11/18/2007

Drupal Useful References

For those of you who are thinking of using Drupal to build your sites, here are some useful references that you can use to get things started. Drupal is a great Content Management Tool (CMT). With it's flexibility and great community, there is almost nothing that it can't do.

Drupal Terminology
Drupal Handbooks
Drupal API reference
Drupal usage lessons (With videos and class notes)
Drupal Cookbook (for beginners)

HowTo turn your drupal website to video host site as Youtube

HowTo: Add drop down menus to your site



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11/11/2007

PHP resources for developers

Nikolas from webdigity forum have posted 10 projects every php developer should use which provides very good list of tools that can save developers hundred of hours of development time. Quoted list is shown below.

Sending Emails

Sending emails is something very common for every web site. Php's mail() function is good for this, but what if you want to attach a file, or send through an SMTP server, etc? Well in that case you should use phpmailer.

User Manipulation

Another common module is the user module. With that you can manipulate users (login, logout, register, etc.) Personally I've never found a project that is good enough, so I created my own Smiley Php user class is a module that can be used even in established projects, as it uses variable data for database tables, fields, session variables, etc.

Fetching RSS Feeds

Ever wanted to fetch an rss feed from your project? Well there is always an easy way to fetch a feed but in most cases you need more than that. When that is the case you should definitely use Magpie RSS.

Geotargeting

There are many times that you need to know where are your visitors coming from. Maxmind gives a solution to this. For a complete tutorial check this article.

Grabbing Remote Content

Some times RSS is not enough so you need to grab the content of a web page and parse it. If you are a huge fun of preg you should not continue reading, but if you are not you definitely need the htmlSQL class. The htmlSQL class allow you to access html values with SQL code. Nice huh? Smiley

Trackback

Sending and receiving trackbacks is vital for a web site in our age. And in fact it is very easy if you are using a class like php trackback.

Template System

Another thing that all sites use is a template. A template engine can save you lots of time, while it can make display changes very easy. A complete template engine that most projects use is Smarty.

BBcode

BBcode used to be a functionality for forums, but as more and more sites use it in order to be more friendly to their users, you might want to use BBcode to your site. The problem is that BBcode requires a lot of coding and I am not sure if you have the time for this. If you don't you'll find StringParser_BBcode class very useful Smiley

Paypal Payment Integration

As you may know paypal has a nice API for developers who want to integrate paypal payments in their sites. The paypal IPN integration class helps you make use of it and start accepting payments in 20 minutes.

Editor Controls

I don't have a problem to make changes to a site using phpMyAdmin or a simple text area, but when it comes to my clients I have to give them more than that. A javascript WYSIWYG editor is a perfect solution but as it requires countless hours to get it done I would suggest you to use the tinyMCE control.


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11/06/2007

AJAX solutions for developer who do not have much time at hand.

The Smashing Magazine put togather 80+ AJAX-Solutions For Professional Coding that can save many Many hours of development time! The topic that is being covered are as follows:
AJAX Auto Completer
AJAX Instant Edit
AJAX Menus, Tabs
AJAX Date, Time, Calendars
AJAX Interactive Elements
AJAX Developer’s Suite
Enhanced AJAX Solutions
Ajax Forms
AJAX Grids, Tables
AJAX Lightboxes, Galleries, Showcases
Visual Effects, Animation
Useful Basic JavaScripts
Galleries, Resources



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