One of many features in Xcode that developers forgot to use is #pragma mark directives. What is a #pragma mark? #pragma marks are simple directives that help us better organize our implementation code.
Read more
Besides my full time regular job, these days I’m working on a community site for a friend of mine. Good knows if it will ever come to life π However, here’s a little something some of you might find useful. I needed to develop and export quite a large amount of users from a database of some other system into WordPress system. Among other things I needed to attach quite a few custom metadata fields to each and every user. WordPress already comes with function for creating/updating user metadata.
Read more
Notice the word free in the title. If something is declared as open source this does not imply it should be free. Take a look at FogBugz. It is, one of the best open source project tracking tools currently available. However it’s quite expensive. Maybe not so expensive to larger companies but for small businesses and freelancers it sure is.
Yesterday I came across dotProject tool. If you are like me and came to PHP from .Net world then your first though might be that this is .Net application due to the “dot” in the title. Well, it isn’t, it’s a PHP powered collaboration tool.
Read more
Can an online store have only one product? Sure it can and we give you the one that just launched. Kapitol Reef was founded to develop, perfect, manufacture and market a new breed of snorkels based upon pressure-balanced breathing in the aquatic environment. The entire focus for this company is to deliver best-of-class products, starting with the snorkel. Kapitol Reef is in the market for many years and this week they published a new site. Similar to our work on Teraflex project, we used WordPress and Magento platforms for the development.
Read more
If you are developer working on a open source technologies then most likely you are using open source or some freeware tools. Since I’m a PHP developer this post will show examples in context of PHP. Developing for PHP can be quite a fun, or sometimes quite painful.
Read more
I got one fairly simple request to develop a custom shipping calculation for Magento that will use some special calculation using UPS API. Right now, Magento only calculates weight and the client needs something more advanced. I worked on similar stuff before, so I guessed this will not be much different. First step was to find an API for UPS. Well, this post is all about the search for API. I’ll update it when I manage to find it.
Read more
One of the problems working under the hood of the Magento CMS is determining the context of $this. If you are about to do any advanced stuff with your template, besides layout changes, you need to get familiar with Magento’s objects (classes).
Let’s have a look at the /app/design/frontend/default/default/template/catalog/product/view.phtml file. If you open this file and execute var_dump($this) your browser will return empty page after a short period of delay. By page I mean on the product view page; the one you see when you click on Magetno product. Experienced users will open PHP error log and notice the error message caused by var_dump().
Read more
Did you ever wonder what does it take to build a successful website? Bob Misita from Virante helps us visualize the process. He made a flowchart of 40 steps that need to be completed before actual website launch. Although the list is quite comprehensive, this steps really occur even in medium sized projects.
I hope this will help all of you who want to build a self-money-generation sites with the deadline of 3 weeks. Look at the flowchart, analyze it and donβt start the development until you planned at least 80% of this boxes.
Read more
Couple of days ago I posted a question to LinkedIn Q&A. It was for those individuals/companies who use WordPress to run their main site. I was interested to know why do they find WordPress to be their chosen one CMS. The users were supposed to name top 3 key elements in WP that they find most important for your site.Β That was the easy part to most of them. Harder part was to name top 3 key elements they miss in WP, but have a feeling it would be important for their site.
There were some really interesting replies.
Read more
After many weeks of work, our 1st Magento project hit the Web: TeraFlex Suspensions. As the purpose of the site in not primarily selling, but also branding and community development, we decided to use WordPress and Magento combination to accomplish the client’s goals.
Read more
Working on a project as only developer having direct contact with the client gives you the freedom not to think too much of a communication tool you will use. Couple of meetings, phone calls and an email will be just fine. After 3-4 weeks, you deliver the project and the communication is over. If that is your common scenario, than skip evaluation of this tool.
Read more
There are many Lightbox clones this days. Some are fancier, some are lighter, some use jQuery, some do not. In this wast set of options, I found one I think I will prefer from today: FancyBox – fancy image zooming tool
It is based on jQuery and is a cool alternative to existing solutions. Here are some features:
Read moreDrop us a line. We'd love to know more about your project.
