Matt Heyes at www.iamroot.co.uk has written a step-by-step tutorial on how to integrate Solmetra’s SPAW WYSIWYG editor with SkyBlueCanvas. You can read the tutorial at www.iamroot.co.uk. “SPAW Editor is a web based in-browser WYSIWYG editor control enabling web site developers to replace a standard textarea html control with full-featured, fully customizable, multilingual, skinable web based WYSIWYG [...]

I have just completed the coding for SkyBlueCanvas version 1.2. The new version is an important milestone for the lightweight CMS because it is the first version to fully implement i18n (internationalization) support, the MVC (model view controller) design pattern and a lightweight ACL (access control list) to support multiple users and access permissions.

I don’t normally make posts that are not related to SkyBlueCanvas, but I really enjoy seeing anyone do anything extremely well. As a friend of mine said, “Danny MacAskill is the Yo-Yo Ma of bikes”. This is just inspiring to watch. Watch the video, you won’t regret it.

It's hard to believe it has been 12 months since SkyBlueCanvas v1.0 was released. SkyBlueCanvas has covered a lot of ground and attracted a fair amount of attention in a short time. This post is a personal letter from Scott Lewis, the lead developer for SkyBlueCanvas.

SkyBlueCanvas has received some nice media attention in recent weeks. So I thought I would write a quick post to link to the sites that have been kind enough to give us some attention. All of these sites as well as the entire open source community are funded in large part by donations and sponsor ads and affiliate programs. Please support their sites and their sponsors.

Fragmentor is a plugin to be used instead of or alongside the default Fragment Plugin in SkyBlueCanvas. Fragmentor provides template and fragment developers an alternative and much more flexible syntax for loading dynamic content views (fragments) into SkyBlueCanvas web pages. Since the plugin uses a different syntax from the default fragment plugin, it will not conflict with it. With Fragmentor, you can pass an arbitrary number of key=< value pairs of data from your article text or template file.

A few nights ago, Steve Fister, one of the SkyblueCanvas Development Team Members posed the question again and offered a few ideas on how to pull it off. After thinking about Steve's suggetions, I realized that this is actually quite easy to do. In fact, with Steve's idea, you can add an editable text block anywhere on a web page. What's more, with a little SkyBlueCanvas Skin Magic, you can build page-specific text blocks, so if you want a different block of text to appear on different pages, you can do it with this trick.

The new MyVars extension allows you to create custom search variables/tokens that will be replaced with the values you specify when your web page is rendered in the browser. This feature can be helpful when you want to be able to easily change bits of informatin such as phone numbers, emails, web page URLs or image paths. You set the value once, and it is displayed anywhere in your site you choose. If the value changes, you only make the change in one place.

One of the most common questions we are asked is how to convert existing or stock HTML templates to work with SkyBlueCanvas. In this article I will guide you, step-by-step, through the process of adapting any existing skin to work with SkyBlueCanvas. This process, once you understand the fundamentals, usually takes about an hour - sometimes even less. In fact, the skin we will use in this tutorial took only 30 minutes.

When I first built SkyBlueCanvas, I was a freelance web designer and developer. For seven years I struggled to make ends meet working on small projects that were not very profitable. I knew there had to be a way for me, and the thousands of other independent web professionals, to make a living working on the limitless number of small projects out there. If you are a freelance designer or developer, you know what I mean.