Producing a rough sketch on a piece of paper may seem more like the realms of a designer desperately trying to get an idea out of their head into a physical form to share with others but I find it can also help me develop backend code. Planning # When starting a new bit of work I normally have the rough idea in my head of how I’m going to modularise the code and what functionality each piece will need. ...
When we develop sites we start off locally and in a development environment. During the development process we continue this process as we evolve the design and functionality. But there comes a point where the site we’re working moves to the stage where it will become the live site. At this point it’s preferable to move it to the live environment. Configuration # We try and match development and live environments as much as possible but it’s not always possible to get exact matches due to various constraints. ...
As I spoke about in the previous post about redesigns my work generally focuses on clients who have existing sites that need to be moved to a new Content Management System and have a new design applied to them. Whilst this can have it’s advantages for design work by allowing the front end developers far more freedom with markup it has some challenges for the backend. Discovery # Every database I have received have been from a different CMS, some have been MySQL and some have been Microsoft SQL database but all have required some discovery. ...
I can’t remember the last time I was involved in making a brand new website rather than an update or redesign. Maybe it’s just the sort of work we are suited to at Headscape and you may find differently. A redesign often brings with it different challenges to making a site from scratch, one of these is challenging the client to provide new types of content. By sharing a vision of how their site could be it encourages clients to improve their site rather than continue with the same old processes. ...
I’ve been working on a site powered by Drupal and needed to find the number of rows a database query returned. Simple enough and quite common procedure. But, the Drupal database API no longer offers the db_num_rows() function. I had a quick Google around and the answered seemed to be to run the query twice but the second time using a count query. Two calls to the database when only one is necessary? ...
I’m really enjoying using CodeIgniter, it’s an excellent framework and has a side benefit of helping to structure your files neatly. I’ve been working on my first login form using it, and whilst there are lots of tutorials going through this common process I encountered a “problem” with the CodeIgniter sessions persisting when the user closed their browser. A bit of searching around and I came up with a few recommendations. ...
A lot of the sites we do in work involve using a Google map, some are simple and just allow the user to choose a spot which populates input fields for latitude and longitude. Others contain large data sets and information about the point, which is normally displayed in one of the Google map bubbles. Using our standard library code for implementing a map and allowing the user to pick a latitude / longitude point IE6 was only displaying a grey background with the Google copyright. ...