Joomla Templates: Creating a Pure CSS Template - Part 2
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This week we delve deeper into CSS with Joomla. We cover templateDetails.xml, index.php, creating a blank Joomla template body, using CSS to create a tableless layout, CSS shorthand, Joomla specific CSS and more. By Barrie North. 0218
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What do you think of the new design?  For those of you reading via RSS just click on the permalink.   Fixed layout.  Blue background.  Nice clean sidebar.  No more obsolete links. Updated content.  All to give the appearance that I'm a professional!  This is part of my new effort to blog more now that I have Rojo  launched.  Anyway.  If anything looks strange please let me know!  I'll also be making some additional layout tweaks in the next couple of days.  In the meantime this will do...
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Ligaya Turmelle has relayed some great news in her latest blog entry, something that the web's been needing for a long time - a new group from the W3C created specifically for enhancing the HTML standard.   Now I have to admit to being curious about what is going on - after all anything new dealing with the web affects me as PHP coder. Since the W3C is supposedly interested in input from the Web community and content developers, I decided to see who from PHP would be there. Granted it is very early for the formation of the group so it didn't really surprise me to see no one from PHP that I know or heard about in there, but I wonder if anyone from the PHP Group will become a "invited expert" somewhere down the road.   The group is looking for members to help define this next generation of markup on the web. Check out their page for some of the qualifications needed to participate and for some of the upcoming events.W3C Launches New HTML Working Group
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DevShed has posted the last part of their latest series, a look at using the Prototype pattern in a PHP5 application, Building a Data Validation System with the Prototype Pattern with PHP 5.   Taking into account that this pattern can be helpful in situations where a prototype object is required, along with other clones of it, in this final installment of the series I'm going to demonstrate how to use it to build a simple application for checking the validity of incoming data.   They create a simple validation system with the pattern to check and see if the inputted data is either alpha only or alpha-numeric. On top of this, they create some additional classes to check the data for things like being a valid email address or if the value is made up of all numbers.
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As Paul Jones mentions, there's a sort of force in the PHP community that seems to be pushing back at the Smarty templating system and calling it unnecessary.    He points out Hasin Hayder's post on the subject. Hasin (ironically author of a Smarty book) has recently come to the conclusion that there "is no need to use an external template engine like smarty".   Some nice guys over there developed smarty and it saved life of a lot of developers (i mean developers). But that time is over. Seriously why the hell I need to learn a new templating language when a "echo" does the thing much better.   Judging by the responses to both Hasin's post and Paul's post it seems like quite a bit of the PHP community agrees (including Michael Kimsal, Harry Fuecks and Brian Lozier).
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Rob Allen has posted a simple example of the Zend_Layout component (since it's in the trunk now) both with a screenshot of the output and the method to set it up.   This example consists of three view files: the outer layout file, the index action view script and a right hand side bar. The remainder of this post describes the key files. If you just want to poke around with the code, then it's at the bottom, so page down now!   He defines the directory layout, sets up his bootstrap file and creates the parts that do the work - the controller and the two-step view layer (with the "inner" scripts that output the information and the layout itself the content fits into).
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Evolt.org has an interesting new article posted today about combining CSS and PHP to display fractions correctly on your pages.   Most of us are uncomfortable with using fractions when writing programs. If we encounter a fraction, we will first convert it into a floating point number (with decimals) and proceed from there. Most programming languages would prefer to use 0.5 as opposed to 1/2 because the later might conflict with the syntax of the languages. In this article, I will discuss my attempt to work with fractions in one of the PHP projects that I have done.   They start with the CSS to handle the output before moving into the PHP code. The code given will take in a decimal number and do its best to match it up with a fraction string value out of an array. The result is the echoed out with sup and sub tags to create the correct effect.
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On the ProDevTips.com website, there's a new tutorial (part one of a series) that walks the developer through the integration of the Zend Framework, some Ajax functionality and Smarty to create a feed reader.   In this series I will walk you through the code of a site that uses only Ajax and Scriptaculous to handle it's completely windowed interface. Making an interface like this is not really good design, it's only done here for the sake of teaching. It is kinda cool though. Especially if you have a big screen.   The source code is available for download and having it makes the installation and setup of the system much simpler. With it, you're only about fifteen steps away from getting the application up and running.
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PHPBuilder has another excerpt posted from the book "PHP 5 in Practice" from Sams Publishing. It takes a quick look at a method to simulate graphical charts with some XHTML and CSS tricks (and PHP's help).   When you need to present data in a chart on a web page, it is often worthwhile to generate graphical charts. This method is covered later in Section 18.4, "Creating a Graph/Chart Library"; however, sometimes for a quick chart CSS can suffice. Listing 9.4.1 presents a function that creates a visual chart of data using CSS and XHTML only.   You can find the code they're talking about for "Listing 9.4.1". They explain it briefly, but it's a quick "here's what it looks like" and less of a "here's the logic behind it" kind of post. Never the less, it's still quite useful.
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Using external CSS files to determine the design attributes creates clean HTML code and will create better search engine rankings. With some knowledge of CSS you can change the code without destroying the visual layout. By Mikhail Tuknov. 0102
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DevShed ramps up another new series today with this new article giving developers a look at working with object-oriented programming through the eyes of design patterns. It's another excerpt from the George Schlossnagle book "Advanced PHP Programming".   This chapter provides an overview of the advanced OO features now available in PHP. Some of the examples developed here will be used throughout the rest of this book and will hopefully serve as a demonstration that certain problems really benefit from the OO approach.   The article lays down the foundation for the more complex information to come. It introduces object-oriented programming briefly, and talks about some of the handy features of it - like inheritance, static attributes and methods.
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On the Zend Developer Zone today, there's this new tutorial that looks at making the move from PHP4's object-oriented programming up to the "more complete obejct model of PHP5" - specifically with the Decorator design pattern.   While working on a project I realized one particular solution was a pretty good way to demonstrate the decorator design pattern together with some of PHP5's features, including abstract classes, interfaces, type hinting, the final keyword and the visibility of properties and methods. This article is intended for those of you who, like myself, are moving from object-oriented programming, including some use of design patterns, in PHP4, to the more complete object model of PHP5.   He sets up a scenario about the development of an online pizza ordering system to show how to "decorate" a pizza with each of the toppings on a list (instead of having to list out every pizza in every possible topping combination). Of course, all of the code is included and explained so you understand exactly what's happening. Finally, there's a demonstration of its usage - a simple call that grabs the stock level/name/cost of each of the items in stock (pizza combinations).
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DevShed concludes their series on using the GD graphics libraries in PHP with thie new article focusing on the use of some of the simple filtering functionality the library has to offer.   In this article I'm going to demonstrate how the GD library can be used to apply some basic graphic filters (yes, like Photoshop, but much simpler) by utilizing the versatility of a brand new function called "imagefilter()". As you'll see shortly, with this function it is possible to reverse, blur and highlight the colors of a determined image, as well as convert it to its grayscale version, among other things.   They use the imagefilter function in a few different examples - altering the colors in an image, working with contrast and brightness and various other filters (like smoothing, embossing, blurring and colorizing).
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Sebastian Bergmann has posted the results of some benchmarking on the compilation he's done on the branches of PHP from version 3.0 all the way up to 5.3-CVS.   As people keep asking me for an update to my previous benchmarks (PHP / GCC / ICC Benchmark, PHP 5.1 / GCC Benchmark (Update), and PHP 5.1 Performance, I quickly ran a new benchmark today.   He rendered the results out into a series of charts defining the number of total seconds taken for the compile and how long each of the components took. It's impressive to see how much of a jump there was between the 3.0 series and 4.3.   He also includes his compile settings (and machine information) as well as the numbers for the results if you'd like to graph them out yourself.
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Rob Allen has two new posts today, both revolving around the same thing - an update to the Zend Framework called the action helper ViewRenderer. The first just mentions an update to his "Intro to the Zend Framework" tutorial PDF, but the other gets a little more in-depth:   The Zend_Controller_Action_Helper_ViewRenderer action helper is a great bit of code that automates rendering a view template based on which action has been called. This is very useful, but renders the action template, not my layout template. To solve this, I am experimenting with extending the Zend_Controller_Action_Helper_ViewRenderer and overriding it so that it know about my layout template. I also prefer to use the view suffix "tpl.php" for my view scripts, so I've made my class automatically set my preferred view suffix.   He illustrates with some code, an example that shows how to tell the ViewRenderer about his "tpl.php" files and link them back to the action that's called on the URL.
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Popular posts from PHPDeveloper.org for the past week:Padraic Brady's Blog: Complex Views w/Zend Framework - The Final Chapter: ZFE & Zend_Layout in Core!php|architect: Stuff your stockings: single issues 30% offDeveloperTutorials.com: How to Install PHP 5 on LinuxStoyan Stefanov's Blog: Fancy FormattingSymbianOne.com: Your S60 Web server gets a boostAndreas Gohr's Blog: MySimple.php - A lightweight PHPMyAdmin substituteNessa's Blog: Working with Permissions in PHPSymfony Blog: Symfony 1.0.10 is OutMatthew Turland's Blog: Web Scraping Article PublishedJan Lehnardt's Blog: REST Controller for PHP Applications
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In a previous article, we touched on the requirements for proper XHTML coding, especially in relation to HTML 4.01. Today, we look at what some of those requirements are in relation to the head portion of the Web page. By Lee Underwood. 0730