Robert Basic has a new post showing how to style the default output of the Zend_Form component of the Zend Framework:
Here's an example for styling Zend_Form's default layout. The default layout is using definition lists. While there's an option for changing the default layout, the wrapper tags and stuff, I see no reason for it. Create the form, add some CSS and your good to go.
He includes some sample markup, the PHP (framework) code that produces it and the CSS that can be used to style it. This can then be used and expanded on however you'd want to customize the form to your site.
Andre Liem has posted five simple tips (part one of a two-part series) on ways to optimize your PHP applications.
After experiencing some issues with an application running the Zend Framework, I realized there were a lot of things I was not doing to optimize my application. There are simple and more complex actions you can take to speed up your application. Since time is precious, and developers with an expertise on optimization are not always available, I've split this post into two sections (simple and more advanced). This post focuses on the simple part.
His simpler suggestions include using the YSlow extension in Firefox, minification of Javascript and CSS, merging CSS/JS requests, using gzip and avoiding CSS background images.
The NETTUTS blog has this new tutorial posted (including a screencast) showing how to make a web application similar to the Address Book on Apple's OS X operating system.
As we all know, WordPress is so extensive that you can use it for nearly anything. There are even articles on sites with crazy titles such as 101 alternative uses for WordPress. So I thought, hey, why not? I bet a lot of people want to create their own Web Apps, and essentially WordPress can do that for you. In this video tutorial, we're going to make an online Address Book.
Building on a WordPress base and including jQuery and a Live Search Plugin, they create the multi-pane look and feel, styled largely with CSS. The end result shows your address groups, the members of that group and the selected member's information in the far right pane.
NETTUTS.com has posted the third part of their series on creating a simple PHP5 framework today:
Now that we've got a basic framework (see part 1 and part 2 of this series), we can start thinking about integrating designs with our PHP framework. For now, we'll concentrate on the front-end design, including how we can make it easy to 'skin' our new framework.
This part looks mostly at the HTML and CSS for the presentation layer (the views) to make a simple two-column layout with some basic image and text content.
Footers are often an overlooked aspect of designing a site - when they can actually be kinda handy and informative. In this tutorial we'll go through some options you can have for your WordPress site.
They take different bits of information - archived posts, the "about" message and some links - and arrange them in a sidebar sort of format. This is then styled to work more like a footer, moving it down to the bottom of the page and laid out horizontally. The complete code for the tutorial can be dropped easily into the wp-content folder (named "WPFooter").
Sameer has posted a new tutorial to his blog recently, a look at a drop-in solution for pagination in your application - the PEAR Pager package.
Pagination is a frequent requirement in web development projects. Most PHP developers must have already implemented paging in one form or other in their projects. In this post we will see how to add pagination the easy way using PEAR's Pager class. Note that in all the posts I use PHP 5.x.x, so if you are still stuck at version 4.x.x, its already time to upgrade.
He includes a simple example (just the page links), how to install the Pager package and a larger example where the results are pulled from a database table and paginated correctly based on an offset ID. There's even some CSS thrown in to make it a bit more pleasing to the eye.
The NETTUTS blog has another WordPress-related post today that looks at "context includes" - changing the look and feel of the postings based on the content type they're tagged with.
The great thing about WordPress is that it doesn't limit how content is displayed, but provides a 'framework' of ways to do so. Even better, it's possible to change the display according to the content. When writing this tutorial it was hard to explain what's going on... But the best way is this: the post will be displayed within the loop according to its content - or contextual differences. Either way, it's including specific files that match up to the category of the post.
There's plenty of code to go around introducing you to the parts of the typical WodPress install you'll be working with and some CSS to help you style the resulting changes. You can download the source and check out a live demo of the end result.
In this recent tutorial from the NETTUTS website, they show how to "build a better blogroll" by combining the client-side power of jQuery with the simplicity of the SimplePie aggregation tool.
A traditional blogroll is a simple list of other sites, often in the sidebar, that are related, owned by, or otherwise friendly to the home site. Blogrolls are a great idea and on-point with the spirit of blogging, but how is a casual reader to know if any of these sites are truly of interest? Let's improve upon the concept of a blogroll by not just listing sites, but dynamically pulling recent headlines from them, and using some fun jQuery animation.
Their code (demo here) uses a CSS-based layout and simple pagination to switch between multiple groupings of RSS feed content.
Jonathan Snookhands off a handy tip for the CakePHP developers out there concerning the debugging information that can be displayed at the bottom of your application's pages.
I just wanted to document this somewhere but whenever I work on a CakePHP project, there's always the debug info that sits at the bottom of the page. It's big and bulky and once I'm off the default CakePHP styles, it's usually pretty ugly. I've done various stylings but I finally took a moment to implement a really simple idea: Fixed position the table and then use hover styles to toggle the visibility.
He includes the simple four style entries that can be used to tame this debugging information down into something a bit more useful (and less intrusive).
On DevShed today, there's a new tutorial on showing how to create a simple application to use one of the simpler protocols - FTP.
PHP has many functions that help us to implement Internet and/or networking protocols. In this article, we will look at how to implement some of those protocols using PHP.
They introduce the FTP functions for PHP (a basic list, PHP manual style) and include the code - the CSS to make it easier to use and the PHP code to make the FTP connection and grab the remote file listing. A screenshot is included to give you an idea of the end result.
