CSS Resetting — a Must

By David Golding |  Print This Post

Building sites is, for the time being, a big pain because of our dear friend Internet Explorer. Too bad that so many people still use this terrible, incompatible, underdeveloped piece of software… For us web designers out there, how do we save time building sites that will inevitably be accessed by IE?

I just read a post on some CSS tactics that zero out functions, making IE that much closer to Safari and Firefox. The defaults are inconsistent across browsers, so by using CSS to bring all elements to ground zero will shave off time trying to get designs compatible across them.

Eric at Meyerweb.com has put together a nice package of CSS trickery that will reset the styles for all browsers. I encourage you to check that out as well as his explanation on why, as designers, we’ve got to start resetting our CSS at the outset.

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Panic’s New App Coda: Finally!

By David Golding |  Print This Post

I read a review of Panic’s new app Coda and thought, “Finally! Somebody is figuring out how to help us web developers out!” I’ve used TextMate, skEdit, BBEdit, Dreamweaver, GoLive, Eclipse and even the old-school applications like Adobe PageMill to make my web sites, but there have been features missing, lots of toggling through files and all. It seems Panic, the masterminds behind my favorite FTP program Transmit, crafted the application that will finally give me what I’ve been hoping for.

My Issues that up-and-coming web developers need to know

Life in PHP, MySQL, HTML, CSS and all that is great. Lots of free, open source stuff out there to get into the web development world. But you may realize that coding everything by hand can take too long. So you begin to borrow from other people by going to HotScripts and such sites that host free PHP scripts. You browse a lot of blogs to learn the tools of the trade to craft HTML and CSS, maybe by visiting the CSS Zen Garden.

An issue I have with all this is that in the end, you almost always come back to doing it yourself. A magic program like Dreamweaver cannot promise to make web development purely a graphical enterprise. You always have to come back to the code because, frankly, the web browsers are to blame. And the HotScripts you use can’t do it exactly the way you need it to be.

Once you come to this realization, like all the rest of us have at some point, you will need to dive deeper into the world of development. Let me make a recommendation at this juncture for you: buy Panic’s Coda and use it first.

It’s an all-in-one program that facilitates building web sites to standard, not an iWeb program that makes it easy, but produces little customization, or a Dreamweaver program that renders pages all outta whack (which visually becomes almost worthless and just like any other editor out there). You’ll spend around 80 bucks for a program that puts everything there, and even has built in books of handy HTML, CSS, Javascript, and PHP references. I personally favor the program much more than dropping 500 bucks for a GoLive or Dreamweaver kind of program.

So there’s my review. You’ll enjoy having the FTP in there; easy access to editing pages; CSS up-to-standard editors that are visually wonderful; multiple-site synchronization; and the clean environment that’s not clunky or disturbing.

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Installing Cake Calendar

By David Golding |  Print This Post

After some feedback, users have been asking for a set of install instructions for Cake Calendar, so I figured I’d post it here. (To download and install the program, please visit the Cake Calendar page.)

Cake Calendar is built on the CakePHP framework meaning that not all the code is made in longhand from scratch. This actually makes life easier for developers, even though you will find more directories and files. Be sure to download the CakePHP core folder and the cakecalendar_1.0 folder.

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Step One: Prep Folder for Uploading

You’re going to upload two folders to your server: cakecalendar_1.0 and cake (version 1.2+). Before you upload them, be sure to prep them for the install.

In the cakecalendar_1.0 > config folder, edit the

file. Here you will specify your MySQL settings. It’s pretty straightforward: put in the username and password. You will find another folder called

(not the one in the config folder). The

file is the install file you will need to run in MySQL to set up your database. (If you have trouble with this, you will need to learn simple MySQL database administration methods, which I won’t go into detail here.)

Next, run a

on the

folder to make it fully writeable. The cakecalendar_1.0 folder is now ready to be installed.

(You may want to make the cake_1.2xxx folder writeable as well.)

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Step Two: Upload folders

You can rename the cakecalendar_1.0 folder to whatever you want the calendar to be called in the URL. For example, renaming the folder for my server to “davescalendar” would mean that the calendar will be accessible via

.

Upload the cakecalendar_1.0 (or renamed, if you changed it) to the server. Upload the cake libraries folder into the same directory where cakecalendar_1.0 is installed. (Usually both are housed in the public_html folder.)

That’s it! It should work fine now. If you run into errors, please consult the CakePHP installation manual, as this will actually be a Cake install error, and not a Cake Calendar one. (I will try to post common problems here as they come my way.)

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Tips and Tricks

To access the administration area, you will need to go to the admin URL (there is no link built into the calendar incidentally, for security reasons). This will be at

. Now, you will need to create a username and password to access this area. This is kept in the MySQL database table

. You will need to create the user accounts through your MySQL database program, be it PHPMyAdmin, etc.

You can change the look and feel of the Calendar by editing only two files: admin.ctp and default.ctp. These are housed in this folder:

Just make sure you don’t delete one important line of code:

Also, the links to the CSS files and javascripts are kept in the layout using the Cake HTML helpers. You can edit these, too, but I wouldn’t recommend it unless you are familiar with Cake. Instead, just edit the

file, and all should still work without broken formatting.

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