We have prepared for you a complex list of tools which are simplifying creating of wireframes.

Different styles of wireframes form ForeUI tool

In simple words are wireframes models of web pages or applications that describe their content and function. While it’s not a full prototype, there are no colors and concrete pictures. Wireframing is a very useful activity simplifying communication between the submitter and implementer of the application itself.

Do you use wireframes or mockups for designing websites and applications? Do you have a favorite tool for this task or are you a hand drawer?

Check out these 42 wireframing tools now!

Alternate foreign key

Hello Everybody,

ORM Designer was growing up in pretty idealistic environment. We wanted it to be a tool that will generate clean and readable code. Elegant tool for elegant solutions. In our minds the ORM Designer was not an ordinary ORM tool, but the sharp and efficient ORM scalpel.

However, developer’s life is not just polished garden of immaculate design solutions. Sometimes you need a hammer. And a big one. One of our users contacted us about pretty unusual solution, having a foreign key pointing to different column than the primary key.

At first, we did not like it. But then he presented his situation of multiple databases in great deal of detail, and we had to agree, that his solution might not be an elegant one, but it was the only reasonable one. Our goal is, after all, having ORM Designer help our users, and do their work for them.

So we have implemented this functionality as a part of our latest release (it is only supported by some frameworks though, namely Propel and Doctrine). You can learn more about it in our documentation.

Do you need to tackle a difficult task? Do you feel that ORM Designer could help you but something is missing? Let us know, we can add specific functions. After all, ORM Designer is a tool intended to help with all your work.

Entity defined by template

Hello Everybody,

One of the most interesting features of  ORM Designer is its customizability. Now we took it to the next level. We have vastly enhanced the template functionality. It’s so awesome now, that I don’t even know where to start.

We have already had templates for some basic functions in place, but we thought, well lets make templates for everything. And we did it! After two weeks of hard labour, strenuouss tests, documentation and despair we can proudly present the NEW TEMPLATES.

Do you want to be sure all your entities have their primary keys? You can. Do you want the aliases used in your associations being generated automatically? They will be. Do you want to create your entities with the repeating fields already defined. No problem, you can have your IDs, names, createdAt and updatedAt with just single click. Do you want to completely define your whole project using templates and just have it built the exact moment you press the Create new project? I can’t see why would you want to do that, but you totally can.

Everything can be manged by a template now, primary keys, aliases, association and inheritance fields, Many-to-many entities, even names and values of ORM properties like the export paths. Templates can be now set separately for Doctrine, Doctrine 2, Propel and PHP Cake and you can even have templates applied on import or changes in your model.

Do not worry, all the old templates will still work, but now you can use the predefined template library, or you can learn how the templates work, and make the exact templates you need.

MySQL Workbench

Hi everybody,

I have realized that lot of people mistake ORM Designer with other visualization and ERD modeling tools. That is bad news because ORM Designer is unique with its support of ORM frameworks. To fight this, we have started a series of comparison articles.

We don’t just model ERDs or visualize the database. We enable you to view your projects, import, edit the visual model and export your projects in Doctrine, Doctrine 2, Propel or CakePHP. With ORM Designer you can just concentrate on the creative part of your work.

Our first comparison is with MySQL Workbench. It is a great and powerful tool, it just deals with databases directly and does not care about the ORM frameworks at all. If you are working with ORM you would miss on all the advantages ORM Designer can give you, if you just took it for MySQL Workbench clone.

Check out the for MySQL Workbench comparison article for more.

Kateřina Mráčková

is graduate student of Information Technology Management and interested in marketing. With an inquisitive and analytical mind, Kate holds passion for tasks associated with online marketing, web analytics, search engine optimilization and social media. She loves her job as a marketing specialist, because it’s modern and rapidly evolving discipline where she can enforce her fanaticism about learning new things.

In free time, Kate is interested in photography, especially loves using old forgotten lenses nowadays. Her other passions are geocaching, hiking with her dog and since the last summer also riding on a scooter (with her dog of course).

So you have all noticed the grid in the ORM Designer, it is this handy little tool to neatly organize all your entities and modules. It was okay, but we had a look at it and thought, “okay is not enough for our users”.

Oh boy, we did not see how big can this little feature get. We spent hours tweaking, arguing, tweaking again, researching, and tweaking even more. Well, it is pretty much perfect now.

You can set all the regular stuff like color and size, but you can also use this mysterious slider called “Grid Sticking” to adjust how firmly will your elements stick to the grid. All your settings will be shared between the tabs and projects and it goes without saying your changes will not get lost when you close the application.

And as always, let us know if you have an idea to make this tool even better. We strive for ORM Designer to be as user-friendly as humanely possible and we’re having great fun implementing all the little features and enhancements.

If you expect an article about genetics or superpowers you will be probably little disappointed. But we think the new ORM Designer feature is quite cool too, so let’s take a closer look at it. In the last week we prepared ORM Designer for language mutations.

From now, English is not the only one

Till now, the application has spoken only English. For most users it is fine with no doubts, it is the most widespread language all around the world. But still, native language is native language and to have commands in application translated is much more comfortable.

To find out if everything works fine, we tested the translation mechanism on our native language. As you can see in the picture above, in the new ORM Designer release Czech is also available :-)

You might have guessed it, but two language versions isn’t our goal. Right now the application is being translated into Spanish, but there are many more languages ORM Designer wants to speak!

Join us!

If you want to join us in our effort to make ORM Designer really multi-language tool, we will be more than happy. Head to the article about Localization and follow described steps.

When you finish the work, share the translation files at our support forum with the rest of the community and enjoy the eternal glory as our greatest heroes :-)

And the last thing, this is how we want ORM Designer localizations to look like :-)

As we promised in some previous blog-post, this week we finished the last article and now we are proud to announce you that our new documentation is ready! We were preparing it for so long and now it is time to show it to you.

34 new articles

Visit our new documentation site and enjoy 34 new articles which will lead you from the very basics of the application up to the advanced ORM Designer functions and features. Reveal how to simply and quickly navigate through the model, speed up your work with keyboard shortcuts or use all benefits of sharing modules.

And there is so much more. You will learn how to be more effective with ORM Designer and get the answers to general questions regarding the product.

Nicely structured texts with images

We did our best to make the whole documentation nice and clear. For your better orientation the articles are thematically sortedinto four groups and the search function was added.  Documentation contains many pictures and schemas for your fast and clear understanding. We also used different font styles to differentiate between the most important points, application commands and code fragments to allow you to read through the text quickly and simply.

Give us your feedback

Our whole team did the best, so we hope you will like the documentation as we do. Still we will be grateful for your feedbackand ideas, how to make it even better. Give us your suggestions or just say hello below this blog-post or send an email to [email protected]. We will be looking forward to all your comments and ideas.

With the influx of new members to our team, we decided to tell you few words about them.

Martin Kulhavý

Former economics student with focus on financial markets. Now working as marketing specialist he found himself to be quite far from the world of stocks, shares and forex trading. In his new work, he appreciates the fact that he learns something new and interesting every day, possibility to unleash his creative spirit instead of following rigid rules and the company of smart and knowledgeable people.

In his free time, he likes to play electric guitar, read books on various contemporary topics and work on his gung fu, which has roots in southern Shaolin. As long time pen & paper storytelling game enthusiast, with the favourite game “Exalted” he is currently anxiously waiting for the launch of Exalted 3rd edition.

Martin “Freki” Straděj

Veteran of corporate customer care, content in a small company environment. The opportunity to focus more on helping people and less on the giant amount of corporate policies is welcomed change of pace for him. And because with ORM Designer troubles are rare, he can indulge in his obsession for documentation, process mapping, interaction between systems of all kinds and preparing rigid rules for the other Martin to follow.

He loves big, fast or dangerous things like fighter jets, tanks, explosions and elephants. To move his body he reenacts military history or free dives. All of his interests come together in PC games, preferably those where you employ fighter jets and elephants to achieve underwater explosions.

Editor note: no animals were harmed during the writing of this article.

As you might have noticed, in the last few weeks we were neglecting our blog a bit. The reason for this is that our whole team is currently busy finishing new documentation, and we are excited to tell you that the launch is planned for the next week.

Don’t worry, no bulky pdf with hundreds of pages is heading your way. Simple is smart, and the documentation completely follows this rule. We created it in a shape of simple websites thematically** sorted** by its main topics. For intuitive navigation, the search function has also been added.

The documentation is divided into four main sections:

• Common Information: FAQ, license conditions, supported platforms, etc.
• How to Use: general concepts of working with ORM Designer
• Frameworks Tutorials: specifics of working with selected framework
• Expert Usage: advanced configuration and customization of application

We are looking forward to introduce documentation publicly, but there is still a lot of work ahead of us. To create something comprehensive, concise and visually appealing is not easy.

Keep your fingers crossed so we deliver it on time, with understandable content and clear form. Follow our blog and we will inform you about the precise date of launch.