Location:

Type: Full-time
Experience: Mid-Senior level
Functions: Other, Information Technology
Industries: Internet, Information Technology and Services, Program Development, Marketing and Advertising

Job Description:
Comrads is looking for experienced PHP Programmers! Are you that motivated and creative PHP web developer with a passion for Internet? Do you have affinity with marketing automation and web-based applications such as DAM, MOM and MRM? Do you want a challenging job and be part of a motivated team that continues to develop and progress? Then we are pleased to get in contact with you.

We offer a dynamic job within an enthusiastic and young organization with an informal atmosphere and good, market-based benefits.

Skills:
Minimal 5 years of experience within a similar job position.

Excellent knowledge of:
PHP, MySQL, AJAX, Scripting (o.a.JavaScript), XML(-RPC), HTML, Flash and Actionscript.

Experience with:
Object-oriented programming (OOP), ITIL, RUP, Adobe Flex, Zend Studio, SVN, Adobe Acrobat, Dreamweaver, PDF-Lib, InDesign, QuarkXpress, Photoshop, Illustrator, Hosting & web server management (Apache), Operating Systems (Mac OSX, Red Hat Linux, Windows).

Company Description:
Comrads is a independant marketing application service provider and we support our clients to execute their marketing communications as effectively and efficiently as possible by means of marketing automation. This enables our clients to realize more return on their marketing budget and are able to focus on their core activities. Therefore, Comrads implements web-based marketing applications to support the marketing and communications processes of our clients. Based on an ASP-model we develop and implement tailored brand & asset management platforms, Web-to-print modules, Document management systems, webshops, etc. Interested? Then we are pleased to get in contact with you.

Additional Information:
Local candidates only, no relocation (Amsterdam Area, Netherlands).
No third party applications.
Acquisition to this vacancy is not appreciated!

Share/Save

Project Url: http://www.vdak.nl

Projectmanagement: connectedconcepts.nl

Project delivery: Jun 19, 2010

Description: Van Daalen Assurantiën is a company that provides insurance, mortgages, loans, etc. They were in need of a new website and I took care of the design, hosting, e-mail, cms and development.

The website holds more than 40 different forms with numerous validation rules. The customer has total control over the content via the CMS that the website was built on.

Share/Save

As Comrads (Solutions) corebusiness is developing online MRM and DAM solutions, Rackspace core business is hosting and they are doing a superbjob so far.

Rackspace wrote a whitepaper (Dutch) about Comrads that I would like to share with those of you who are interested.

Share/Save

WHMCS is an all-in-one client management, billing & support solution for online businesses. WHMCS handles everything from sign up to termination, with automated billing, provisioning & management. With WHMCS, you’re in control with a very powerful business automation tool.

In addition to my previous post where I made a Mollie module for iDEAL, I now also created a CardGatePlus payment module.

Card Gate Plus is a little bit cheaper then Mollie (instead of €0,99 you only pay €0,75 per transaction in the highest category). Card Gate Plus also accepts way more ways to pay.

Amongst the options are: Visa, Mastercard, iDEAL, Wallie, Giropay, Mistercash and Maestro.

If you want a copy of the Card Gate Plus payment module for WHMCS I would be happy to sell it to you for a small fee.You can order it here.
After payment you will receive the package immediately.

Share/Save

WHMCS is very very handy if you handle multiple domains. The systems comes with multiple domain registrars and payment gateways, but with my luck the ones I need aren’t included.
Since I’m Dutch and conduct most of my business in Holland I needed to hook it up to TransIP as my registrar and to a random iDEAL payment provider.

iDEAL for the ING bank is included with WHMCS, but since I have my bank account with the Rabobank it isn’t going to be much use for me.

TransIp offered a WHMCS module for download themselves which you can find here. Now I only needed a iDEAL payment provider.

If you are only doing a few transactions per month then it isn’t lucrative to get a contract with a big bank like the Rabobank. It will cost you more then 50 Euro a month and have to pay transaction costs on top of that.

I did some research and found out that Mollie has a very good deal. With Mollie you do not have a setup fee, you don’t have a monthly fee and you don’t have batch fees. You only pay € 0,99 for successful transactions.

Now that I made my choice I needed to hook it up to WHMCS. The developers of WHMCS have a very complete API with very good documentation. Mollie has a few example classes for download as well, so it was just putting the pieces together and juggle the variables between the hook and the callback script and voilà.

If you want a copy of the Mollie payment module for WHMCS I would be happy to sell it to you for a small fee.
You can order it here.
After payment you will receive the package immediately.

Share/Save

Purmerend, april 2010 – Comrads built a custom solution to create, produce, order and distribute publication materials. This online solution also contains a webshop (with ordermanagement and realtime stock information).

The system also communicates realtime with the ERP system of Reumafonds as well as with the ordermanagement system of the logistics supplier.

Share/Save

Purmerend, january 2010 – Since the beginning of this year Comrads redesigned the Draka brandportal. The Asset Bank was completely upgraded to the latest standards, the integrated ‘Stationery webshop’ was  completely revamped and the design itself was upgraded. Comrads created one complete system with all basic elements for every brandexposure you can think of.

The Draka Brand Point platform enables all Draka employees and external Draka contacts worldwide to browse and download (media)assets, order business cards, envelopes, stickers, etc.  All actions are regulated trough an extensive permission system that features multiple roles, groups and document rights.

Share/Save

I usually just use IMAP for my e-mail within Outlook on my office computer and IMAP with Thunderbird when I’m home on my laptop with Ubuntu, but my laptop gave me some troubles at home so I took my girlfriends laptop and fired up my webmail.

Damn!, Squirellmail is so incredibly ugly and gui-unfriendly compared to Horde or any other webmail project you come across. Not only do the themes stink, but it misses out on several basic functionality like sieve filtering and per-user SpamAssassin preferences.

I had some spare time on my hands so I went looking for a Squirellmail alternative. Very quickly you will find that there aren’t that many (good) webmail clients around. There is GoogleMail, Horde, Roundcube, Zimbra and a few lesser known ones. GoogleMail isn’t an option since we don’t like to host our e-mail elsewhere, Zimbra isn’t because it is more of an collaboration suite then it is a webmail client and Horde isn’t an option once you compare it to Roundcube

RoundCube is an excellent open source experience for an AJAX webmail, and what will really attract you to Roundcube is its advanced user interface with drag and drop functionnalities which make it very easy to organize your email. RoundCube Webmail is written in PHP and requires a MySQL database. The user interface is fully skinnable using XHTML and CSS 2. Roundcube also offers extensions in the form of plugins. This enables you to use SpamAssassin options per-user, Sievefiltering per-user, etc.

Roundcube was definitely the webmail program the fitted our needs most. We quickly installed it next to our Squirellmail installation. The installation was super-easy and super-fast. Then installed the ManageSieve and SpamAssassin plugins and I thought we were good to go.

Then a colleague mentioned that he couldn’t set a auto-reply from within RoundCube. He was planning to take a few days off and wanted to set an out-of-the-office notification. I quickly looked in the RoundCube repository for a auto-reply function but it is only available for a specific Windows mailserver. On the forums of RoundCube the programmers state that there will be no such official plugin or feature made available since they think it is not something the webmail program should manage.

I disagree.

I think users should be able to set their auto-reply message from within their webmail and not having to go trough Usermin or Webmin to do so.

Since SquirellMail DID have the auto-reply functionality available and SquirellMail also runs on PHP and MySQL I decided to just take that plugin and port it to RoundCube. I wrapped the whole thing in a RoundCube plugin format and voila, it works brilliantly.

The plugin writes a file to the users homedir where the SendMail server picks it up and fires the ‘Vacation’ plugin that sends an auto-reply.

Anyone who wants the plugin can download it here.

Update – If you can’t use FTP to put the forward files you may try using the squirrelmail_vacation_proxy program. Not that I do not support this program nor the use of it.

You may download it here.

Update – There is now a SourceForge project concerning this plugin. You can download the files there and contribute to it as well.

Support and questions can also be put in the projects forum.

Share/Save

Comrads

Purmerend, may 2009 – Since the beginning of this year ING and Postbank merged as one. Comrads put the combined ING brand identity into ING Merkwereld: one complete system with all basic elements for every brandexposure you can think of. The ING Merkwereld platform also takes care of the production process that is highly automated.

The ING Merkwereld platform enables all ING employees and external ING contacts to browse and download (media)assets. All actions are regulated trough an extensive permission system that features multiple roles, groups and document rights.

 
Read the complete article in Print Buyer 05/09 (Dutch).

Share/Save