In the last couple of months, [I] have been doing a lot of thinking about frameworks. They certainly are very important, and each has it's strengths and weaknesses. But are we choosing our frameworks for the right reasons?
Read MoreA very quick and descriptive tutorial (forum post) covering basics of FTP (File Transfer Protocal).
Read MoreBen Forta starts the first in a series of Coldfusion Reports.
Note: Flash player required to view this Breeze presentation.
Read MoreIn the final article in our series about using PHP and JavaScript to store data on the client side, we will be building on what we learned about server and client interaction to create a JavaScript-based paginating system.
While the subject is far too extensive for being completely treated in a couple of articles, from my point of view, [I've] tried to contribute a bit by explaining a simple approach for storing server-side data in JavaScript arrays.
Read MoreIn the first article in this series, we developed a simple PHP function that dynamically generates a JavaScript array and populates it with external incoming data. In this article, we will develop a real world application using this method, in the form of a news ticker.
This is the second part of the series "PHP and JavaScript Interaction: Storing Data in the Client." Welcome back! If you've been following the concepts covered in the first article, then you probably have grasped the underlying ideas behind the approach taken to store data (text files or database records) directly in JavaScript arrays, avoiding additional or unnecessary server loads.
Read MoreCertainly the concepts have been covered repeatedly in countless articles, books or papers you can imagine, digging into the territory of Web development: server-side and client-side programming... In most situations, this interaction is bi-directional. You might see either server-side languages, such as PHP, generating client-code, that means JavaScript/(X)HTML, or JavaScript functions building up data to be processed in the server. Either way, the process is often a two-way street. Particularly, if we take into consideration the first half of the equation, where PHP (or the server-side language of your choice) performs some kind of quick client-program generation, we rapidly end up storing some temporary data directly in the client computer's memory.
We'll demonstrate how to use this approach to store data in the client and noticeably reduce the client-server transferring process, developing a couple of applications useful for implementation on any project of your choice. Let's get ready to try out a combination of PHP and JavaScript.
Read MoreIf you want to run a business with a website, security must be high on your list of important matters to get right up front. In this article, you will learn about Internet-based network security assessment and penetration testing, which can help you determine your website's risk of being successfully attacked -- and what to do to fix any problems. It is taken from chapter one of the book Network Security Assessment by Chris McNab (O'Reilly, 2004; ISBN: 059600611X).
Read MoreBefore sIFR (Flash title replacement), there was good old JavaScript and PHP, to generate images from text using any font you like. All without changing the structure of your HTML or CSS.
Text styling is the dull headache of web design. There are only a handful of fonts that are universally available, and sophisticated graphical effects are next to impossible using only standard CSS and HTML. Sticking with the traditional typefaces is smart for body text, but when it comes to our headings — short, attention-grabbing blocks of text — it would be nice to have some choice in the matter. We’ve become accustomed to this problem and we cope with it either by making the most of the few fonts we have, or by entirely replacing our heading-text with images.
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Econtentmag.com has a great article on Content Management Systems, here is an extract;
In Part I of this series, [I] looked at CMS interfaces and found that in general, users come to CMS projects with diverse expectations, leaving vendors struggling to match a product out of the box to a prospective customer's particular scenarios. As Jared Spool, founding principal of User Interface Engineering, puts it, "A CMS product is designed for an ideal, generic world, but none of us work in that world—it's like trying to sell everyone an average-sized shoe."
So here in Part II, [I'll] examine usability through the lens of system functionality. What does it mean to have a usable workflow? Can a "Help" subsystem make up for the inevitable gaps in user training and understanding? How can authors find what they need? To the extent that you can answer questions like these for your CMS project, you are well on your way to developing a more usable—and therefore, by definition, a more effective—content management system.
Read MoreUsability has moved to the forefront in the past few years, especially for corporate Web sites, as marketing managers seek to understand and measure whether their investments in Web communications are really paying off. Now that Web-based applications have proliferated, enterprises are beginning to look more closely at application usability in general and the usability of content management systems in particular.
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