people in the movie theater. How many men were there? Women? Children? Read the problem carefully. There is only one solution to this problem. Now if you want to try and solve it, go ahead, before continuing on with the rest of this blog post. This problem has

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NoSQL Databases

In the last couple of years, there has been a surge in popularity for what is known as NoSQL databases. NoSQL, also referred to as Schema-less or Document-based, is a scalable, flexible, and high performance database. Programmers have found that traditional, relational style databases such as MySQL may not be the optimal solution for many of today’s data storage challenges. In a NoSQL environment, data is stored as a “Document”. Documents are independent of each other, and contain any kind of information so long as it contains a primary key. There are no restrictions from document to

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Google Usability Applied to Washington DC Hotel Searching

Websites that aggregate information is nothing new. Since the dawn of the internet thousands of sites make a living by compressing the vast resources the web has to offer. Recently a new website that assists with finding Washington DC hotels near the metro launched and caught our eye. The website follows the path of Google usability and design. There are not like me buttons, follow us on Twitter buttons, or really a variety of images. The bland design makes it easy to quickly identify hotels near DC metro stations and then read a summary about the hotel’s hundreds of online. The website a

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Paste from Word to WordPress

  • March 9th, 2011
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Our Non-profit Website Design team has done it again!  Often our clients have complained that "Pasting from Word" does not really happen nicely.  Tables get mangled, images get destroyed, and the whole process is just an ugly mess. Well - our new Paste from Word plugin fixes this calamity.  There is still no replacement for good XHTML/CSS coding, however this plugin should help save much of the hassle. Let us know what you think!

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Simple Crumbs Invalid Header Bug Fixed for WordPress 3.1

  • March 9th, 2011
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Our Nonprofit WordPress team has resolved a minor bug that has come up with the Simple Crumbs plugin.  Upgrading to WordPress 3.1 caused an issue where the Simple Crumbs plugin would stop working. Take a look and download an upgraded plugin: Simple Crumbs Invalid Header Fix

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Turn Key Map Plugin and Custom Maps

  • January 16th, 2011
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Over the past few months, we’ve been approached a few times about creating interactive world maps or global presence maps. It seems as if as fully functional Google’s mapping engine is, many corporations are looking for something a bit more specific for their needs. There are two main challenges that we have been asked to conquer: Create a map that the client can update without the need to know HTML or Adobe Flash / Action Script Create a map that suits a specific information need (for example allow overlays to be turned on and off) vOfficeware’s NonprofitCMS team has developed a

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WordPress Donation Plugin with PayPal IPN and Goals / Campaigns / Buckets

  • January 15th, 2011
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For quite some time our nonprofit clients have been clamoring for a donations plugin or widget that lets them instantly track progress against a specific goal. We've all seen this before. Those who have donated to friends running marathons or participating in triathlons have set a goal, say $500, and could show donors in real time how much was left to achieve that goal. Our WordPress custom plugin team spent a few hours this holiday season to crank out our freely available WordPress Donate Plugin! This plugin has a plethora of features ready to use out of the box: 1. Setup campaigns with go

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