By Michael J. Ross
Regular e-commerce shopping carts work fine if the functionality of the store site is limited to listing products, allowing customers to purchase them, accepting credit card payments, and all of the other e-commerce features offered by these shopping cart solutions. But what if you also want to support collaborative editing of content, community forums, and other capabilities that could help increase traffic to your site, but are usually only found in content management systems (CMSs)? Is it possible to combine the best of both worlds — shopping carts and CMSs?
Wednesday, 20th August 2008
Zend Framework Tutorial
By Lyndon Baptiste
I find myself constantly bombarded with questions from students and co-workers I've introduced to the Zend Framework regarding how the different components can come together to form a basic application. I've searched, I have found, I have emailed great tutorials, but still the most common questions are posed "What's should I include in index.php?", "Should I use Zend_Db_Table?", "And what about Zend_Form?"
Wednesday, 13th August 2008
Creating an Online Newsletter with Drupal
By Michael J. Ross
As part of the Information Revolution that is changing the way that the world works and plays, people are increasingly turning to the Internet for the information they use to make decisions — financial, professional, health, etc. Consequently, news publications that are printed and mailed through the post are being supplanted by portal news sites, blogs, and online newsletters (oftentimes referred to as "e-zines" — electronic magazines).
Friday, 11th July 2008
Setting Up Subversion for Development on Windows
By Akash Mehta
When developing web applications on your own, a common challenge is keeping track of your changes. Mature version control systems make it easier to manage development as projects increase in size and complexity. In this tutorial, I'll show you how to set up Subversion on a Windows machine and get started with a simple project.
Wednesday, 2nd July 2008
Port Scanning and Service Status Checking in PHP
By Akash Mehta
While building web applications, it's often important to keep an eye on the other services running on your server. Having access to the current status of public servers can empower your applications to make decisions and respond to problems automatically. Acknowledging a service is offline can also save endless support emails. In this tutorial, I'll show you how to keep track of your server status by scanning ports on your server with PHP.
Friday, 6th June 2008
Getting Started with AJAX in jQuery
By Akash Mehta
AJAX is probably the biggest thing you can add to your site; with AJAX, you can dramatically increase functionality, and give your end users more usable web applications. But AJAX is tricky to get started with - it usually requires very complex JavaScript knowledge. In this tutorial, I'll show you how to get started with AJAX using the jQuery JavaScript framework.
Sunday, 11th May 2008
Web Database Access from Desktop Applications
By Michael J. Ross
There may be growing interest in moving computer applications from the desktop to the Web. But desktop applications are still a huge market, whose demise has been prematurely reported by the media in the past, and will most likely be reported in the future. In addition, for many domain areas, a Web browser — even for an AJAX-powered site — will be insufficient for many application needs.
Tuesday, 6th May 2008
Stylize Your Digg Count
By Leon Chevalier
A digg count normally comes in badge form I’m sure you’ve seen it. It shows how many diggs a web page has, and provides a link for you to digg it. Learn how to customize this in this tutorial.
Tuesday, 22nd April 2008
JavaScript Debugging Techniques with Firebug
By Akash Mehta
Server side scripters have always had it easy; debugging a web application is simple, and IDEs make problems easy to identify. Client-side scripting with JavaScript, however, is a whole new ball game. In this tutorial, I'll identify the best basic and advanced JavaScript debugging techniques to help you take control of your JavaScript code.
Sunday, 20th April 2008
CubeCart 3.0 Installation and Configuration
By Michael J. Ross
In this tutorial, we will get an introduction to CubeCart, created and distributed by Devellion Limited. Their flagship product is one of the easiest low-cost e-commerce solutions available, and is growing in popularity. Note that CubeCart is not technically open source, since the code cannot be freely redistributed. On the other hand, most of the code is not protected using encoding, and can thus be read and understood.
Monday, 7th April 2008
PHP Site Search Made Easy
By Akash Mehta
When users want to find information on your website, they first look for a search box. Failing that, they head back to Google - potentially finding a competing site and taking their business elsewhere, or simply becoming frustrated with your service. But implementing effective search doesn't have to be hard. In this tutorial, I'll show you how to build a basic site-specific web search in just five lines of code, using the Yahoo! APIs.
Sunday, 30th March 2008
5 Tips for Photoshop Efficiency
By Corrie Haffly
Are you on your way to becoming a Photoshop expert, wizard, or guru? Here are five tips for working more efficiently with Photoshop that will make you a faster expert, wizard, or guru.
Thursday, 27th March 2008
Planning Your Stylesheet - The Definitive Guide
By Brigitte Simard
The more we rely upon CSS, the larger and more complex stylesheet files become. Planning and organizing your stylesheet is essential to creating a lean, manageable website. There are many ways of organizing CSS code but the following are best practice...
Wednesday, 26th March 2008
Installing and Configuring Drupal 6.1
By Michael J. Ross
One of the most popular CMSs is Drupal, partly because it offers all of the aforesaid features, and partly because developers familiar with PHP (the language used by Drupal) can modify the functioning and appearance of almost every aspect of Drupal. The latest series of Drupal, version 6.x, provides improvements and brand-new features in a variety of areas: installation, administration, human language support, theme management, security, performance, and more.
Monday, 24th March 2008
Photoshop "Inferno" Typography Tutorial
By John Conanan
Create cool inferno style typography with the techniques from this Photoshop tutorial.
Wednesday, 19th March 2008
Photoshop Indiana Jones Poster Tutorial
By Rick Davidson
Well if you're a movie buff of any bearing you would be aware of the looming release of ‘Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull’. You would also definitely have seen some of legendary poster artist Drew Struzan's work (bow). His art for this latest movie is classic Jones, classic action adventure, it's brilliant. Hell, everyone should have their own Indy Poster. In homage to Struzan, let's do it.
Tuesday, 18th March 2008
Photoshop Plasma TV Design Tutorial
By John Conanan
This Photoshop tutorial takes you through the process involved in designing a plasma tv.
Monday, 17th March 2008
Designing a Black Zune 2 in Photoshop
By John Conanan
This Photoshop tutorial guides you through the process of creating your very own Black Zune 2.
Sunday, 16th March 2008
Design a Cool Old Book with Photoshop
By John Conanan
This Photoshop tutorial walks you through the steps involved in creating an old book from scratch.
Friday, 14th March 2008
Desktop Application Development with PHP-GTK
By Akash Mehta
PHP-GTK 2 is out, and with it, a fantastic means for PHP developers to build useful, reliable cross-platform desktop applications. In this tutorial, I'll show you how to get up and running with PHP-GTK in no time and build your first desktop application.
Thursday, 13th March 2008
Making a Cool Anime Header in Photoshop
By Waseem Khan
This tutorial walks you through the steps to making an anime header using Adobe Photoshop.
Tuesday, 11th March 2008
GWT Basics: AJAX Programming with Java
By Michael J. Ross
Prior to JavaScript and other client-side languages, Web browsers operated as if they were HTML dumb terminals, merely presenting Web pages generated on a server. For such pages, every user action requires a full page refresh, with a round-trip over the Internet, which degrades performance and thus user satisfaction. It may be fine for a great many Web sites, but it is completely inadequate for high-performance dynamic Web applications.
Monday, 10th March 2008
AJAX Accessibility for Websites
By Brigitte Simard
AJAX or Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, is an innovative way of using existing technologies to create highly interactive web applications. AJAX allows portions of the page to be updated without having to refresh and reload the entire page...
Monday, 10th March 2008
Making Your Own Watermark with Photoshop
By Waseem Khan
This Photoshop tutorial walks you through the process of creating a simple watermark for use with all the images you would like to protect.
Friday, 7th March 2008
Installing PHP on Windows
By Michael J. Ross
A brochure-style Web site may be sufficient for a business that simply wants a basic Web presence — some static pages to inform the visitor of the company's off-line contact information. But most organizations want a Web site that can interact with the visitor, delivering custom content in dynamically-generated pages, and storing visitor information in a database.
Wednesday, 5th March 2008