Don't forget to check out part 1 if you have no read it.
In the second part of this 5 part tutorial series on how to build a Twitter-like website, we will be creating a signup form so that users can register to our website.
We will be adding records to the database that we created in part 1 and creating validation rules to make sure that the user didn't put any invalid data into the form.
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This tutorial will be the first of a five part series where we will built a social network site similar to Twitter from scratch. We will be using the CodeIgniter framework for the core of the website and jQuery for the effects. In this first part we will be configuring CodeIgniter to display everything correctly and we will also set up a database and connect to it.
You can view a demo and download the resources for this tutorial at the bottom of the post.
Web 2.0 websites have a lot of Ajax functionality, some times when you load a new element of a page you may want the user to be able to click the back or forward button so that they can see the previously loaded content. One method to add this function to a website is to use the jQuery Address plugin with jQuery.
jQuery Address has 4 main methods; init, change, internalChange, externalChange. The init method is what is called when the plugin is initiated. The change method is called when the URL is changed, an element in the page is changed or either the forward or backward button is pressed. The change method has the combined functionality of internalChange and externalChange. The internalChange is only called when a hyperlink inside the page is clicked; externalChange is only called when the URL is changed or the backward or forward button is pressed.
To allow deep linking within your website the only two methods that are required is init and change, you can then use internalChange and externalChange wherever you may need them.
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Every website needs a way of contacting the people behind it and putting an email on a page is not such a good idea; because bots can easily pick up this email address and send spam to it. This is where a contact form comes in very useful because people can send you messages but do not get your email address. (more...)
A few days ago I was developing a website for a client. They required that there be a map showing where addresses are that were retrieved from a database. I have never properly looked at the Google Maps API before because I have never needed to use it; so for the first time I looked at it and gave it a try. Then after playing around with it for a bit i realised that reverse geocoding was needed to convert the address into latitude and longitude figures.
Because I was programming this website in PHP I thought I would have a look around for a PHP class to see if there was a quicker way of doing this. Luckily enough I found a PHP class called PHP GoogleMapAPI. It took me a few minutes to read through the documentation for this class but it was so straight forward and simple. All in all it takes only 6 lines of code using this class to create a google map and locate it to an address; because it does all the other work for you that you don't need to know about if you're not going to be programming Google Maps every day of your life.
