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Chatbots

Typebot is a free and open-source platform that lets you create conversational apps and forms, which can be embedded anywhere on your website or mobile apps.

It provides various features like text, image, and video bubble messages, input fields for various data types, native integrations, conditional branching, URL redirections, beautiful animations, and customizable themes.

You can embed it as a container, popup, or chat bubble with the native JS library and get in-depth analytics of the results in real-time.

Typebot can be used in the Cloud (free tier available) or installed via Docker.

It drag & drop builder makes it amazingly fast to build your personal chatbot. It provides a ton of integrations (Google Analytics, Google Sheets, OpenAI, Zapier, Webhooks, Email, Chatwood) out of the box or you can connect other things via your own API Requests.

I have been a longtime user of RocketChat and build my own chatbots using Hubot or BotPress.

RocketChat
„Rocket.Chat is a free and open-source team chat platform that enables real-time communication between team members. It provides team messaging, audio and video conferencing, screen sharing, file sharing, and other collaboration features. It offers a familiar chat interface that makes it easy for teams to stay connected and collaborate effectively.

Rocket.Chat is highly customizable and extensible, with a large number of community-contributed plugins and integrations. It supports multiple platforms, including web, desktop, and mobile, making it accessible to teams regardless of their device or location. It also offers end-to-end encryption for secure communication, and compliance with various industry regulations such as HIPAA, GDPR, and others.“

Hubot
„Hubot is a popular open-source chatbot framework developed by GitHub. It allows developers to build and deploy custom chatbots that can automate tasks, integrate with various APIs, and enhance team communication and collaboration.

Hubot is built on Node.js and can be extended with various plugins and scripts, making it highly customizable and flexible. It comes with many built-in plugins, including integration with popular chat platforms like Slack, HipChat, and Campfire, as well as various APIs like Twitter, GitHub, and Google.

Hubot enables developers to build chatbots that can perform various tasks, such as scheduling meetings, deploying code, fetching data, and responding to user queries. It also provides a command-line interface for managing and interacting with the chatbot.“

Botpress
„Botpress is an open-source platform that allows you to build and deploy chatbots and conversational interfaces. It provides a user-friendly interface and a visual flow editor that allows you to create and manage your chatbot’s conversation flow. Botpress comes with many pre-built components and integrations, including natural language processing (NLP) engines, chat widgets, and webhooks, making it easy to build complex chatbots with advanced functionality.

Botpress offers features like machine learning-based NLP, conversational analytics, multi-language support, customizable themes, and a modular architecture that allows you to add custom functionalities with ease. It supports multiple channels, including web, Facebook Messenger, Slack, and WhatsApp, allowing you to reach your audience wherever they are.“

Typebot rocks

Typebot beats Botpress and could be the reason why I might be skipping RocketChat as well. Not sure I want to build an integration for RocketChat myself.

Setup

portalZINE NMN | Development meets Creativity | typebot

Base YAML Docker-Compose File to get you started. This will setup a Postgres instance, the typebot builder and typebot viewer.

Github
Docker Setup

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THE QUESTION

A while back a potential customer asked me, if it is possible to restructure a WordPress Multisite setup and WPML with a more simplified and custom url structure?


THE ROUGH IDEA

1 . BASE.website web.site (with possibly different languages)

web.site/de/
web.site/en/

2. SUB.website web.site/nl-nl/

Languages would normally be added like this:

web.site/nl-nl/de/
web.site/nl-nl/en/

The customer wanted it to be restructured / simplified like this:

web.site/de-nl/
web.site/en-nl/

This basically mimics the structure of a single WPML website with custom languages, but with all the benefits of a multisite.

THE SOLUTION

This is nothing that WPML or WordPress Multisite provides out of the box.
I built a prototype setup to make it work.

Not something that I would propose for anyone, as it requires a lot of tweaks for anything that handles dynamic links (plugins, hooks, core systems, page.builder …)

Its doable :)

BASIC URL HANDLING

One thing that needs to be tweaked globally, is the mapping of the new url structure.

So web.site/nl-nl/en/ needs to become web.site/en-nl/

This needs to be handled on the server side, by proxying the original to the new structure.
This can be easily done using Apache or NGINX.

With that web.site/nl-nl/en/ will be proxied to web.site/en-nl/, but any core navigation will not work yet.

This is the fastest solution that I came up with, within the hour I gave myself ;)

There surely are other options, like the core rewrites / restructuring of the core shorturl handling. But these approaches might break things in far more areas.

Using the proxy approach, keeps the core as it is. The solution needs to be as simple as possible, allowing to maintain it in the future :)

HOOKS TO THE RESCUE

Just for the basic setup a couple of hooks are required to make this work, more might be needed depending on the plugins in use.

Here a couple of examples ….
WordPress site_url

WordPress Nav Links

WPML

Rankmath

This will not cover every angle, but will give you a starting point! I love my puzzles and there always is a viable solution :)

Need something similar … get in touch!

Happy coding …

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Ich hatte dieses Jahr die Möglichkeit, über meinen Kunden TYPEMYKNIFE®, an der „Nacht der Sterne“ in Stuttgart, im Mercedes-Benz Museum, teilzunehmen. Auf der Gala kommen mehr als 800 Gäste aus Gastronomie, Hotellerie, Politik, Kultur und Wirtschaft zusammen. 

NACHT DER STERNE / ahgz Sterne Award 2022

portalZINE NMN | Development meets Creativity | nacht der sterne 2022 typemyknife 1
Felicitas Then – Anmoderation
portalZINE NMN | Development meets Creativity | nacht der sterne 2022 typemyknife 3
Verleihung + Food

Es war ein klasse Abend, auf dem nicht nur die Spitzenköche aus Deutschland, der Schweiz, Südtirol und Österreich ausgezeichnet wurden, sondern diese auch Live zeigen konnten was sie so können.

Veranstaltet wird die Party von der Allgemeinen Hotel- und Gastronomie-Zeitung (Ahgz) und Burg Staufeneck / Rolf Straubinger.

Moderatorin des Abends waren die Journalistin und Fernsehköchin Felicitas Then und Rolf Westermann von der ahgz-Chefredaktion.

Informationen zum Award, den Methoden und Siegern findet man hier.

TYPEMYKNIFE®

portalZINE NMN | Development meets Creativity | nacht der sterne 2022 typemyknife 2
portalZINE NMN | Development meets Creativity | nacht der sterne 2022 typemyknife 4
TYPEMYKNIFE® – Im Gespräch

TYPEMYKNIFE® hat Vorort an einem Stand eine kleine Auswahl seiner Küchenmesser, die über den 3D Gravur Konfigurator vorbereitet und graviert wurden, präsentiert. Dadurch hatten Gäste die Möglichkeit, die gravierten Küchenmesser einmal persönlich zu entdecken und die Qualität zu bestaunen.

portalZINE NMN | Development meets Creativity | typemyknife portalzine
Glamour Shot / Kartentausch LOL

Die fast 1400 km Rundreise aus dem Norden hat sich gelohnt. Es ist immer schön Kunden mal nicht nur virtuell zu treffen, besonders wenn die Distanz so groß ist. Bei der Entfernung trifft man sich nicht immer mal kurz auf einen Kaffee oder Gin-Tonic :)

Gruß an TYPEMYKNIFE® / Schwäbisch Gmünd / Stuttgart

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A grid mystery

Somehow the Grids Layout Builder for Gutenberg ist not pushing styles to the footer within a Timber theme. At least not for me.

Somehow the wp_footer action within the Grids plugin is not being executed and no grid styles are added to the footer. I am not getting any errors, but will have to investigate some more in the near future ;)

Update: It is related to the get_footer action within Grids. get_footer is used to load the appropriate footer template file, which I am not using in my Timber theme ;) So the workaround below is perfect.

Quick patch

Here a quick workaround for the theme functions.php, that does the trick for now.

Grids for WordPress, what is that?

„A layout builder is a tool that helps you creating visual structures in your page, from a simple layout made by adjacent columns, to more complex compositions.

Grids is entirely based on the WordPress block editor, which means that you’ll be able to use it together with the myriad of content blocks that developers and designers from all around the World are creating.

With Grids, we’re bringing a visual structure to the content written with the WordPress Block Editor.“
Grids: Layout builder for WordPress / Documentation / CSS-Tricks Article / A Complete Guide to Grid

Grids Example

This is using the Grids Plugin and only took a couple of minutes! I am so glad IE 11 is soon completely unsupported ;) and we can start using CSS Grid freely. Well we can, as nobody should be using IE 11 anymore!!!

On mobile its just stacked rows :)

CSS GRID: SOLVING PUZZLES

COLUMN 1
I love to solve puzzles and find epic solutions :)

CSS Grid Layout excels at dividing a page into major regions or defining the relationship in terms of size, position, and layer, between parts of a control built from HTML primitives.

Like tables, grid layout enables an author to align elements into columns and rows. However, many more layouts are either possible or easier with CSS grid than they were with tables.

LOVE IT!

COLUMN 2
We all love magazine-style layouts and we are getting closer to getting that :) The magic is in the detail.

For example, a grid container’s child elements could position themselves so they actually overlap another layer, similar to CSS positioned elements.

FLEX OR GRID
The basic difference between CSS Grid Layout and CSS Flexbox Layout is that flexbox was designed for layout in one dimension – either a row or a column.

Grid was designed for two-dimensional layout – rows, and columns at the same time.

COLUMN 3
I only styled the Desktop size, as a little preview. Added Custom CSS to switch areas for tablet sizes.

  • The grid properties are supported in all modern browsers.
  • An HTML element becomes a grid container when its display property is set to grid or inline-grid.
  • All direct children of the grid container automatically become grid items.
  • The spaces between each column/row are called gaps.

LET THE BATTLE BEGIN!

STAR TREK IPSUM

Unidentified vessel travelling at sub warp speed, bearing 235.7. Fluctuations in energy readings from it, Captain. All transporters off. A strange set-up, but I’d say the graviton generator is depolarized.

The dark colourings of the scrapes are the leavings of natural rubber, a type of non-conductive sole used by researchers experimenting with electricity. The molecules must have been partly de-phased by the anyon beam.

VS

STAR WARS IPSUM

Lucas ipsum dolor sit amet c-3po solo bothan qui-gon darth solo darth dantooine dagobah mustafar. Fett solo yoda r2-d2 kit obi-wan hutt amidala kenobi. Jade leia gonk lobot ahsoka darth jade skywalker organa. Utapau mara owen darth darth yavin.

Lando baba wedge darth solo skywalker ben fett. Fisto wookiee bothan antilles antilles luke kenobi. Yavin naboo kenobi jinn calamari antilles. Organa jabba skywalker gamorrean ackbar. Windu skywalker kit skywalker. Dantooine dantooine moff leia dantooine wicket amidala.

Things missing!

This is almost a perfect Gutenberg plugin and a reduced / simplified integration of CSS grid. I really think that this plugin makes Gutenberg 1000times better.

There is so much repetition of Gutenberg blocks out there, while this really addresses something new and nails it :)

There are still things missing, that are critical and would make this even more useful for certain websites:

  1. Allow to name grid areas. Would allow faster manual css modifications.
  2. Allow grid templates per breakpoint. This would make it perfectly usable in a responsive world. This is by far the most important issue!
  3. Some additional styling options would be nice, but nothing major. (Allow to adjust the grid gap …)
  4. Export the inline styles to files, that would leverage caching far better.
  5. Custom CSS integration, which allows to centralize Custom CSS for areas and sections.


Enjoy coding …

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The issue

WACOM is known for stopping support for their pen tablets after some years, especially for the cheaper consumer pen tablets.

The WACOM Bamboo (in my case the CTH-461) is a pretty popular pen tablet and the latest driver wont install natively under Windows 10. Really frustrating for hardware that is still in perfect shape.

The solution

  1. Download latest available driver from Wacom
  2. Do not install the software directly yet.
  3. Right click on the downloaded file and choose „Properties“
  4. Click Compatibility on the popup
  5. Activate „Run this program in compatibility mode for“, choose Windows 8.
  6. Now you can install the driver & software.
  7. Enjoy

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