There are two JavaScript utilities I can’t live without when it comes to developing Content Management Systems: Tiny MCE and Prototype. Tiny MCE creates a robust and customizable WYSIWIG editor on your textarea form elements allowing users to write copy with formatting, links, and images. It’s used in many popular projects like Word Press (which is powering this blog!) and Drupal. A word of caution that there are known library conflicts between Scriptaculous and Tiny MCE.
Prototype can be used to do very simple, elegant form validation as is demonstrated on my contact page. Dexagogo demonstrates this with great detail and offers a demo download for your learning pleasure.
With both of these libraries it’s much easier to develop forms that give your users the power to add sophisticated content while preventing input errors in a user friendly way.
Carson Workshops, the creators of Think Vitamin, puts on short conferences examining hot topics in the Web world featuring a host of luminaries speaking about the various facets of their topic. They often post podcasts of each talk, and their recent The Future of Web Apps Summit is the latest in that series. Kevin Rose, Jeff Veen, and Tantek ?áelik are just a few of the big names who spoke at the recent conference, and all of this knowledge is free for your listening pleasure. The topics cover UI design, the business of building and selling your web application, development practices, APIs, and more.
You can download each talk individually or subscribe to their RSS feed to get them all at once.
I’ve recently written an article for SitePoint entitled “Use Ajax and PHP to Build Your Mailing List”. The article walks readers through the process of constructing a mailing list sign up widget that makes use of the Prototype JavaScript library to send an Ajax call to a PHP script, which then stores the email address in a MySQL database. The result is a very quick, and painless mailing list sign up process requiring no page refreshing or redirects.
The article will be published later this week or next week, and will include a code archive with a completed version of the scripts.
Microsoft has announced on their IE blog that Internet Explorer 7 will be released before the end of the month, which means if you have not yet tested your sites in the new browser you’d better make a point of it soon. If you have been using CSS hacks, such as child selectors, to feed standards compliant browsers different style rules than IE6, IE7 will now understand those hacks and may cause improper rendering of your pages. The best way to handle CSS specific to IE is with conditional comments, not with the various hacks anymore.
A word of caution, installing IE7 will over-write your IE6 installation unless you install IE7 in standalone mode as is described here.
A List Apart has posted a really wonderful list of essential resources for web desgin newbies, a task that I have been trying to tackle here to help guide my students. This list is really top quality and addresses many of the same topics I was discussing recently.
I have compiled a small collection of scripts that I have written or modified from other sources. There are lots of useful things like a working PHP shopping cart, a mailing list sign up widget that connects to Mail Chimp or your own database using Ajax, a PHP contact form with server-side validation, an RSS parsing script, a Scriptaculous photo slideshow tool perfect for showing screen shots of your work, and a few others as well. All of these things have been useful to me, and I hope they do others some good as well. If you modify or make use of any of these tools I’d love it if you would shoot me an email with a URL so I can see what you have done.
While you are checking out the code examples in the resources section, you may also want to check out my list of design tools, recommended books for interactive designers, and links to various interactive design resources.
