BleedingEdge

Thanks! Looking through the options available, javascript font replacement seems to be the best all-round solution (especially for navigation/headings etc, where text-selection isn't such an issue). I wonder if there is a way to add security (so people can't download the JS file and use it themselves) by having the javascript in a PHP file in a if(defined('BASEPATH')) { } block to ensure that only index.php (or whatever) can access it. M

Hi everyone, I have only just come across typeface.js and cufon as options for text replacement. They seem pretty cool. Are there any major drawbacks (aside from needing javascript enabled). Is it possible to style the elements alternatively with CSS as well (so that if JS is turned off, you can get it to degrade semi-gracefully with other fonts)? Cheers! Martin

Thanks guys! Jay - I don't think I wrote the HTML bit very clearly... Sorry. I meant that you would use 'single quotes' for the PHP but the output you want printed would be "double quoted" - exactly as you wrote in your example. Just a quick question on the "Hello, your name is $name" example... I would always write that as: 'Hello, your name is '.$name.'' Is that not the best way of doing it, for consistancy? Cheers! Martin

Hi guys, Is there an accepted best practice for what quote marks to use and when in PHP and HTML development? From what I can tell from looking around (and reading code snippets), it is generally accepted to use single quote marks in PHP unless you are outputting HTML, where you use double. This avoids the necessity of escaping quote marks for output. And therefore, HTML markup should be double quoted. Is this about right? Thanks! Martin

Hi guys, If you look at slmost any article on the BBC News website, the sidebar has various modules in it called "FEATURES AND ANALYSIS", "LATEST STORIES", "BACKGROUND", and "HAVE YOUR SAY". All these modules contain various links which, one way or the other, relate to the main article. Would these (in the main) be automatically generated links based on page meta-data? How would one begin to go about doing this? I need a starting point. I want to work it out, but I just need a bit of help getting going ;-) Cheers, Martin

Hi guys, Has anyone used Perforce as a SCM / versioning system? Is it good/bad/indifferent? Cheers! Martin

Thanks! Yes indeed it does help :-) I've also had a quick browse on the CI forums and docs, so I've got a better idea about it now - and it seems really very useful, not only for writing disciplined code, but for writing a lot less of it (and helpers like the form and URL helpers make life much simpler!) Ok, so on to question number 2... Can CI be integrated with EE (1.6.8 Branch)? I know that the 2.0.x branch is "codeignited" (as they are saying ;-) ), but I would be interested in just trying things out with the 1.6.8 core and CI on my laptop - I'm still learning EE and am using the core to get my head around it. The EE 2.0 demo is only 30 days, and I'm about to go off on a 3 month music tour, which will give me plenty of time to mess around with it. The file structure integrates fine (where the directories are duplicated, there are no duplicated files), but surely that's FAR too easy!? Cheers, Martin

Hi guys, I know I'm being a bit dim, but I'm trying to see exactly what CodeIgniter is for (as compared to ExpressionEngine). I know that EE 2.0 is built on CodeIgniter, but what exactly is a PHP framework? What does it achieve? Cheers! Martin

Hi guys, Is there a way (that doesn't affect SEO - each page is treated as a "separate" page) to mimick frames using content <div>s? Taking a simple grid based site as an example. You have a full width header, a sidebar, and a main content area. Secondary navigation menu is in the sidebar. When you click a menu item, the content is loaded (changed/updated) in the main content area, but the header and sidebar do not need reloading. The requirement is that the client sees the page as a new address though (for history, search engine crawling, etc.). Is this possible using AJAX or another method? If it *is* possible, is it good practice or not? Cheers, Martin

Superb. Well I know jQuery a bit so it seems to make sense to continue with that then! Yeah I've just been looking through the plugins for it - pretty comprehensive, although as with many extension sites (PHPBB comes to mind) there is such an overwhelming number of them it's often hard to find what you need!! Cheers, Martin

Hi guys, There are a plenitude of Javascript libraries out there now, all doing (to a greater or lesser extent) much the same thing. Some are incredibly complex, with the ability to create an almost desktop-like interface for the web. But, which would you recommend for someone who just wants basic UI components (accordian, slideshows, and modal windows for images (a la lightbox), content (AJAX, local pages, and external pages). I would also like a basic AJAX framework for AJAX-i-fying my site (comments, form validation, loading content etc.). I've been looking at JQuery and JQuery Tools (from the folks that make FlowPlayer), and it seems pretty comprehensive for what I want to achieve, but I have to say that the effects and animations don't seem as smooth as with some MooTools / Prototype+Scriptalicious effects I've seen. I have heard that JQuery is more suited to a beginner-to-intermediate coder (which I am) than MooTools though. Can anyone confirm this for me? What other decent libraries are out there? There may well be a gem I've never heard of! Cheers, Martin

Thanks folks. Well, seems to be as close to a consensus as you are likely to get in web design! Merci monsieurs! Martin

Well I'm not qualified to say Huw! But hopefully someone will chime in. Thanks for the replies. I hadn't thought about SEO - to be honest, I don't know enough about it to say what difference it would make (especially if the <title> had the site name in. Logically it makes more sense semantically that headings are used for content, and I can appreciate that with an audio reader it would get annoying (but wouldn't menus too?). There just seems no way to "brand" a website if both CSS and images are turned off (although I honestly don't know how rare an occurance this is!). The site I am working on is an "entertainment" industry website, so I'm making some reasonable assumptions about the capabilities of the browsers that will be directed at it (and the type of users as well). As it is my own site though (and I'm on no real deadline), I'm using it as an experiment as both a full XHTML/CSS ("tableless") site, and also developing stylesheets for mobile devices too. M

Hi guys, Is <h1> better served as the title for the whole site, or as an article/specific page heading? The site I am currently developing (for me) is called (for argument's sake) "My Site Title". There is a masthead at the top of every page with this. Should this be h1? Thinking in terms of accessibility, if the site is viewed without stylesheets and images, there would still be site branding if the site name was h1 (and using a <div> with a background and css replacement techniques to hide the h1 when the site is viewed properly). This would seem to make sense, but I'm not sure if structurally it is best from a markup viewpoint? Any help appreciated! Thanks, Martin

Thanks!!

Hi guys, I am using CSS to highlight the current page in my navigation system using id="unique_id" in the body tag. This is fine for simple navigation, but if you need to highlight 2 menu items (the parent and child for example), how would you go about it? If your structure (and menu system) was: SECTION A - Subsection A1 - Subsection A2 SECTION B - Subsection B1 - Subsection B2 * And on the * page you wanted to CSS highlight both the SECTION B and Subsection B2 menu items individually, how would you do it? I am using PHP, so if there is a PHP way of doing it that is easier than using IDs, then I am all ears Many thanks, Martin

Yeah, as I said I've been with them since '03 and until now have been pretty happy. I think what p****s me off the most was the rudeness of this bloke I was talking too - just an immediate "no this is not possible at all" and a very surly tone when I questioned why... I'll try again tomorrow.

Well the no refuelling rule goes back to '93 (refuelling was scrapped for '94, along with a load of other rule changes like banning of traction control/active suspension/other driver aids). Then came the knee jerk changes (the infamout "plank" and others) after the deaths of Ratzenberger and Senna, and the massive injuries of Wendlinger (was it him?) in Monaco soon after. Personally I think no refuelling is a good thing - strategy cannot be decided on fuel now (and Q3 is more about the simple speed of the car/driver than the fuel weight on board). Although, I would love to go back to qualifying being 12 laps max for each driver, and the best driver/car combination gets pole. Not this knock 5 cars out in Q1, keep the top 10 after Q2, and decide the top 10 in Q3 malarky! Good on Vettel today though. McLaren looking a little weak. Let's have a non McLaren/Ferrari champion this year! Martin

Hi guys, I am having some trouble with Fasthosts at the moment. I recently registered 2 new domains with them (using an account I have had since 2003), and along with 2 others I want to transfer them to another *Fasthosts* account. The problem is, the account I want to tranfer them from is an "old style" account (account starts with an "n"), and the account I want to transfer them to is a "new style" account (account starts with "uk"). According to tech support who I spoke to just now (who had, it must be admitted, a limited grasp of English - probably because it's the weekend) it is simply not possible - not just by me, but by them either. What *is* possible though is for me to easily transfer these domains to another hosting company, which it looks like I will have to do. It is simply not possible to keep the registrations with the old account - I am separating my business and personal hosting and the business one will all be done from a different bank account with a different card. Irrespective of which, I am the customer, and that is what I want to do. Does this sound right to you? I find it truly bizarre that a company makes it easier to transfer a domain to another company than to another account within the same company. That's one way to lose business... It surely cannot be beyond the wit of these intelligent people to make this happen? So....... UK based PHP/MySQL + Webmail hosting recommdations anyone? Cheers, Martin

Thanks - yeah that's pretty much what I thought. It doesn't seem to be as ubiquitous as MS claim...

Hi guys, Compared to the more established Flash, how many users actually have Silverlight on their computers? Is there any point in going down the Silverlight route (yet) for a website? Cheers! Martin

Thanks guys. As this moment in time, I've nothing online - I've managed to get releases from several of my clients for music to put up as demos, so I'll be getting it up in the next month or so. If you've ever seen a musical in the UK, the chances are you will at least have heard my work As for the weblogs in EE - is it possible to have a "latest entry" link on a page, and also have a page of "all the others"? I'm developing some freeware music tools (MIDI/audio processing etc.) and would like to be able to add each version release as another entry in a weblog, and the link to the latest release is always on the homepage, whilst still having an archive page of previous releases. Cheers, Martin

Yeah that's true actually... I suppose the weblogs would make it easy to manage music and video demos. I'm right when I say (thinking back to a post of mine on the EE forums last year which I think you replied to!) that the data itself isn't stored in the database - only a reference to it? So I could set up a weblog with the fields "Title", "Description", and "Filename" (or similar) where the filename is as an example "foobar". Then within the page I could create links pointing to "foobar.wav", "foobar.mp3", "foobar.flac", "foobar.wma" etc... Hadn't thought of that until you mentioned it! Could be useful though. Cheers! Martin

Hi guys, I have been thinking about developing my own online "presence" for my work (I'm a musician - composer, conductor etc.). I have reasonable HTML/CSS/JS/PHP/MySQL chops (also quick to pick things up too), and I'm good with developing graphics, so I'm going to give it a go myself. The general structure of the site will be very simple. The only real "updated regularly" section will be the blog, which will also double as the "news" section (there will be a news category). Given that I will be essentially hand coding the site, I'm not going to use anything like Joomla or Drupal, because firstly I feel it is overly complex for this requirement, but also because they give you a lack of control (and the code is very messy). I like ExpressionEngine very much, but again I'm wondering if it will be overly complex. Would you experts recommend a full on CMS system like EE, or a site built around a framework such as CodeIgniter with a blog "bolted on" (using WordPress)? Many thanks Martin

Thanks guys. I temporarily deleted all the CSS references on my template page and it didn't seem too bad. Using <h1> as the document heading makes sense to me, but that does leave the problem of site branding if both CSS and images are off. It would be nice to have the company name at the top of every page in large, bold, letters (just using a <div id="masthead"> creates it in the normal paragraph text, which does not make it obvious what site it is). That's a minor point though I suppose! I've been reading up on ems. Seems to be a pain in the a**, but the only really workable solution for completely accessible sites. Browsers render by default at 16pt(?!) which seems a little random, so (tell me if I'm wrong) you have to set the font size to be a percentage of the "default" size to get a "useful" em size (say 10pt, which is 62.5%). Then, 1em = 10pt. Am I in the right ballpark? Cheers! Martin