Excellent CSS Sprite website

With most of our web development we use CSS sprites (see previous post about it).

I just wanted to share this excellent generator with you all for it

http://css-sprit.es/

Getting Select boxes to show value rather than the id in CakePHP

Been struggling with something lately – and that is to get the select boxes on the edit / add views of a cakePHP app to show the correct thing.

For instance I have a Countries table that has an association to the UserAddress model, to get this association and pull out the country name rather than the coutnry_id I have to do the following:

$countries = $this->UserAddress->Country->find('list', array('fields' => array('Country.country')));

Sometimes CakePHP automagic takes away a bit of common sense from us

Open Source Software

Had a meeting today with a client about a new website we are looking to create and we were discussing Joomla or Wordpress and the benefits they provide to the end users. So I thought I would just briefly sing the praises of Open Source Software and why it has several benefits over closed source proprietary software.

Take Joomla for example, it has 1000’s of developers working on it, either directly or indirectly by posting bug fixes on forums. Basically by using open source software you are gaining the benefit of these 1000’s of developers working on a product that is essentially “free”.

Whereas if you use closed source Proprietary software then you have to hope that eventually that they fix that niggling problem you have

Frameworks…

We at Nu Order Webs use a few different methods of creating sites – normally depending on the amount of specific customisation that is needed. Often if a simple CMS site is needed we will either use Joomla or Wordpress, but quite often a client will require something really specific that cannot currently be done using open source software. That is where a framework comes in! Our Framework of choice is CakePHP, we find it’s strong typing and ease of data passing a huge benefit when it comes to rapidly creating applications, not to mention the huge prototyping benefits given from using bake.

However looking at the current market, there are a lot more job offers asking for the Zend Framework. Now personally I have never got on with the Zend framework, I think it is overly simple and doesnt actually seem to provide any “Automagic” features, and surely the whole point of a framework is that it prevents you having to write an excessive amount of code?

Sure they have a fantastic “library” of pre-written code for web services, but one of the benefits of cakePHP is that you can simply import these and instantiate them as you would with any other object. For instance on a previous project we simply used the Zend libraries for google picasa to import a photo album from the users picasa account in roughly about 30 lines of code.

So I would say – don’t always follow the crowd, sure Zend has the backing of the creators of PHP but as an MVC framework designed for RAD – I would suggest that possibly there are better choices out there – especially when it comes to code generation!

Just a quick update

Have lately been inundated with projects from small quick E-Commerce sits through to large scale Accommodation search sites – we are intending to update our portfolio section on the site as soon as these latest projects are finished as it needs a bit of a revamp.

Just another day in the life of a web developer eh? Too much work, caffeine and not enough sleep, time