While browsing through the web I’ve stumbled upon the slogan that sounded like “Powerful Flash CMS”. As for me it was rather pompous and promising but it picked me up (I guess it’s the very thing the website developers hope for). So I decided to check out the realness of the declared statement. Luckily for a few months I’ve been thinking about creating a flexible, dynamic and – what is more important – a functional and attractive Flash Photo Gallery. So when I saw the unknown encouraging Flash content management system I couldn’t stand aside. And now I’m going to test one of the flash galleries which are available at Motocms.com as demo versions. Frankly speaking I didn’t expect to see a great variety of templates but I was pleasantly surprised when I thumbed through new and new nice looking flash themes. So, the first output is that the good variety of products testifies in favour of Moto Flash CMS.

Even for a novice that I am it was easy enough to create my live demo account and get the trial template’s version. Wow! For the next 30 days I’m the competent owner of the flash photo gallery template and I’m free to evaluate it. Yummy! It sounds good (I would even say tempting)…

And wait a minute, what’s that going on?! After waiting for a while for my first loading the CMS has appeared. Alright, maybe it was not as fast as I expected it to, but most likely that was a problem of my slow computer which was not exactly ready for this sort of operation at first, not the Flash CMS itself. And what a miracle – I can see the Control Panel! Its outlook knocks me out! I like all kinds of flash elements very much and here they are!

When you touch one of the five elements with the mouse pointer they start to roll, shuffle and change. And on the next moment the quality of graphics impressed me greatly. At the first sight you can appreciate the hard work which had been made before the photo gallery template was presented to the online community. Every element looks as it is in 3D and sometimes it seems that you can touch the digital object. If you only could see my monitor right now you’d know that it is covered with my finger prints. Damn, I like it more and more!

I like when the applications talk to me and give useful tips about things I see in front of me on the monitor (without this I feel like I’m a child pushing and touching everything around randomly). In fact I am truly a zero in flash website creation and this is my first attempt to make an unbelievable and highly functional interactive flash photo gallery. My masterpiece has to demonstrate human beauty so I try to create two gallery pages with male and female models.

Looking at the photo gallery website template I started trying to change its outlook. It appeared to be very easy (especially if you have been working with Microsoft Office for example). Every flash template element can be easily changed with one or double-click of the left button of your mouse. This way you may also modify any type of website’s content in a few minutes. The same can be made by clicking once on the digital object and then push “Edit Module” button on the bottom right corner of the browser window. In case you like the right mouse button more than the left one you may click it once and choose “Edit” from the drop-down menu. Developers of the Moto CMS strived much to make the result of these three actions the same.

Let’s look at the flash gallery title – I don’t like it at all and naturally I decide to change it. So I click once on the template’s title and see the Menu panel at the right side of the window.  There I type the other slogan text – Avalon – and you may think of some other words to present your flash photo gallery to the online community. Moreover you are welcome to make some other changes like letters’ color, text effects or pointing this text link to a certain website page. As for the Effects you may find 5 of them in the template: Bevel, Blur, Color, Glow and Shadow. And what is more interesting is that these delicate effects can be applied not only to the text elements but to graphics, too.

And when you correct inscriptions of the flash gallery template you may be interested in fonts’ modification. Arial, Georgia, M+ 1c, Tahoma, Times New Roman and Verdana are standard fonts for photo gallery templates. But if they don’t suit you then you are welcome to add something new to the font list. In such case you need to have a *.swf font file or to create it by yourself. Not exactly by yourself because embedded Online Font Creator and Fonts Manager by Motocms.com will convert the ordinary *.ttf and *.otf fonts into the *.swf format for you (don’t you think it’s marvelous?). And in such way my cute flash photo gallery has got the new title lettering. I guess now with Algerian font the theme’s slogan text looks more presentable, don’t you think so?

When I was working with the navigation system MotoCMS has offered me to create new pages but I didn’t need them and I only deleted the third gallery page from the template and started working with the existing ones. Adding new photos to the Media Library took me a few minutes. I would rather take into account the photos’ size and aspect ratio to make them look good on the website but I’ve not taken that into consideration right from the start. So I had to use  the Image Editor integrated in MotoCMS template and you know, it was absolutely amazing (you may find it after double click on the image you want to edit). And when I completed my beautiful galleries I found that they were twins! I mean, the photos from the first one were the same with the second gallery photos. I thought it was a bad joke but it was not funny for me, at all. Having found the mistake I was confused because all I needed to do was to create two different Contents for different galleries. So, guys, when you add any new items to the photo gallery from your Media Library don’t forget to choose “Catalogue content” in the header part of the Advanced Gallery Widget window (Double-click on the gallery page will allow you to complete it with new photos). Moreover it would be not bad to choose different widgets for every photo gallery page.

And you know, it was my first and the last serious trouble with this Flash CMS – my future work was mostly ideal – I just had to settle the issue which color I wanted to use more.

And two social media buttons were the next thing for me to be proud of. Almost every website has its Facebook and Twitter pages. So if I’m thinking of having an interesting and popular website I should take care of my social media network presence. But I don’t think that icons with blue birds and shaped letters are good for my website’s design. So I need to make them by myself. And Flash templates from Moto CMS allow me to do it. Among other slots such as List Element, Image Slot, Image Slot with Appearance, Background Image, Page Part, Close Button and Photo Gallery Lightbox there is a Simple Button Slot. Click it and choose the place you want the button to be placed at. Now you are able to correct the newborn button (size, orientation, color, text, effects, click event etc.). After all I’ve got two unobtrusive buttons at the home page of my Flash photo gallery.

You know, my Flash photo gallery is nearly completed but I still haven’t touched the “Module” tab. This function enables adding and correcting Media Player Widget, Rich Content Block, Form Widget, Main Menu, Advanced Gallery Widget, Photo Gallery Preview and Photo Gallery Thumbnail List. A contact form has been already placed on the Casting page so I just need to change it a little bit. Double clicking on the contact form opens the Form Widget Window in front of the eyes. It does not differ too much from other editable windows so it is easy to add or remove content fields. On the right side of the window you may find Configuration button which enables you to format parameters of the Form Configuration and Validation Error Massage submenus. Here you may type the email address you want all users’ massages to be delivered to.

And don’t forget to save changes you’ve made by clicking “Save Page” button on the upper sidebar. It would not be good if few hours work will gap nothing.

You know when I was trying to build the marvelous photo gallery with the help of Moto Flash CMS I remembered my childhood when I saw the Power Point by Microsoft for the first time. It seemed to be like a magic – you push the button and then the colorful image starts twisting and rolling around the monitor. It was unbelievable and inimitable feeling. And when I started working with the MotoCMS-based Flash Photo Gallery Template I was shocked because of simplicity of the customization process. Again all I had to do was to simply push the button and observe magical results of my simple action. I did not expect that everything will be so intelligent. Of course this comparison is too simplified for such serious software as MotoCMS, but it is as easy in use as the Microsoft product was for me back then. I find it amazing because millions of people don’t want to waste their time on studying new complex technologies which they will use just once. It is a perfect chance to create a magnificent flash website without extra efforts and frustrations.

And maybe the time of my glory as a flash developer (or at least a flash website manager) is not so distant and unbelievable!

A CSS editor helps developers to develop and deploy cascade style sheets with ease. A good CSS editor will speed up development time and help to troubleshoot and debug.

CSS files are just text files. Any text editor will do the job. However, once CSS files begin to get complicated or get large, managing and editing them becomes more difficult if using a simple text editor.

So below are top 14 CSS editors for Developers and designers.

1. Free CSS Toolbox

Key features and benefits

• Quickly create and adjust CSS code
• Auto-complete and syntax highlighting makes CSS editing easy
• Easily re-format any CSS code
• Quickly adjust somebody’s else CSS to fit your style
• Make your code pretty and easy to read
• Find and eliminate errors in your code
• Check your CSS against various specifications
• See if your CSS is compatible with older web browsers
• Reduce the size of your CSS code by up to 70%
• Make your web pages load faster
• Quickly validate your CSS code with the web-based W3C CSS Validator
• Make sure your CSS is up to the CSS Level 2 standard

2. Simple CSS — A Free CSS Authoring Tool

Features and Benefits

• Runs on Macs, Windows and Linux
• Simple CSS allows you to easily create Cascading Style Sheets from scratch
• With Simple CSS, you can manage multiple CSS projects and import your existing style sheets.
• Simple CSS supports CSS2

3. JustStyle CSS Editor

Features and Benefits

• Powerful and easy-to-use
• Highly interactive
• Easy deployment
• Platform independent

4. A GTK-2 CSS Editor

Key Features -

• Syntax highlighting
• Syntax validation
• MDI notebook based interface
• Quick CSS properties and values insertion
• Auto-completion

5. Dialog-based insertion of CSS complex values

Key Features:-

• syntax highlighter for many languages (20+) and customize syntax highlighter
• code completion
• Php debugger
• code hint for functions (also called quick info/parameter hint)
• columns and row highlight
• code browser
• ftp edit – edit files directly on a ftp server
• shtml, xml, php syntax check
• included help for php, html, mysql
• sql designer

6. Astyle is a visual CSS editor.

Features and Key benefits

• Visual easy-to-use interface
• Graphic tree-type view of attachment files and the CSS structure
• Grouped view of properties and selectors
• Automatic selection and grouping of CSS selectors from a markup language document
• CSS, HTML, XML highlight code editor
• Active preview current selectors and documents with IE and Mozilla support
• Clean up HTML document via CSS
• Copy, Paste and Cut operations
• Drag and Drop operations

7. Eledicss is a CSS2 editor

Eledicss is a CSS2 editor implemented as a server-side PHP script. It allows editing CSS files using a web browser.
Features

• Can be installed both on UNIX and Windows webservers.
• If you want to directly change the css files (online), they must be writable by the webserver.

8. Notepad++ is a free source code editor and Notepad replacement that supports several languages.

Key Features:-

• User Defined Syntax Highlighting
• Auto-completion
• Multi-Document
• Multi-View
• Regular Expression Search/Replace supported
• Full Drag ‘N’ Drop supported
• Dynamic position of Views
• File Status Auto-detection
• Zoom in and zoom out
• Multi-Language environment supported
• Bookmark
• Brace and Indent guideline Highlighting
• Macro recording and playback

9. Online CSS Template Generator

Key Features

• Make, manage and market se friendly templates
• Syntax highlighting on CSS and xHTML
• Drag and drop page elements
• Integrated image makers
• Microstock at low prices
• Template im- and export
• WYSIWYG xHTML editor
• Integrated help-area
• Visual DOM tree
• CSS wizard

10. An open-source css editor for windows

Key Features :-

• Snap{css} is an extremely light-weight
• Notepad-like application that allows css designers to easily edit their code
• Quick acccess to helpful features such as our beautify and collapse functions.

11. Oxygen CSS Editor

Key Features:-

• Support for CSS Validation
• Improved CSS Content Assistant
• Sortable CSS Outline view
• Folding

12. Freedomeditor, Customizable browser based (text/web(WYSIWYG)) file editors

Key Features:-

• TinyMCE style sheets selector.
• Configurable/Loadable settings/functions for each filename-extension.
• File system / Folder browser.
• Bookmarker with correctly operating Firefox sidebar support, thanks to jQuery and a jQuery plugin called frameReady
• Create files in your native language.
• Merge CSS filesCompress and/or Categorize CSS source code, remove useless white space, tabs.
• Use CSS files for database purposes.
• Independent function library that you can use to parse CSS files to 3-dimensional PHP arrays.
• Identify and remember color codes.
• Console terminal (modified phpterm) accepting commands by url request, for automating administrative tasks.
• Find/Replace on multiple files in a folder.
• Easily add custom tags.
• Extensive AJAX usage.

13. MacRabbit CSSEdit

Key Features

• With CSSEdit, you see changes to your style sheet applied in real-time
• For any Web App or HTML file
• You can edit style sheets for absolutely any site on- or offline.
• Making your Web 2.0 App beautiful is now easy and productive.

14. StyleMaster CSS editor

Key Features

• Browser compatibility
• WYSIWYG CSS design
• Instant previewing

If your Favorite CSS Editor is not on this list and about the thoughts and opinions with above said CSS editors please share your comments.

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23 inspirational Light Graffiti Examples

Color plays a very important role in communicating a design and how that design is perceived by the user. Thats why you need the pick the right color palatte for your design work. As a designer, there are many different things that you should take into account when choosing colors for your design.

Below are 27 color Tools and Resources for Designers.

1. Color Scheme Designer -

2. Check My Color

3 Gray Bit

4 Contrast-A: Find Accessible Color Combinations

5 Kuler

6 Color Palette Generator

7 Color Lovers

8 4096 Color Wheel Versions

9 Color Schemer

10 ColoRotate

11 ColourLovers Copaso

12 Color Blender

13 Color Explorer

14 Colors on the Web – Color Wizard

15 Color Munki

16 Online color Palette Creator – Aviary Toucan

17 Easy RGB

18 Color Jack

19 Daily Color Scheme

20  Colr

21 Color hunter

22 Color Mixers

23 Color Palette Generator

24 FireWheel Design color burn

25 Color Mod

26 ColorZilla For Firefox

27  Color fields Colr Pickr

While compiling this useful color resources it’s always a possibility that I missed some other tools and resources. Feel free to share it with us in the comments.