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12|09

DiggDugg: Getting the Gist of it.

I’m starting to force myself to write more classes. It’s something I’ve always been interested in, but could never pull myself away from the linear design patterns that I’d become so comfortable with.

I’ve written a class based on some basic functions of Digg.com that I’m planning on using for a tutorial. I wouldn’t be a very good teacher if I released a shoddy class out to the masses. Continue reading

11|27

Styling WordPress Comments

Styling the WordPress comments can be a pain if you don’t know what you’re doing. You have to wade through functions and files to finally get what you want.

Luckily, we can write our own comment function, using our own code, to make styling the comments 100% easier and 50% more fun

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11|17

Simple Templates: Easy as Pie

The Problem

I’m working on a project and have to generate the same template on 4 different pages. I was also using javascript to create the same template on the fly. Needless to say this wasn’t the most efficient way of doing things because if I needed to change 1 aspect of the template, I needed to edit 4 different files.

I tried to write a little function, inspired by CakePHP, that would take an array of information, open up a template, replace any text and then return the new content. Continue reading

11|10

Code for the Uncoded: Foreach Loops

Getting started with any type of language can be difficult for some people. Most tutorials or examples use a lot of “developer terms” that a designer or beginner won’t be familiar with. This can add another level of difficulty to otherwise simple tasks. This is hopefully where Code for the Uncoded comes in. Continue reading

11|05

PHP Shorthands: Write Less Code!

Writing a lot of code can get very tedious especially when you are in hour 6 of your work day. I’m always looking for way to write less code so i’m going to share a few tips that I use on a daily basis. Continue reading

10|29

WordPress as a CMS

When most people think about WordPress, they think about blogs. If you look at the front page of WordPress.org, they talk a lot about blogging as well. What they don’t tell you is that WordPress can also double as a very powerful CMS; you just have to set it up properly. It can be a bit tricky to get setup and working the way that you want; but this is where I come in. Continue reading

10|22

How To Tame Your PHP Error Logs

I recently watched a quick Screenr screencast by Jeffrey Way about logging your errors in PHP to a text file. Needless to say, I was a little bit inspired.

It was only a quick 5 minute tutorial so it didn’t go into much detail and after implementing it into one of my projects it needed some tweaking.

The main problem was there was the potential for your site to create thousands of indistinguishable error logs. My solution was to create folders to house daily log files. This makes your error logs live inside a nice folder structure broken down by year, month and day. Continue reading

10|14

The Ultimate Guide for Learning Mootools

Getting started with any type of framework can be an intimidating experience. I had worked with scriptaculous and prototype to begin with, but decided to move over to Mootools because it’s a more light weight framework.

After the initial move to Mootools I was frustrated with the lack of community support and ended up moving back to prototype immediately. After I was more comfortable with working with frameworks I moved back to Mootools and haven’t looked back.

With this tutorial, I’m going to try to make sure that you have a great beginning to the Mootools framework. I’m going to walk you through getting everything downloaded and setup as well as some of the basic elements of mootools. After that I’m going to spend some time walking you through how to use the Mootools Docs, which is a site that you’ll be visiting very often during the use of Mootools.

View the Tutorial/Screencast

This tutorial is now owned by NetTuts+, I’m just the author.

10|05

Learning PHP on Mac OS

So you’ve decided that you want to learn a new language and PHP is your language of choice. Now that you’ve made your decision, I’m going to walk you through how to get PHP running on your system and how to begin learning a new language.

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10|05

How to Include All Your Functions In 3 Lines of Code

Functions are amazing. Working with huge function files is not.

I like to group all my functions into different “function files” to keep everything nice and clean. For example, I’ll keep all my functions that clean up various strings or elements in a clean.php file.

This is great because I don’t have to scan a 50000 line PHP file to find the function that I’m looking for.

As your application grows, the number of function files may grow with it. This can pose a problem. Did you remember to include the new function file in all necessary scripts?

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