The demise of the once unrivalled NextGen Gallery plugin for WordPress has nudged me to look for a replacement for several clients’ WordPress Web sites. My criteria for replacement candidates are simple, and I think I may have found it: FooGallery. This article is a first look at this gallery plugin.
Articles Archive
Read Blogs More Efficiently (and Enhance your Blog Reading Experience) Using Categories and Tags
Boy, if there isn’t a whole lot of junk out there on the Web! But there’s also a lot of good stuff. Unfortunately, finding the good stuff can be difficult. So much of that junk just gets in the way. Even if you’ve found a blog (or blogs) you like to read, you might be spending too much time sifting through articles that are of no real interest to you. At some point, you probably give up. This article is written for people who read blogs. If you’re one of them, the tips herein might make your blog-surfing time more efficient and rewarding.
Which Categories and Tags Should I Use?
For people who are new to blogging, the concepts of Categories and Tags can be confusing. The first challenge is understanding what they are and how they differ. The next challenge is using them effectively. The purpose of this article is to offer guidance in addressing that second challenge.
How to use Advanced Custom Fields with Genesis
I can’t explain why I’ve waited so long to try out the Advanced Custom Fields plugin. All I can say is I’m glad I finally did. Today. This article will show you one simple method for displaying the values of those custom fields in your Genesis child theme.
Diagnostic PHP: Get All User Constants
Sometimes I want to see all the constants I have defined. Here is some diagnostic PHP I use for displaying all user-defined constants.
Diagnostic PHP: Get All User Functions
Sometimes I want to see all the user-defined functions that are in memory when a page loads. Maybe the page doesn’t need certain functions and I can realize performance improvements by removing them. And sometimes — I’m being candid here — I copy functions from one application into a library file for another and don’t need any of them for the current application. This function, offering some diagnostic PHP, helps.
Diagnostic PHP: Get All Included Files
Sometimes when developing, it’s helpful to echo some diagnostic information to the screen. Here’s some simple diagnostic PHP I use for displaying all included files.
Hayes Shutters Online Ordering System
Word-of-mouth referrals are still our favorite source of new business. One day no so long ago, I called a fellow (actually lady) Web developer after reading her humorous and all-too-familiar account of a “sales call from hell” on her Facebook timeline. After some commiserating, we shared highlights of recent projects and agreed to think of each other if and when opportunities to collaborate arise. Before we hung up (a soon-to-be-obsolete metaphor, I imagine), I had contact information for two prospects who might need my services. A little more than a month later, one of those prospects became a client. This article describes my first project with that client.
CSS Descendant Selectors
CSS descendant selectors (also known as contextual selectors) allow you to write lean, clean, semantic html and CSS markup with a minimum number of class and ID names, making your code easier to understand and maintain, and maybe even giving you a sense of harmonious calm. In this article, I explain this claim with an example.
Custom Web Form: Contract Generator in PHP & MySQL
Forms are the engine that drive user interactivity on the Web. We see them everywhere — they are the meat of eCommerce Web sites and online surveys, and simple versions of forms are common on “Contact Us” pages. Some forms are easy to make, using basic HTML, online form builders, or plugins for platforms like WordPress. But there are other applications for Web forms — including some applications for which you might not initially think a form is the answer — that require a custom solution with custom programming. This article describes a project in which we created a form-based system for generating contracts for a private school’s Independent Study Program. This system, housed within the existing password-protected Intranet/Administrative area of the school’s Web site, automates and streamlines the process of generating contracts, minimizing the need for manual calculations and eliminating most, if not all, of the opportunities for user error.