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Typography I: The Slimmed-Down Basics

This article is the first of a short series on typography and its application to web design. The 'feel' of any website is hugely influenced by the way the content is presented and, of course, the font chosen will be crucial to the readers' perception of the site.

Despite this, typography can be easily overlooked in the grand plans of web page layout. This series will go some way to helping us understand a little bit more about typography and how to make the most of it. Furthermore there's valuable information along the way that might help us all with our printed documents as well.

Linda Goin

3409

A Photo Album Site in PHP, MySQL, XHTML and CSS: Pt.III

In the previous instalments of this multi-part tutorial on building a website to show our holiday images, we firstly constructed an XHTML/CSS framework for the site, and secondly created a database to store our photographic information.

In this third part we're going to be working with that data as we start to build our dynamic pages. More specifically we'll be concentrating on displaying pictures from our default photo album.

Rachel Andrew

6311

SQL: Tips

This week's SQL article is a collection of tips and techniques for writing SQL.

The tips are divided into these categories:

Syntax
More Syntax
Performance
Design

The syntax tips cover reserved words, NULLs, strings, parentheses, and IN lists. You'll also learn what's wrong with "select star", why JOIN syntax is better, and when to write RIGHT OUTER JOINs (hint: never).

The performance tips barely scratch the surface (database performance is a career unto itself), but they include the importance of indexes and how to make sure you don't sabotage your own indexes.

The design tips include advice about first normal form, using simple datatypes, and autonumbers.

If you like these tips (or not), if you want to see more, or if you have any feedback on them at all, please post a comment in the discussion forum for this article.

Rudy Limeback

3847

Building an XML Flash Application with PHP and MySQL Pt.II

In this second article of the series, we'll be building the front-end of the web-site for our imaginary Pet Store client. Here we'll be seeing how we can feed the data we've pulled from the MySQL based back-end we developed in the first article, into a Flash based interface.

Our interface will make use of various Flash components, including the Flash MX 2004 XML Connector, which will be required to pull the XML out from our PHP pages and into our front-end.

Gareth Downes-Powell

7968

Stylesheets for all Occasions

Just starting out with CSS and wondering what all the fuss is about?

If so, then this article by Matt Machell might help you out. Here Matt will show you how a change of stylesheet can make the same file of marked up text have a very different look. Of cause it's not just an aesthetic point, different stylesheets can help customize your presentation for different types of media and users with varying requirements.

Matt Machell

2154

SQL: Paging

In this tutorial, Rudy explores the SQL to accomplish paging of content drawn from a database and displayed on a Web site. Paging can be done one item per page, such as for large articles or stories, or multiple items per page, such as for search results, when it is common to see, say, 10 per page.

By analyzing the performance dynamics of paging in general, and then exploring the specific SQL to carry it off, Rudy's tutorial will give you the confidence to implement paging on your own site.

Rudy Limeback

6256

Building an XML Flash Application with PHP and MySQL Pt.I

In this two part series, Gareth is going to show us how to build a Flash application to display information stored in a MySQL database. Building on the XML tutorials he's recently published, this application will use PHP and XML to transfer the data from database to front-end.

The scenario is that our client has a Pet Store containing exotic animals and wants an application to display the animals available for sale, along with a quick description of them. This week we'll be looking firstly at the back-end of the application – that is the database, then we'll move onto the processing logic - the PHP pages and the form of the XML data we're transferring around.

Gareth Downes-Powell

17669

A Photo Album Site in PHP, MySQL, XHTML and CSS: Pt.II

In the first tutorial of this series we embarked on our mission to provide a website for displaying our holiday pics, by creating an XHTML/CSS layout that would provide a suitable framework.

In this second step we're going to look at how to create a suitable database for holding our photographs. The database we'll be using is MySQL and, as an aside, to carry out our tasks we're going to make use of a freely downloadable tool called MySQL Control Center.

This tool is available from MySQL and during the course of this tutorial we'll look at using it to work with MySQL. If that's not to your taste though and you prefer another tool, or even working at the command line, then no matter there's still plenty in the tutorial to keep you interested.

Rachel Andrew

9328

A PHP Based Opinion Poll: Pt. II

In last week's article we started building an opinion poll system using a pair of MySQL tables to store our polls’ questions and results, and PHP to interface between the web browser and the database. We built the database tables and a basic admin system to create new polls and questions within them.

In today’s article we’re going to finish off our admin section and build the front end to the poll so that users of your web site can vote.

Allan Kent

2809

Playing With the Edges: CSS and Curves

The problem with a great many CSS-based designs, is that they tend to look very blocky. Mainly due to the inbuilt box model and border controls that CSS contains.

But CSS designs don't have to be boxy. In this tutorial aimed right at beginners to CSS, we're going to look at ways in which you can take those sharp corners off a CSS-based design, by adding some curves and a bevel or two.

All you'll need is some basic experience of hand-coding HTML and CSS experience to make full use of this tutorial, but Dreamweaver MX 2004 will help you speed up the creation of the CSS. Don't worry if you haven't hand-coded HTML before, Matt will take you through it step by step.

If you enjoy this tutorial you may like to read Matts companion piece: CSS Tabs for Beginners.

Matt Machell

7207

A PHP Based Opinion Poll Pt.I

In today's article we're going to take a look at the steps involved in designing and building your own PHP based opinion poll for your site. You know the kind of thing I mean – in a sidebar area you see a couple of options you can choose from; you choose the one you want and click Vote, after which you can see how many other people made the same bad choice you did.

What we're going to investigate is an easy way for you to create and administer your own polls using a MySQL database. We'll look at what tables we need to create and why, how to build an administration system for it so that we can quickly create new polls, and a way of building the front-end for users to vote, capturing that vote and displaying the results.

Allan Kent

3948

PHP and XML #4: RSS Feeds

In this tutorial, we're going to look at processing RSS feeds, so we can take feeds from other websites, and add them to our own.

First, we'll look at what RSS is, and the format that an RSS feed used. We'll then look at how to read in an RSS feed from another site, and how to process the XML data contained using PHP and its SAX parser. Finally, we'll look at how to display the data extracted from the feed, formatted using CSS.

Gareth Downes-Powell

7129

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