News

Back in my novice days, when I first started developing for the web, all my PHP sites were written in quick and easy procedural code. This was great I thought; I could knock together a website in no time, as long as I knew exactly what I was developing.

The problems always came when a client would come back a month or two later and ask to have something changed. I would revisit a previous project only to be greeted by a spaghetti meal of html, php, javascript, sql and css, all tangled together on the same plate. God forbid if the client asked for some changed or new functionality, because my application made no use of classes or objects, a lot of the code I wrote would be copied and pasted where it was necessary *cringe*.

I knew something had to be done about this and it was around this time I began to see how object oriented programming was a god send. By creating classes and using objects I was able to create (what I like to call) mini-applications within a big application. This meant I could reuse the same code easily when performing tasks which were often repeated (form validation, file uploading, database administration).

I continued to create great applications like this for a long time and even used some great classes that people had developed and generously shared with the rest of the development community. It was around this time I began to wonder, has anyone created a massive library off all of these classes which share similar naming conventions, class structure and would separate the different areas of programming into more manageable and sensible sections?

I put my thinking cap on and did some research, and I came across the Zend Framework and CodeIgniter. Wow, this was my first introduction to MVC programming and I have never look back since. After comparing the two excellent PHP frameworks, I decided to use CodeIgniter as the Zend Framework seemed very verbose and was more suited to enterprise projects in my opinion. CodeIgniter was easy to get to grips with, still had the “wild west” feel I loved about PHP and was super fast with great documentation! With an MVC framework I have managed to develop applications extremely fast and the best part is, when a client asks for changes or new functionality, it’s so easy to do so. Keeping costs down and the quality of our service top notch!

If you’re fairly new to PHP, or software development in general, I would still always suggest you spend some time working with procedural code, it can give you an appreciation and understanding of what is happening behind the scenes, using an MVC framework has often left me forgetting just how much time and effort I’m actually saving! Remember though, web development is an art of sorts. We will always have great new tools, frameworks and guides to make our jobs easier but we all must take responsibility when it comes to adhering to best practices, commenting and documenting code and above all ALWAYS plan for extensibility and changes within your applications (everyone loves to change things).

Permalink

On Friday last week, the website lab visited a workshop run by Codeworks that demonstrated the exciting news features of CSS3 and HTML5. We also got some got told some good techniques and tips for proper project management and dealing with clients in a proffesional and efficient manner!

Towards the end of the day, we were asked to create any type of digital media using the word "Freedom" to inspire us. We took sometime to come up with something a little creative and exciting, we came up with the idea of taking the word Freedom, splitting the letters up and allowing the user to bounce them around the page "freely". Whenever the user dropped a letter on the page, a new tweet would appear from Twitter that contained the word freedom. The little project made us of jQuery, CSS, xHTML and the Twitter API.

To take a look at our submission that took little under 2 hours to make! Click here

Permalink

It has been a very busy couple of weeks. We are pitching for some really exciting contracts at the moment and we're looking forward to sharing more information about them when we can!

We've just gone live this week with two more websites as well. We're working on writing them up for the portfolio section of this site, but if you just can't wait to see them, head to these links: firstcontactclinical.co.uk, finehardwoodboxes.co.uk.

The First Contact Clinical site is going to serve as their 'home site', or a base of operations if you will. First contact offer a wide range of services, and we're continuing to work with them to develop their online presence. The site for Peter Lloyd was a replacement for a long outdated site. The idea for this was to create something that was very easy for him to update whilst maintaining a similar design

Permalink