Talk In Code

Drupal is a CMS system that can be freely downloaded and used from the Drupal website. It is not an object orientated PHP driven system and so everything is available through function calls and variables.

I have heard that the learning curve on developing Drupal is quite steep, but once you get around this initial hurdle the whole thing is pretty simple. This ease of development means that it is possible to take an idea and use Drupal and all its features as the CMS behind your idea, thus saving you time on your project development.

Drupal works in a kind of framework pattern in that you need to create files and folders in order to extend or overwrite the existing functionality, which is already quite extensive. This can trip up a lot of developers who are new to the system. My recommendation is to get someone to explain the initial steps to you and and then try it out for yourself. However, there is plenty of documentation available on the Drupal website.

From visiting the Drupal website to having a working version of the system on a test server took me literally 10 minutes, including the time it took to download and upload the files. I have used WordPress extensively in the past, but have always found that it can only be customized to a certain extent before you need to start hacking the source code. Although this is getting better with newer versions of Worpress I will be using Drual in my next website build.

phpMyAdmin is a tool, written in PHP, that allows you to handle the administration of a MySQL database server. You could always download the MySQL GUI tools, but the problem there is that you need to give external access to a user account, which isn’t always possible to do. This is where phpMyAdmin steps in.

The tool is easy to use and I have done some tricky stuff with it in the past. It can do everything that you need it to do with MySQL.

I have tried to install phpMyAdmin a couple of times and have failed each time. Admittedly, I only attempted it half-heartedly, but this is the only stumbling block I can see in the average user trying to use this system. However, many hosts will give you access to this tool as part of the hosting package, and it is only really needed if you expect to do a lot of database administration otherwise you can just run PHP scripts.

The website contains extensive documentation, and even if this isn’t enough there are a few books available for the tool.

QuirksMode.org is the personal and professional site of Peter-Paul Koch, freelance web developer in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

The consists of lots of pages about CSS and JavaScript as well as lots of information about the differences between browser implementations of CSS and JavaScript. I find it a great resource for looking up things that I am stuck on, and often find the site when searching for problems on Google.

Peter-Paul Koch has also written a book on the subject of JavaScript and browser compatibility and can be found talking about his subject in many events throughout the year.

Since starting programming I have used a lot of text editors, some have been good, and some have been very, very bad.

One text editor that stands out is PSPad. It is a free text editor for Windows that has lots of features and is very stable. I have been using this for a while now and have seen very little problems. I say "very little" as I once tried to open a 800 megabyte log file and it fell over, which is understandable.

It has the following features:

• Have many different files open with multi tabbed editing.
• Close and re-open the editor with the same files you had open.
• Built-in FTP client.
• Search and replace in files.
• A very neat text difference engine which highlights differences.
• Create new files from templates in HTML, PHP, Pascal, JScript, VBScript, MySQL, MS-Dos, Perl and a few more.
• Fully functional HEX editor.
• Intelligent syntax highlighting dependent on file type, which can be changed to any other syntax highlighting.
• Ability for users to create their own syntax highlighting.
• Print out text with coloured syntax highlighting.
• When typing you can press Ctrl and space to see a list of functions that start with what you have typed. This is an intelligent list so if you are writing in PHP you will be given a list of PHP functions.
• Built in code explorer that allows you to view functions and classes in your files. Created for PHP, XML, HTML, INI, C/C++ and Pascal, but more are in development.
• Spell checker.
• Auto correction of code.
• Bracket and tag matching.
• HTML code tidying and formatting.
• HTML entities and ASCII chart.
• Text manipulation with line sorting, removing blank lines and regular expression text replacing.
• Export text with syntax highlight to HTML, RTF, Tex format or to clipboard.
• Ability to link program with external compilers and capture error messages.
• Record, save and load macros to carry out repetitive tasks.
• Create a project so keep track of multiple files.
• Many more features besides these few.

Here is a screen shot.

Personally I find the bracket and tag matching extremely useful, and is a feature that makes it stand above professional text editors like Dreamweaver. If you are battling with your current text editor then give PSPad a go and see how easy it is.

Tizag has been created along the same lines as W3Schools in that it is a useful resource of tutorials and code examples on webbases languages. Most of the tutorials are well written and extremely detailed and so are useful for beginners and experts alike.

If you can’t find what you are looking for then the Tizag Webmaster Forums are very active and you will always find someone who will lend a helping hand to whatever you are stuck on.