On a recent project, I worked with a lesser known and charming little CMS known as Textpattern (or “Txp” to its users). The decision came after a long and drawn out process of researching and theming various CMS solutions to see what would be the easiest to develop (there was a time constraint) and what would be the easiest to maintain for a non-technical manager.
So the last CSS post (you know, the one for newbies? I know you read it! You read them ALL!) wasn’t advanced enough for you? Well you’ll feel right at home here. This time, I’ll take you through 10 CSS tips that experienced designers either somehow haven’t discovered or have learned and forgotten (which happens all to often in the coding world).
Web design is (or perhaps should be) all about good practices and web standards. In spite of that, it’s pretty amazing how many designers just learn by doing and do what works rather than what’s good. Here are a few tips I wish I had been told about from the start.
1. Include a color scheme in your stylesheets
That way, when you’re creating a border color for some random form element and you can’t remember exactly what shade of light blue you have been using, you don’t have to search through the CSS declarations until you find it. Here’s an example from yours truly, CapsizeDesigns.com:
So you understand the basics of MVC. You get the Active Record and all that craziness. You have CI up and running, maybe even with some basic controllers and views. You’re on your way. At this point, it’s the details that start to get confusing. Where do assets (CSS, JS, images, etc.) go? How do I know if this piece of code belongs in a model or a library (or a helper)? How can I change the way URLs are displayed? If this sounds like you, you’re in the right place my friend.
One of the major reasons why PHP frameworks benefit us has to do with the inexperienced (or even average) developer’s lack of security knowledge. PHP (especially database driven PHP) is riddled with loopholes and opportunities to a malicious user to get the best of you, unless you know what you’re doing.
Luckily, CodeIgniter handles a lot of these concerns for you, and gives you the tools to handle the rest. In this section of the CI tutorial, we’ll take a look at many common security threats, including how CI handles them and what you need to do to make sure your CI driven web apps aren’t being threatened by them.
And we’re back with part 3 of our incredible CI tutorial. In part 1, we installed and configured CodeIgniter. In part 2, we took a basic look at how CodeIgniter handles the MVC architecture. Now we’ll check out CodeIgniter’s database handling including the Active Record implementation, performing simple CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) operations, and sending query data from models to controllers to views.
Welcome back. In the last section we got up and running with CodeIgniter and familiarized ourselves with the structure and installation of it. This time, we’re going to take a closer look at how CodeIgniter handles MVC, and what MVC really even means!
This is the meat of CodeIgniter and most other web application frameworks (Symfony, Zend, CakePHP, and even the infamous Ruby on Rails). It’s also a really great way to structure any kind of application, and you’ll feel like a better person for having learned it. And it’s good in bed. Moving on…
CodeIgniter is an “Open Source Web Application Framework that helps you write kick-ass PHP programs.” The website says it all. CodeIgniter is BALLER. However, it’s documentation is awesome after you get going, but getting going is a little tougher. That’s what I’m here for. Hopefully, after this tutorial, you’ll know your way around CodeIgniter and have a pretty good feel for the MVC architecture.
In part one, we’re going to learn about installation and configuration of CI, and also get a feel for the folder structure (which always seems to scare people away). So let’s get going!
For a project we’ve been working on, I recently had to implement a calendar in PHP to show upcoming events. The solution was a wee bit tricky (and pretty annoying), so here it is in all it’s glory, in case someone else is looking. It’s pretty easily skinnable, and very scalable, so it should fit in nicely with your project.
CSS Frameworks have been a hot topic the past few months. Although they’ve been getting a lot of heat from semantic freaks and minimalists (for adding unnecessary code), I think they’re a step forward. As I’ve said before, web design is about doing things quickly and beautifully. No matter how you feel about frameworks, it’s undeniable that they speed up the design process. I’m a fan.
I’ve become a little obsessed with CSS frameworks lately. I’ve tried just about all of them at one point or another. I’ve argued with many a semantic warrior who hates them for their non-descriptive clss names. I’ve fought with a few minimalists who can’t stand all of the (4kb…seriously) bloated code.
Regardless of how you feel about them, it’s pretty obvious that they save time, and that’s what we’re all after. Here’s my take on a few of them:
Javascript libraries are relatively new, but they’re already everywhere. Almost every major website has some type of library in use (Facebook - Scriptaculous, Amazon - jQuery, Apple - Scriptaculous, Google - jQuery, Digg - jQuery, blah blah blah). With the way that this trend is going, some ground rules need to be laid.
jQuery is basically amazing. It’s no-brainer syntax makes it incredibly easy to learn, and it’s chaining cuts tons of would-be Javascript into one or two lines. As an example of this, let me show how you stupidly easy it is to make a really slick, totally useful Ajax contact form using jQuery.