CategoryCoding

May 5, 2009 — Magento is a popular open source e-commerce software platform that has a modular architecture and is extremely flexible. Read more…

April 28, 2009 — CSS Sprites are not new. In fact, they are a rather well-established technique and have managed to become common practice in Web development. Of course, CSS sprites are not always necessary, but in some situation they can bring significant advantages and improvements – particularly if you want to reduce your server load. Read more…

April 22, 2009 — Progressive Enhancement is a powerful methodology that allows Web developers to concentrate on building the best possible websites while balancing the issues inherent in those websites being accessed by multiple unknown user-agents. Progressive Enhancement (PE) is the principle of starting with a rock-solid foundation and then adding enhancements to it if you know certain visiting user-agents can handle the improved experience. PE differs from Graceful Degradation (GD) in that GD is the journey from complexity to simplicity, whereas PE is the journey from simplicity to complexity. PE is considered a better methodology than GD because it tends to cover a greater range of potential issues as a baseline. PE is the whitelist to GD’s blacklist. Part of the appeal of PE is the strength of the end result. PE forces you to initially plan out your project as a functional system using only the most basic of Web technologies. This means that you know you’ll always have a strong foundation to fall back on as complexity is introduced to the project. Read more…

April 17, 2009 — This is our fifth 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 style only the text inputs, refreshing a content-block automatically, how to avoid some positioning problems and create and use transparent div-backgrounds; we also discuss further CSS-related problems and deliver answers to a couple of quickfire questions. Read more…

April 11, 2009 — Joomla is one of the most powerful, robust and feature-rich content management systems out there. Besides being open-source, Joomla is capable of some really stunning designs through the use of modules and built-in display customizations. Below, we present a list of 20 35 of the coolest, slickest, most eye-catching Joomla template designs. Read more…

April 8, 2009 — Over the last several years, developers have moved from table-based website structures to div-based structures. Hey, that’s great. But wait! Do developers know the reasons for moving to div-based structures, and do they know how to? Often it seems that people are moving away from table hell only to wind up in div hell. Read more…

April 7, 2009 — Originally called Apollo, Adobe Air was released in beta back in 2007 and has gone from strength to strength ever since. You can build an Adobe Air app using HTML, JavaScript, Flash or ActionScript relatively simply. Basically anyone with even a little knowledge of programming and a little patience can create rich Internet applications. Read more…

April 3, 2009 — Many people, designers included, think that typography consists of only selecting a typeface, choosing a font size and whether it should be regular or bold. For most people it ends there. But there is much more to achieving good typography and it’s in the details that designers often neglect. Read more…

March 27, 2009 — Last week we published Getting Started With Ruby On Rails, the first part of our Ruby On Rails introduction. We explained basic ideas behind Ruby and presented concepts and essential components of the language. Read more…

March 25, 2009 — The most popular and best open source database is MySQL. Simple as that. It is consistently fast , reliabile and very, very easy to use. One of MySQLs main features is its cross-platform support, it will run on almost all operating systems, including Windows, OSX, Linux and many more. So, MySQL is the best database, and we all use it. The question now is which is the best MySQL Admin and Development Tool. Read more…