TheWayOfCoding.com

I’ve been modifying Drupal (drupal.org) for a neighborhood organization website. It took a little research as, like most similar open-source projects, the documentation leaves something to be desired. I now have the site to a point where I want to put it up on the Internet. I have some hosting, so I got the domain… and bam, it’s on the web right? Well no. I feel it is necessary to make a general process overview as it took a good deal of research and tweaking to get it working: -I have “reseller hosting.” That means I can host multiple domains with the space/bandwidth that comes with the yearly fee. I bought the neighborhood domain, added a special hosting plan (defines storage, bandwidth, and other properties), and tried configuring the dns information -Seeing as I have not done too much with the whole domainname-dns-nameserver-whatever configuration process I had some trouble figuring it out. What I ended up doing was having my domain name registrar create 2 name servers from ...

Thanks to the new functionality I am able to use the free blogger.com blogs as a website. It’s all thinks to functionally they added after Google acquired them. For example I created a custom template for my sister’s graphic/fashion/photography design website. In this post I’ll go over the basics that allow this to work. Google allows custom domain names. This means the whole website can have a professional look and feel because all links connected to the site will look like www.nameofsite.com/revrefvrv/dfvdfvd… etc. The use of labels, conditional statements, and the database data that blogger allows to be accessed through the template system. To make a standard website I started with the simplest of the pre-created templates modifying it to suit my needs. I removed a lot of the functionality like comments, backlinks, and whatever else. For a basic website you first need some links to blocks of site content. I generally hard code them into the template. Now if you’ve used the ne...

As I mentioned in the previous post I had my custom CMS site reasonably functional. From that time as I worked with the director, I found out that they were using a CMS system already. No point in trying to reinvent the wheel as it’s said. It’s called Sohoadmin and it works pretty well all things considered. I would not call it that user friendly, but seeing as I am doing volunteer work I don’t want to spend 2-3 months creating my own thing that I would also then have to provide technical support to in the future. It’s been an interesting process so far getting them where they need to be. The person who they were working with before isn’t very motivated to help them and it was showing (he hosts the server too). I wanted to get Sohoadmin upgraded to the newest version, but when he tried to do that it did not work correctly resulting in me sticking some band aids on the site to get it somewhat functional again. Now we are to the point that we bought our...

1149 lines of code so far. That’s not including and database file initialization code or other things such as the css for the public site. Completed (“somewhat tested”): Add/edit main page links Add/edit/delete main page basic html content blocks Visual template system and the final visual look of the site. Public index.php looks “done” visually. The main links work and display all basic – content blocks when clicked (ordered by ‘zorder’). It’s just lacking sub links (articles and galleries). To Be Completed: Delete main page links (I haven’t decided if I want it to do a recursive deletion of all content associated with it or not). Add/edit/delete articles (aka. multipage basic html content blocks). Add/edit/delete image galleries. Make the admin pages secure. Testing, testing, and more testing! I’ve been thinking of not bothering with an image gallery aspect. The multi page articles would have similar abilities to a photo gallery. The only difference is that it could not support ...

As I’m programming this database driven website, I’ve come into a few irritating little issues. Today I’ll talk about a few methods to access page content (images) from the back-end. I’ve created a way to create and edit page content with a browser based WYSIWYG editor. The problem is after the first time the data is submitted to the server, all images are set with a path that now only works from the root directory of the website. So when a user tries to edit some page content with images in the WYSIWYG editor they see broken images (aka. “The dreaded Red X”). I thought of a few ways to fix the problem. I’ll also mention which method I actually used in the end. 1. Have the PHP script handle the path conversions. This would mean two functions or so with a few replacements using regular expressions. So when the fetched data is sent to the user all of the html image tags are modified. When or if the user sends the data back they are remodified (excluding any new images the user is...

From the previous posts it’s easy to notice that I’ve been searching for an efficient way to code large web projects. While I am still open to frameworks and such, I had something happen that kind of “brought me back to my roots.” I have the job of making a website for a not-for-profit organization in my area. I decided that they should have something easy to update, so that means a data driven site with a back-end. I don’t want to use premade systems because they have too many things I don’t want included. I therefore decided to go with what I’ve worked with in the past which is straight PHP. More specifically PHP5+ and the SQLite database engine. PHP5 perfects a good deal of useful features over the older versions such as the class/object model. It also adds support built-in for the file based SQLite engine. For what I am creating, SQLite takes out a lot of the unnecessary complexity of using MySQL. I’ve got the database and gene...

Nothing is ever easy… Anyways, to get a computer ready to start developing with the Symfony PHP framework you have a few options. You can take the long, long route and install apache, php, and a database server. With that you have to do a good deal of configuration to get everything working together. You could also download WAMP or XAMPP, which are just prepackaged versions. I haven’t used XAMPP, so I can’t say how you would get that working. The best reason for using WAMP is that it is self contained in c:\wamp folder by default. You can also start and stop all of the server processes (Apache & MySQL) anytime by just closing the tray icon. It’s great so you don’t have unnecessary processes running all of the time. The main problem is that WAMP and Symfony don’t work “out of the box.” No surprise there. This is the process I used to get WAMP working with Symfony: Download WAMP (1.6.6) and install: http://www.wampserver.com/en/ Open a browser to http://localhost/ WAMP should...

Over the past week or two I’ve been researching ways to develop server-side web based applications as fast as possible (time is money, haha). I am in the initial stages of starting a little side business with a friend and one of our possible clients is looking for a large system to handle online ordering of their products. If you know anything about developing and programming a complex system, it takes a lot of planning as well as a good deal of time to actually create it. My “developer ideals” won’t allow my to create something of poor quality, so I’ve been reluctant to take on large things in the past. I’ve been pushing myself more lately to produce results the results I strive for with more speed. Well more like I’ve been trying to learn new methods and techniques where I can keep my quality level high, but just get things done faster. While I’ve programmed in PHP before, I know that I would need to create a large amount of generic functionality to handle an ordering system. T...

I started playing around with Visual Web Developer Express 2005 (VWD). I had originally planned on using VWD with MySQL. The problem is that to use the new stuff in ASP.NET 2.0 like the pre-made authentication you have to use Microsoft’s own SQL server, or try to get some convoluted method of making MySQL work as the provider. I’m sure that I could eventually get it working, but in the end it would not provide me the free easy to use fast development solution I was looking for in asp.net and MySQL. I had a plan to develop a dynamic small business website with user authentication, but I see now that it probably won’t be with VWD Express and MySQL. If I have to reinvent the wheel for everything I’d rather just use PHP and MySQL. That being said, I still plan on messing around with VWD and Microsoft’s SQL Express. I might be doing some research about Ruby On Rails to see if that would better meet my needs.

Microsoft has a great site with video tutorials here . They cover various aspects of visual web developer in VB and C#. They can’t cover topics in too much detail, but more then enough to be worth while. Plus they are free…