Yearly Archives: 2009
Sep 4, 2009 by Matt | Posted in Coding
CodeIgniter. CakePHP. Kohana.
There’s no shortage of PHP frameworks…but why should you use one? What are the major advantages?
- MVC – The Model-View-Controller architectural pattern helps you tier your code for easier maintenance. By keeping the data-manipulating logic separate from the bits that handle the display, you make it much easier to change either the template or the underlying code without touching the other.
- Bundled classes – A framework includes classes and helper functions for common tasks, such as database access, pagination, and form handling. Not to mention smaller things, like truncating text to a specific word/character count.
- Rapid development – Frameworks help you create a small to medium-sized application much quicker than if you wrote everything from scratch. If you’re in a hurry, using a framework will help you finish things before you reach that looming deadline.
If you’re a total DIY type, you don’t even need to rely on a third-party PHP framework. You could assemble on yourself, one that’s more specific to the projects you work on.
Sep 3
GetGravatar is a jQuery plugin that is a perfect touch for blog comment forms. It monitors an email address form input, and makes an AJAX request to load a Gravatar. (See a demo.) This would enable you to show a user’s Gravatar next to…
Sep 2
Have you ever wanted to add a drop shadow around an element, but didn’t want to mess around with extra background images just to pull off such a simple effect? Why not use a cutting edge CSS3 effect, which won’t work in Internet Explorer…
Sep 1
What do you think of the blogroll in my sidebar? It takes up very little space, sweeping all of the links out of sight until they’re called for. When you hover over it, they snap down. This trick is done entirely with CSS, and…
Aug 31
Do you use OpenDNS? I have for awhile, since my ISP’s DNS servers can be kind of flaky sometimes. The one thing I don’t like about the service is how it hijacks mistyped domains and I’m Feeling Lucky searches that Firefox would usually redirect…
Aug 28
You may have heard of LESS. It’s a Ruby Gem that allows you to write CSS files with variables, nested rules, operations, and “mixins,” which are akin to custom functions in a programming language. The LESS files are compiled into pure CSS before going…
Aug 27
TechSmith has finally released a Mac screencasting application. Camtasia for Mac is not a port of the popular Camtasia Studio software, but an entirely new application that has many of the same features, but has its fair share of differences. From the feature set,…
Aug 26
If you use Thaya Kareeson’s BuySellAds WordPress plugin, turn off the caching feature! To do so, set the JavaScript cache time setting to zero. This is because Buy Sell Ads network is now also tracking the number of times the ads themselves get requested…
Aug 25
Net.Tuts+ has a good tutorial on the Kohana PHP framework. Following it through should get you used to the MVC structure, help you configure everything, and give you a good overall feel for the framework. Coupled with the official Kohana docs, you should be…
