Michael J. Ross
Company: Michael J. RossAuthor Bio:
Michael J. Ross is a web developer, writer, and freelance editor.
Tutorials written by Michael J. Ross:
Creating an Online Newsletter with Drupal
As part of the Information Revolution that is changing the way that the world works and plays, people are increasingly turning to the Internet for the information they use to make decisions — financial, professional, health, etc. Consequently, news publications that are printed and mailed through the post are being supplanted by portal news sites, blogs, and online newsletters (oftentimes referred to as "e-zines" — electronic magazines).
Friday, 11th July 2008
CubeCart 3.0 Installation and Configuration
In this tutorial, we will get an introduction to CubeCart, created and distributed by Devellion Limited. Their flagship product is one of the easiest low-cost e-commerce solutions available, and is growing in popularity. Note that CubeCart is not technically open source, since the code cannot be freely redistributed. On the other hand, most of the code is not protected using encoding, and can thus be read and understood.
Monday, 7th April 2008
Drupal CMS e-Commerce Module Basics
Regular e-commerce shopping carts work fine if the functionality of the store site is limited to listing products, allowing customers to purchase them, accepting credit card payments, and all of the other e-commerce features offered by these shopping cart solutions. But what if you also want to support collaborative editing of content, community forums, and other capabilities that could help increase traffic to your site, but are usually only found in content management systems (CMSs)? Is it possible to combine the best of both worlds — shopping carts and CMSs?
Wednesday, 20th August 2008
GWT Basics: AJAX Programming with Java
Prior to JavaScript and other client-side languages, Web browsers operated as if they were HTML dumb terminals, merely presenting Web pages generated on a server. For such pages, every user action requires a full page refresh, with a round-trip over the Internet, which degrades performance and thus user satisfaction. It may be fine for a great many Web sites, but it is completely inadequate for high-performance dynamic Web applications.
Monday, 10th March 2008
Installing and Configuring Drupal 6.1
One of the most popular CMSs is Drupal, partly because it offers all of the aforesaid features, and partly because developers familiar with PHP (the language used by Drupal) can modify the functioning and appearance of almost every aspect of Drupal. The latest series of Drupal, version 6.x, provides improvements and brand-new features in a variety of areas: installation, administration, human language support, theme management, security, performance, and more.
Monday, 24th March 2008
Installing Apache on Windows
Even though it is possible to do Web development and testing on a remote server, it is better to fully develop a new Web site on a local Web server, and then upload everything when it is finished, for many reasons: 1) Keeping the unfinished site off the Internet is safer, because as you begin developing the site, you probably have not put in all of your code for neutralizing any potential attacks against your site, including cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities...
Wednesday, 20th February 2008
Installing MySQL on Windows
As Web sites and Web-based applications become more important to commercial firms and other organizations, so too does the methods used for storing data online, such as customer contact information, system login details, product data, and much more. Rewritable flat files may be sufficient for extremely limited data for which security is not an issue. But for most Web sites and applications, a robust database is called for.
Thursday, 28th February 2008
Installing PHP on Windows
A brochure-style Web site may be sufficient for a business that simply wants a basic Web presence — some static pages to inform the visitor of the company's off-line contact information. But most organizations want a Web site that can interact with the visitor, delivering custom content in dynamically-generated pages, and storing visitor information in a database.
Wednesday, 5th March 2008
PHP Debugging with Zend Studio
In this tutorial, we will explore how to use the latest update of Zend Studio for debugging PHP scripts. But first, we will get an overview of the product, its various editions, the system requirements for running it, and other installation considerations.
Sunday, 3rd February 2008
Web Database Access from Desktop Applications
There may be growing interest in moving computer applications from the desktop to the Web. But desktop applications are still a huge market, whose demise has been prematurely reported by the media in the past, and will most likely be reported in the future. In addition, for many domain areas, a Web browser — even for an AJAX-powered site — will be insufficient for many application needs.
Tuesday, 6th May 2008
