In the past I’ve mentioned the Lightbox script that I use on the BMTG website and on this blog. This uses the Scriptaculous JavaScript library.

Last night I stumbled across an alternative to Scriptaculous, named mootools. This is a lot more compact and they even allow you to compile your own version at the point of download, allowing you to limit its content. It even compresses the code for you. Anyway, this is no good to me without a matching Lightbox script and, lo-and-behold, I found one named Slimbox – in fact it’s almost identical, but quicker and various improvements made.

I’ve now embedded both of these in a new version of the BMTG site that I’m working on, and it works like a dream with no modifications to my existing code (other than calling different scripts and stylesheets) required. Nice. It’s more compact and a lot quicker too.

One down side is that I was using Scriptaculous for one of the changes I was making to the site – namely hiding various page contents unless a button is pressed to reveal it. mootools has an equivalent function, but it’s not so easy to use (the downside of a more compact system I guess). Instead, I’ve done anyway with the flashy effects and used a simple bit of JavaScript instead.

By default the section that I want to hide has the following DIV surrounding it…

<div id="cast_div" style="position:relative; display:none">
:
Content here
:
</div>

This will hide the content until a button (displayed above the content) is pressed.

So, to reveal the content you add the following..

onclick="document.getElementById('cast_div').style.display='block'"

To hide the content again…

onclick="document.getElementById('cast_div').style.display='none'"

Sometime ago I added a modification to the Copy+ forums that would notify the administrator when a new post was added (allowing him to quickly remove any spam, as well as respond quickly to genuine questions).

However, after some security upgrades by the site host, all emails seemed to stop working. This was because it wouldn’t allow mails to come from email addresses that didn’t belong to the domain – as this domain didn’t come with any email capability, this was therefore a bit of an issue. The solution was to use SMTP instead.

In time, though, we realised that the new post mod didn’t use SMTP. So, the other day, I found another mod which works in a similiar way, but uses SMTP. This has fixed the problem nicely.

Oh, and I took the opportunity to add PHP Speedy to the Copy+ site (though, not to the forums).

As a non-profit and charity, I’m often on the look out for tools and services that I can use for the BMTG website. However, apart from various sites offering to create free websites, there seems little in the way of help for such groups. However, there are two sites/companies that I’d like to recommend…

Memset
They host the BMTG website for free. All you pay for is your domain name, which you can buy elsewhere and point to their nameservers. Their service is excellent as if the quality of their hosting. Oh, and they’re carbon neutral

PayPal
They provide reduced charges to non-profits. Google Checkout doesn’t. Never-the-less the PayPal non-profit charges aren’t much more generous than the standard Google Checkout rate.

There is also Google for Non-profits, a collection of Google tools and sites. Unfortunately, it’s just that. And the link no longer appears to work, even though it was only launched a couple of months ago.

Google Grants offers 3 months of free advertising to, well, people them deem to be appropriate – submit your details and cross your fingers.

If you’re aware of any useful services for non-profits/charities, please let me know.