Developers

Ultimate Tutorial - How To Design Custom Templates For Joomla! 1.6

Wed, 11 May 2011 11:32:00 +0000

If you want to learn how to design and create custom templates for Joomla! 1.6, you’ve come to the right place. This tutorial will teach you how to create a basic Joomla 1.6 blog template, complete with all the tools you’ll need to create more advanced templates with custom variables, multiple themes, multiple languages, and more module positions than you can shake a stick at. At the end of the tutorial, you’ll even be able to download free both the sample template and a blank starter template for you to begin work on your own templates. It’s a tutorial, reference guide, cheatsheet, and resource kit for creating Joomla 1.6 templates, all rolled into one package.

MooTools Plugins

Tue, 08 Mar 2011 18:40:00 +0000

Check out our MooTools plugins, complete with examples, tutorials, documentation, and demos.

Joomla Administration Explained: A Joomla! 1.5 Admin Tutorial

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 21:36:00 +0000

This is the second in our series of tutorials and guides for how to use Joomla! 1.5. In the previous tutorial, we covered how to install Joomla 1.5. In this tutorial, I'm going to teach you the basic concepts behind the Joomla administration section.

Joomla's admin interface can be overwhelming at times. To be honest, the way some things are organized can be confusing for beginners and may take a while to get used to. I'm going to attempt to help minimize the confusion by guiding you through some of the common tasks you'll face when creating a website.

If you've never logged into the administration section of Joomla, you can find it by typing the URL of your root Joomla directory and then adding administrator/. The login page should appear and you should login using the username and password chosen during installation.

How To Install Joomla! 1.5: A Beginner's Tutorial

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 21:20:00 +0000

This is the first in a series of tutorials about how to create and manage a website using Joomla! 1.5. In this tutorial, you'll learn how to install and setup Joomla. Future tutorials will include how to use the Joomla administration, and how to create your own modules and templates.

What Is Joomla?

First, let me explain briefly what Joomla is. Joomla is a Content Management System, also referred to as a CMS. It may sound like a mouthful, but a CMS is basically a piece of software that you can install on your server that will allow you to quickly build and easily manage your website.

One of the nice things about Joomla is that it's free and open source. It also has a very large community of developers around it, so if you need help with something, chances are someone in the forum will be able to assist you. The large community also means that there are numerous add-ons, called extensions, that are available for Joomla that will allow you to upgrade and enhance the capabilities of your website.

37 Tested PHP, Perl, and JavaScript Regular Expressions

Tue, 22 Sep 2009 10:40:00 +0000

A regular expression, also called regex or regexp for short, is simply a piece of code that matches a pattern. Mastering regular expressions can be a difficult chore, and if you don't need them all of the time, the syntax is tricky enough to make the task frustrating or slow as you will constantly need to use a reference sheet.

In order to save you time, I've compiled a list of PHP, Perl, and JavaScript regular expressions for common use cases that have been tested and are ready to go. This isn't a regular expression tutorial or even a reference; you can think of it more as a cheatsheet for when you just need the regex but don't want to put a lot of time into relearning regular expressions.

Ultimate IE6 Cheatsheet: How To Fix 25+ Internet Explorer 6 Bugs

Tue, 15 Sep 2009 22:12:00 +0000

The best strategy for dealing with Internet Explorer 6 is not to support it.

Stop. Ok, I feel your frustration. You're a web developer and you're ready to tear your hair out because you have to support Internet Explorer 6, but, to put it tactfully, IE6 doesn't support you. You've spent hours on it, but you just can't seem to get your layout right. I can empathize. I can also help.

This isn't one of those rants about IE6 or a campaign to try to kill it. There are enough of those around the web, but they don't help if you need to support IE6 because it still has a significant enough marketshare that you can't ignore it for business reasons. No, this is the resource you've been hoping for.

I've scoured the web for resources and also included some of my own fixes for IE6 and now I've put it all together in this cheatsheet/reference manual as a resource for anyone who has to deal with Internet Explorer 6. Where possible, I've done my best to provide the cleanest and valid solutions to each bug instead of ugly hacks. I've also tried to give proper credit for each case, but some of the solutions have been shared so many times that finding the original discover of each fix is difficult. If you see a missing credit or if I missed a bug and fix, please contact me and let me know and I'll update this page.

This massive IE6 guide took a while to put together, so bookmark it, share it, tweet it, and use it to save yourself and your coworkers hours of screaming at your monitor and banging your head against your desk or other inanimate objects. Don't be fooled, however, this cheatsheet is as much for me as it is for you.

15 Essential JavaScript Video Tutorials

Thu, 13 Aug 2009 03:17:00 +0000

JavaScript can be difficult to learn on your own. It can be even more difficult to find good tutorials that teach best practices from the onset. I've gathered together 15 video tutorials from the people who really know their JavaScript. You'll learn about the basics of JavaScript and how to debug it from Douglas Crockford, Peter-Paul Koch, Joe Hewitt, and others. This collection of tutorials is for pure JavaScript, no frameworks (those will come in a future post), so you'll get a chance to learn from the ground up. If videos aren't your preferred method of learning, check out the bottom of the post for more JavaScript resources.

CSS Rounded Corners Menus

Tue, 04 Aug 2009 22:56:00 +0000

So, you want to make multiple valid cross-browser, rounded corner navigation buttons that are resizable, have a hover state, degrade gracefully, and use only CSS and one image? No problem.

I've looked at a few rounded corner solutions, but so far I haven't really found what I was looking for, so I decided to try working it out myself. I wanted a solution that was lightweight, valid, cross-browser, and didn't require JavaScript. The technique I came up with isn't the end all solution for rounded corners and I'm sure that I'm not the first to use it, but it did meet my needs, and so I'm satisfied with the result. The only caveat I'll make before we dive into the code is that I did end up needing a single line of JavaScript in order to make Internet Explorer 6 function properly without flickering. Let's get started.

Procedural vs. Object-Oriented Programming (OOP)

Wed, 29 Jul 2009 10:52:00 +0000

Having trouble making the leap from procedural to object-oriented programming (OOP)? In this tutorial, I'll explain the difference between the two styles of programming and give real-world examples on how and why you might use each. This tutorial isn't language-specific and I won't use any code examples, but by the end of it, I think you'll have a better understanding of object-oriented programming and how you can apply it in your own code projects.

If you're just starting out, chances are that you are programming in a procedural manner. In a way, procedural programming could also be called linear programming. One thing happens and then the next. Code is executed from the top of the file to the bottom.

OOP isn't as linear as procedural programming. Code is often broken up and distributed across multiple files, each one with a single purpose. OOP is also more abstract than procedural programming because it looks for patterns and reusability. The same code can be loaded and executed many times to accomplish a task without having to retype it.

Tutorial: How To Create RSS Feeds

Thu, 09 Jul 2009 23:27:00 +0000

You've probably seen them on the web, even if you don't know what they're used for; those little orange buttons that look like they're broadcasting something are everywhere. They're links to RSS feeds. In this tutorial, we'll explore some of the uses for RSS feeds, why your website should have them, and you'll also learn how to make static feeds with XML and dynamic feeds using PHP.

In its simplest form, RSS is really just a list of similar links with a title and description. RSS is an acronym for Really Simple Syndication and it is a dialect of XML. RSS comes in three versions: 0.91, 0.92, and 2.0; with version 2.0 as the most current and common version. You can download the sample files for this tutorial here.

How is RSS used?

RSS is used in many different ways by both people and websites. In general, because RSS works as a syndication channel for a list of links, any consumer of the information in that channel is called a subscriber.

One of the largest benefits to RSS is that you can view headlines from multiple sites without having to visit them directly. This is usually done using a program called a feed reader, which gathers all of the different RSS feeds that you instruct it to and displays them in a central location. Although there are many different feed readers out there, Google Reader and My Yahoo! are two of the more popular ones.

Many RSS feeds are updated dynamically whenever new content is added and thus enable subscribers to visit sites only when there are updates. This saves an enormous amount of time for users who wish to keep track of news or information on a variety of websites. Some RSS feeds even contain the entire piece of content and allow subscribers to view it without ever having to leave their feed reader.

Websites can also get the contents of an RSS feed and display them as a section of their website. Because websites aren't limited to just their own RSS feeds, this allows them to display content from all over the internet. Although we won't cover reading RSS feeds in this tutorial, displaying external RSS feeds on your site can be a great way to augement your already existing content.

MooTools 1.1 Tutorial

Tue, 05 Feb 2008 09:02:00 +0000

Update: Mootools has since moved on from version 1.1, the version for which this tutorial was written. You can still learn the basics of MooTools by reading this tutorial, but be advised that some of the code examples may be out of date with the current version of MooTools. We will be publishing up to date tutorials in our tutorials section, so check back often.

MooTools is a JavaScript library that can be used to manipulate parts of your web page, dynamically transmit data without reloading the page, and it also provides numerous effects, transitions, and user interface tools. This tutorial covers some of the basics for working with MooTools version 1.11, although it should also apply to version 1.2 as well. If you don't know JavaScript yet, you'll pick up many of its basic concepts by reading through to the end.

What exactly is a JavaScript library? JavaScript is a powerful programming language, but it can be difficult to understand and implement. MooTools is a collection of files written with JavaScript and it extends the functionality of the language and also provides shortcuts for performing certain tasks.

There are many JavaScript libraries available such as Prototype, YUI, and JQuery, but it is important to note that MooTools is not compatible with them. This means that if you include MooTools with another library, chances are that your page isn't going to function in the correct manner. So if you want to use MooTools, you're going to have to use it exclusively.