CSS frameworks are great to save time from recreating rules for typography, forms, tables, etc.

However, they are not that great for everyone. There are many designers/developers that prefer to recreate such stuff from scratch so that each of their work looks/feels different. Or, many others have their own CSS snippets that fasten the development.

If you are one of these designers/developers and looking for only a grid system but nothing more, Fitgrd can be a good fit : ).

Fitgrd is a responsive grid system with 12 columns and no strict sizes for the min-max widths.

Each column has 2 percent of margin on both sides and everything works with percentages.

When working on a web project, many of us usually keep a scratch document open to copy/cut/paste code snippets without losing them.

Capsule is a free WordPress theme that is specifically built to replace that scratch document.

It comes with a built-in code editor and supports Markdown Extra syntax + GitHub-style fenced code blocks.

The code editor has support for syntax highlighting of many languages, tags can be added quickly with metadata and they can be filtered.

Any number of entries can be added, they are listed with their creation dates and quick links exist for locating them faster (tags or adding to favorites).

Also, there is Capsule Server which makes “team collaboration” possible by replicating selecting entries with other Capsule installs.

Displaying video on websites is both easy and hard as a good video experience usually requires a custom-styled, cross-browser and fast player.

Flowplayer, the popular HTML5 video player, offers a great experience with a completely customizable feature set.

One of the most important things when playing video is probably the browser support. The player does that perfectly with HTML5 by default and falling back to Flash when needed.

Flowplayer’s interface is completely customizable and it comes with 3 beautiful skins. Also, its layout is fluid and works in any screen size with no extra settings.

There is a web-based designer to create a completely new skin and also see how flexible it is.

It can be controlled very easily (keyboard and touch events support) and offers a (native) fullscreen mode too.

Cuepoints can be defined for any video, sub-titles can be added and the videos can even be displayed in slow-motion.

For a better customization, any HTML can be shown when the videos are preloading and once they are ended (good for presentations and branding).

Flowplayer integrates well with Google Analytics and can track “how long a video is played, how many times it is played and in which format (HTML5 or Flash).

Each video file is embeddable (if enabled) with the help of a share button that auto-generates an embed link.

All the functionality of the player can be controlled with a powerful API and it has callbacks on every level to interact with any event.

The player is open source and free to use under the GPL license. For commercial use, it requires a license.

And, Flowplayer team provides great support (paid support exists) and an active user community that discusses on their product forum.

How to join the giveaway?

Flowplayer is giving away 3 * Commercial licenses ($95 value/each) and in order to join:

• please comment to this post

And, the winners will be selected randomly on 06 May 2013 (1 week later) with the query below:

SELECT * FROM wp_comments WHERE comment_post_id=4037 AND comment_approved=1 AND comment_type='' GROUP BY comment_author_email ORDER BY RAND() LIMIT 3

Good luck to all.

The winners

Here they are:

• bigcloud (comment #1263775)
• Techspy (comment #1263756)
• Federico Garcia (comment #1263809)

Congratulations.

Bootstrap and Foundation are the most widely-used and complete front-end frameworks out there.

However, there are other alternatives in the field. Usually not as complete as them but, sometimes, a simpler solution is what we may prefer.

IVORY is a lightweight front-end framework that can handle responsive layouts from 320px to 1200px widths.

It has a 12-column grid and comes with styles for typography, forms, buttons, tables, pagination, toggle-switches, tooltips, accordion, tabs and more.

When launching a new web project, having a “coming soon” page that collects e-mails of users to notify them about the launch is pretty common.

The same also goes for some other landing pages that ask users to fill a form to move forward.

Desant is an open source, single page web application (in Backbone.js managed by Sinatra backend) for handling such cases with ease.

Any page built with it can easily collect user information via forms, it keeps track of the referring URLs and the locations of visitors (by country).

It uses MySQL for storing data and can be installed manually or quickly with Vagrant.

Extra Strength Responsive Grids is a CSS framework that comes with solutions to various issues experienced in responsive layouts.

The framework is completely grid-focused (no styles for typography, tables, forms, etc.) and uses percentage-based width adjustments.

For smaller screens, besides using less columns, elements can be resized smartly.

Also, it has support for nested grids and the framework is built on top of SASS that allows any quick customizations.

Genericons is a free icon font that is created with blogs in mind but can fit easily to any website.

It is a project of Automattic (the company behind WordPress) and the icon has items like calendar, arrows, social networks, link, comments... Simply, the most-used ones in blogs.

There are currently 60+ icons and it is documented with examples (can be found in the download package).

PredictionIO is an open source prediction engine that allows developers to implement predictive features to their sites/apps.

Such predictive features can be the recommendations of videos, articles, deals, photos or documents, restaurants, etc. that are specific to a given user (which we see in many sites).

The application is designed to work with big data (supports Hadoop, Mahout, Cascading and Scalding) and has SDKs for major programming/scripting languages (Ruby, Python, Java and -soon- PHP).

It has a REST API for integrating the prediction features into apps and an admin interface helps setting up everything.

PredictionIO can be installed on any platform (runs on JVM), it is in the beta phase but still very valuable considering it is hard to find an alternative in that field.

Forums used to be (and maybe still) the most standard place online where users discuss.

They are evolving in many ways with sites like Reddit, Q&A systems or simplified versions.

Discourse is also a discussion platform (built with Ruby on Rails) that is not complicated for end-users, eases reaching to the content easy and has various social tools.

First of all, there are no pages to navigate, just scrolling is enough. It is possible to mention users like Twitter and has support for real-time updates.

It remembers where you last left reading, reply to the entries quickly, send a quick-reply-invite to friends so that they can reply without registering and login/register with any social network accounts.

Discourse makes categories optional, they can be created or not, has an admin for controlling everything and an API for expanding it further.

Gantt charts are an important piece of project management apps or any process with a duration.

Teamwork Gantt is a free jQuery component, created by Teamwork (a project management service), that simplifies generating Gantt charts.

It has a wide array of features including zooming, drag ‘n’ drops, in-place-editing, resize, scroll and many more.

There is support for exporting the data in JSON and the layout is skinnable with CSS.