rachelandrew

The API allows you to communicate with their database via a safe method. It looks like you've got a SOAP API there so you'll want to make your sure have SOAP enabled in PHP. There aren't many tutorials that I could find, however this guide on the Zend site covers a lot of the basics: http://devzone.zend.com/2202/php-and-soap-first-steps/ You may find the company have a PHP wrapper you can use to simplify things. If so, I'd start by looking at their examples and getting those working. If he isn't tied yet to using this company I'd recommend taking a look at GoCardless for direct debit, it's a much simpler integration. https://gocardless.com/

Based on my own experience of having some very busy sites that attract a lot of spam, and that of our customers, the best method is to go with using something like Akismet and a form to email. Akismet is used by WordPress to stop blog comment spam but also has an API so you can use it with other solutions, we implemented it for Perch forms and comments. The thing with Akismet is that is learns from all the missed spam that gets marked as spam so picks up even the hand entered spam. If you must publish email addresses then really the only thing to do is find some industrial strength spam filtering on the email account. My email address is _everywhere_ and I use MailRoute which does a pretty good job of filtering out the junk.

There are roughly two different approaches to turning a site into a content managed site. To get the most out of something like WordPress you need to turn your site design into a theme and then you can add WordPress functionality or plugins to that. There are other things out there, such as the product I'm co-founder of Perch, which can work from the starting point of having an existing set of static pages that you want to make editable. Which is best in your situation I'm not sure. If you want off the shelf themes then WordPress might suit you better, and it would be worth doing the work to convert what you have or find a theme that suits. If you want to keep your existing design and just add content managed bits then Perch might be a good fit for you. Even as a CMS vendor I wouldn't suggest that any one solution is "the best" for everything. It depends on what you hope to achieve.

With HTML5 as with CSS3 it's not so much "Can I use this at all?" but more "Can I use this particular part of the spec?" As you are replacing an existing site you have all the information you need in the logs to find out what browsers you need to support, you can then use that information to decide what HTML5 features you can use and how much you need to polyfill them. HTML5 is backwards compatible by default so unless you start using specific HTML5 elements or features you shouldn't encounter any issues. The main thing has already been noted in the thread. Some older browsers, including IE8, will not allow you to apply CSS to elements they don't understand so you need to either set them to display block or use the html5shim to do that for you. This HTML5Doctor post - from 2010 - covers a lot of the basics: http://html5doctor.com/how-to-use-html5-in-your-client-work-right-now/ Other HTML5 stuff, for example form fields, will just fallback nicely in old or non-supporting browsers. For example if you use the new HTML5 form field for email in a supporting browser you'll be prompted if you don't enter a valid looking email address, in a non-supporting browser you would get the standard text input field. Hope that helps.