CategoryCoding

March 24, 2009 — Here, on the Smashing Editorial team, we always try to meet the expectations of our readers. We do our best to avoid misunderstandings, and we try to spread knowedge and present only the best design practices and development techniques. However, sometimes we do make mistakes. And when we do, we apologize and do our best to correct what we’ve done. In November 2008 we published the article 10 Advanced PHP Tips To Improve Your Programming. Apparently, according to negative comments to the post, it contained some errors and some statements that are just wrong. We sincerely apologize for our mistake, and we are truly sorry for any inconvenience we caused by it. However, this simple apology is not good enough. To solve the problem, we asked Chris Shiflett and Sean Coates, two PHP gurus, to take a closer look at the article, explain its errors and make it perfectly clear what is actually right and wrong in the theory and practice. This article is a professional response to our article published a couple of months ago. Read more…

March 23, 2009 —

This is our fourth installment of Ask SM, featuring reader questions about Web design, focusing on HTML, CSS and JavaScript. In this post we’ll cover how you can distribute the horizontal space between elements evenly, how you can achieve maximum sides on images; you’ll also learn best practices for CSS font replacement and answers to a couple of quickfire questions.

Antoine Nicolas writes: *Do you know how to perfectly and dynamically distribute objects horizontally in a container using CSS?* This is a classic example of something that is fairly difficult to do in CSS but probably shouldn’t be. I have approached this problem in a number of different ways in the past. I have revisited it a little now, and I’ll present what I believe is the best solution here.

March 20, 2009 — If you’re a Web developer who’s been curious about Ruby on Rails but has never gotten around to trying it out because you couldn’t find a suitable overview of its advantages, then this article is for you. We want to bring Ruby on Rails closer to those who want to take a peek first, without going through an entire tutorial. So, this article is structured a little different from most other introductions out there; hopefully it is more useful because of this. I assume you’re already familiar with some other form of Web development, whether PHP, Python, Perl or Java, and relational databases like MySQL. First, we’ll introduce Rails and Ruby and the basic ideas behind both. I’ll teach you just enough Ruby so that you understand the code samples. I’ll tell you how to get Ruby on Rails running on your computer, and I’ll give you an overview of the basic functionality of Rails and demonstrate how Rails’ main parts work together. This tutorial consists of two articles: in the current, first article we get started with some basic concepts and essential components of Ruby on Rails. In the second part (it will be published next week) you will learn how to install the engine; you’ll also take a closer look at Rails’ inner workings and discover main advantages of Ruby on Rails. Please stay tuned. After reading these parts, you should have an idea of whether Rails is for you. If you get the feeling that it is, I’ll point you to some good tutorials on the Web that you can use to learn Rails. I’ll also provide a lot of further reading recommendations so you can dig as deep into the topic as you like. You may want to take a look at the following related posts: * 10 Useful Tips For Ruby On Rails Developers Read more…

March 10, 2009 — Subversion is a version control system that many Web developers and designers use to back up their work. Subversion was started in 2000 and is quite popular in the open-source community; major repositories such as Google Code use it to distribute source code. Read more…

March 8, 2009 — As the Web grows and becomes more dynamic, more and more websites have user-generated content and tools that greatly improve the user experience in terms of usability and accessibility. Interactive solutions for lightboxes, form validation, navigation, upload, auto-complete, image cropping, slideshows, tool tips, sliders and tables are being developed that use nifty JavaScript and AJAX scripts. Read more…

March 5, 2009 — Choosing a content management system can be tricky. Without a clearly defined set of requirements, you will be seduced by fancy functionality that you will never use. What then should you look for in a CMS? Read more…

March 3, 2009 — Popular JavaScript libraries such as jQuery, MooTools, Prototype, Dojo and YUI can be great for accomplishing common JavaScript tasks. These libraries provide many functions, whether the matter is related to events or effects or AJAX. And if one of these libraries can’t do the job, a plug-in probably exists that can. Such flexibility is great but sometimes comes with a penalty (the size of JavaScript files being one of them). Although adopting a well-known JavaScript library is usually a wise decision, you may want to perform a task that can be accomplished by a more lightweight library dedicated exclusively to that task or that is not supported by the more popular JavaScript libraries. Below, we present 40 stand-alone JavaScript libraries that serve specific purposes. These are not all the ones out there, but every Web designer or developer will find something helpful here. Read more…

February 25, 2009 — Rails is an model-view-controller Web framework written in the Ruby programming language. One of its great appeals is being able to quickly crank out CRUD-based Web applications. A big advantage of Rails over other frameworks is that it values convention over configuration. If you follow the correct conventions, you can avoid lengthy configuration of files, and things just work! Therefore, you spend less time writing boring config files and more time focusing on business logic. Read more…

February 12, 2009 — Everyone wants to be more productive, make fewer mistakes and write good code. Of course, that all depends on you, but in most cases integrated development environments (IDEs) can help you achieve those goals more easily. Unfortunately, choosing the right IDE is very difficult because a lot needs to be considered. And the website of almost every IDE tells us it is the best one. Read more…

February 9, 2009 — JavaScript is a powerful client-side scripting language used in many modern websites and Web applications. In the hands of a skilled Web developer, JavaScript can enhance the user’s experience of the website and provide rich interactive components and features. But even though syntactically simple in nature, JavaScript is often difficult to author because of the environment it runs in: the Web browser. Read more…