Developer Tutorials' Webmaster Blog

Testing email routines in web applications

in Web by Akash Mehta

For any web developer that’s ever had to build a signup routine, email is the necessary evil that takes pride of place among hated activities. Sure, a simple call to the language’s mail library will send a message through, but the moment the boss wants a HTML email, or users need attachments, everything starts to get tricky. To top things off, automating testing of an email routine can be near impossible with the usual tools. Today we’ll look at some of the options for testing email routines in web applications.

Turn Your Wordpress Blog into a Social Network

in Design, WordPress by JonGos

Wordpress is a CMS that was built for blogging but many people have repurposed it for magazines, newspapers, blog networks and all sorts of other goodies! But did you know you can hack your Wordpress blog to be a no-cost solution for a social network? Well you can, and here’s fifteen plug-ins that will let you do it.

First Look at A.viary.com

in Design by JonGos

One of the hottest application suites to hit the design community since Adobe was born is now upon us. A.viay.com is a well executed visionary attempt at becoming the ‘CS3′ of web apps. And I’m not sure how it happened, but while Adobe wasn’t paying attention this group may have just snatched the market.

We all love web apps, as long as you’re connected they provide cheap, fast and less resource alternatives to desktop solutions. On top of that they store your data in the cloud, a good place for it if your computer ever crashes or is stolen.

SimpleTest: Unit Testing for PHP

in PHP by Akash Mehta

We recently looked at front-end testing of web applications with Selenium. Today, we’ll take another approach to testing your PHP applications: backend unit testing for your actual PHP code. As part of our posts on test driven development, here’s a quick intro to using SimpleTest to test your PHP applications.

Getting Started with ORM in PHP

in PHP by Akash Mehta

ORM, or Object Relational Mapping, is a database design approach that simplifies managing complex databases for programmers. Instead of direct database access, an ORM layer in a PHP framework can make “objects” stored in a database behave like actual objects from a programming perspective - for example, creating a new “car” stored in the database could involve a call to $car->new(). By abstracting actual database access, web development can be more productive and result in more reliable applications. Here’s a quick intro to ORM in PHP.

Create a Custom Firefox Search Tool in Five Minutes

in General by JonGos

site:yourblogname.com searchterm

This is an example how to search your blog as a query in Google. But have you ever wanted to learn how to make your own ‘Search Tools’ for Firefox so that you can look-up information on your own blog quickly, from anywhere on the internet? Or do you want to hack Google Custom search to improve your earnings and it’s functionality?

How to Follow Design Tutorials

in Design by JonGos

Image via Wikipedia

Are people getting spoiled?

In the last two years or so, the number of free design ‘instruction’ and resource sites has exploded. Unfortunately, a lot of people seem to think we live in the Matrix, where ideas can just be downloaded into their heads. Well, it’s 2008 and they haven’t invented that technology yet. Until they do we still have to work to come up with new ideas and to learn how to best execute them.

Selenium IDE: Front-end web application testing

in Web by Akash Mehta

Ever setup a demo for a client, only to find you had a syntax error in one of the key files? Or maybe you’ve forgotten to setup the database on the staging server and your boss is staring at a screen of MySQL errors. In this tutorial, I’ll show you how to put together a simple frontend-based test suite using Selenium, to help identify these issues sooner than later.

Migrating legacy PHP 4 applications to PHP 5

in JavaScript by Akash Mehta

As Ivo Jansch pointed out on the Ibuildings blog, there’s barely a month left till security fixes are discontinued for PHP 4. While support for PHP 4 officially ended last December, security updates were offered until 08-08-08. Most major web hosts have been phasing out PHP 4 support, but many legacy applications built with PHP 4 in mind are currently in use, and the more intricate will take quite some time to move to PHP 5. Here are some tips and resources for managing the migration process.

jGrowl, an OS X Growl-like jQuery message plugin

in JavaScript by Akash Mehta

jGrowl is a plugin for the jQuery that generates unobtrusive notification boxes on a page. It has a similar design to the OS X Growl Framework, after which it is named. With jGrowl, web developers can easily display brief information messages and alerts to their users during busy sessions with complex web applications.