Using PHP to Update Your Copyright
Being that we are on the verge of entering a new year, I felt that this was an ‘on topic’ little tutorial to share! Any developer who utilizes PHP should know that it can help save time, which in turn increases productivity. PHP offers a wide variety of tools to help you to create smart, dynamic website. Here is a little trick to help you to not have to go to every single website you design and develop to manually update the copyright information to the current year. Depending on how you have a site setup, that could be a pretty decent task, especially if you’re not utilizing any sort of global variables.
WordPress Parent Navigation
For those beginner developers out there working in WordPress, here’s a little trick that you may have not run into yet. If you need to build out a website in WordPress that will load the navigation dynamically, meaning that any pages that are added in the backend of WordPress are automatically placed in the navigation on the front end of the website, there is a nice piece of code that will do that for you. You have the option to edit that code to render out the displayed navigation in almost any way that you’d like, which is a great plus when it comes to having control over a website.
What the Font?
For those designers out there who haven’t heard of WhatTheFont I’m here to help you out! Have you ever received a project from a client who has given you a JPG of their logo and you really need an EPS? So you go through the whole thing and request the logo in vector format rather than raster. They come back to you with the unfortunate information that they don’t have the correct file, can’t find it, or have no idea what you’re talking about. It isn’t unusual for a client to know that they should have a vector version of their logo. That’s what designers are for! Anyway, we got a recent job where we had this problem. The logo contained a simple illustration with the store name. The font that was used looked so familiar but we couldn’t put our finger on the exact font that it was. So rather then running through our font collection (which would take quite some time as the collection is huge!), we consulted WhatTheFont! WhatTheFont’s service is free by the way.
How We Work
A couple weeks ago I got an email from Paul of Digital Hand who is located in the UK. Paul had a couple questions to ask us on how we work so he could possibly get some insight from us to better help his client base. If there is only one thing that I have learned from the web community, it is that there are so many truly awesome things out there to help people with questions. So the tutorials on our site is kinda our way of trying to help to give back to the community and maybe us answering a couple questions might be able to help some people out there. Now there are tons and tons of ways to get the job done so our answers may not be someone else’s or even work for someone else. These answers are simply how we do things. And please, if you have any thoughts that you might be able to add please don’t hesitate to comment!
Removing index.php In EE
With using Expression Engine your pages default to using a index.php on all of your pages which is quite annoying. So rather than being able to tell people to visit your contact page by going to yoursite.com/contact you have to send them to yoursite.com/index.php/contact. Honestly, it’s not a huge deal breaker; however, it’s ideal to not have the index.php on every page. I tried a couple ways to eliminate the index.php. The first way was by using a plugin for Expression Engine that is supposed to write the necessary information on your .htaccess file. However, when I went to use the plugin it basically took my site offline. So I had to just delete the .htaccess file. I’m sure that the plugin does work but maybe something with my hosting wasn’t connecting properly. After trying that a few times I pretty much gave up.
