Rapid Web’s Open Source Contributions 2015

In 2015, Rapid Web Services made a commitment to increase their contributions to the open source community. We therefore started several open source projects. This post will go over some of the most interesting open source contributions we made last year.

Direct Share Buttons

Including large amounts of external JavaScript and 3rd party code for all the various social media sites can be a pain. They can slow down the loading and rendering of your webpage, possibly frustrating your users. We developed these Direct Share Buttons to allow people to keep the important social sharing functionality while not requiring any external JavaScript.

As shown above, these buttons can be rendered in multiple different styles depending on your needs. You can choose to display them as circles, rounded squares or rectangles.

You can easily install these Direct Share buttons with bower. Just use the below command.

bower install direct-share-buttons

For more information, take a look at the Direct Share Button GitHub repository.

Basic JavaScript Cookie Banner

All websites are now required to display a banner to indicate and/or request acceptance of cookies, due to EU law. We therefore created this simple JavaScipt powered cookie banner. It implements implied consent.

This can be easily installed via bower install basic-js-cookie-banner. It requires Bootstrap (CSS) >= 3.3.5 and jQuery >= 1.11.3.

For more information, take a look at the Basic JavaScript Cookie Banner GitHub repository.

PHP Google Contacts v3 API

This library was created to allow for easy integration of Google Contacts into web applications. After initial setup, it creates an easy object-orientated interface to the Google Contacts system.

Installation is easy via composer. After you have installed and setup the library, it is worth reading the usage instructions which are available in this blog post.

For more information, take a look at the PHP Google Contacts v3 API GitHub repository.

And more…

There are plenty of other open source projects we’ve worked on over the last year, such as the following.

• RW File Cache – A file-based caching system, with a similar syntax to memcache that has some unique features.
• Mobile Checker – A small service for checking if a website is mobile friendly using the Google Pagespeed API
• Deactivate User Plugin – WordPress plugin that allows a user to deactivate their own user account from within the WordPress login area, or via the shortcode
• Backup Deletion Script – Shell script to identify date named backups and remove them
• Bootstrap 3 Styleguide – A Bootstrap 3 style guide, aiming to display all the Bootstrap components on a single page, based on the Bootstrap 3 Theme Example
• Bootstrap Styletile – A style tile to show common website elements. Useful for demonstrating design concepts to clients.

We’ve created an open source mini site where you can see more about our open source work. For a list of all our open source projects, take a look at the Rapid Web Services GitHub organisation.