I am currently developing a website. I would like to separate content and presentation. I am currently using a Dreamweaver Template to achieve this. However, I find that Dreamweaver's edit regions are very limiting in the design view. I have found that the same goal can be achieved by including the header and footer of my website.
What are the pros and cons of using includes rather than using templates?
First, if I were to rephrase your question, it's more like asking "Should I by a wire frame of a kite or by the glue to stick together what I'm making?" And then, you ask about the pros and cons of buying the wireframe against buying the glue. There are far too many variables as you can see...
And back on your your question... At some point your template will use include files. And for a start, it's worth knowing what you're thinking... Let's look at some basics.
Web design - usually refers to making websites that aren't really interactive. They don't have server-side elements. So most of the site has 'static' contents. If this were the case, you're better off with DreamWeaver, particularly if you're not into html/css editing.
Web development/programming - starts off with something as elementary as mailing a form, to highly interactive sites like FaceBook. Here you'll need to use some server-side language, usually like PHP, ASP or JSP. The choices are many but you've got to choose your own platform or combination of them.
Now to the second option (above). If for example, you were building a site using PHP, one of the nice things you'll do is to include your header, footer and side panels that need to be repeated across all pages. This way, you'll eliminate the need to re-write those sections. But if you were using a program like DreamWeaver, it does this duplication for you. Yes, it physically copy-pastes those sections into every file that needs it. Of course the end result may not be any different. But as a developer, you will be tied down to the DreamWeaver platform or for that matter, any other specific platform.
On the other hand, if you get used to working with an editor like NotePad++ or GEdit, you may switch between editors at any time. But you have the task of hand-coding everything from scratch. But then again, since you would use include files to bring in your headers and stuff, you save development time as well.
I don't know how much of html/css or php you know, but here's one of my demos to show you how to hand-code a site. This ain't complete but you should get an idea.
Link to the video introduction
Link to the video on youtube
Related
I am doing some web data classification task and was thinking if I could get the co-ordinates of html elements as they would appear on a web-browser without taking into consideration any css or javascript being referred in the web page.
My language of programming is c++ and the need results for a couple million of pages, so it has to be fast. I know there is a Microsoft COM component which renders the page in a web browser control and then can be queried for position of different html tags. But this is not suitable in my case as it first renders the whole page which takes up a lot of time.
So as I found out, there are open-source layout engines WebKit, Gecko that can probably be used for this. But that's a huge piece of code and I need someone to direct me to the right classes or right modules to look into or any previous/similar work someone has done previously. Also, please let me know what you guys think is a good choice if I want to customize the existing code for use with multiple threads to make it faster.
Thanks
Generally, you would find that different page rendering engines do render the html in their own way and the results will differ.
The thing is that if you stick to any concrete browser engine, what you are to do is somehow bringing this engine into your project and using engine's interface to retrieve these coordinates. Kind of a tough task though, simply because you'll have to read a lot of documentation and crawl through thousands of files.
I think that right approach would be posting this task in some place, that is specific for the page rendering engine you've chosen. (gecko/webkit/...)
If you prefer sticking to something MS-specific, guess it's gonna be easier, but can't help you with something like class names or code chunks that you want to see. Probably somebody else could guide you in this case.
Background:
I have a new site in the design phase and am considering using ColdFusion. The Server is currently set-up with ColdFusion and Python (done for me).
It is my choice on what to use and ColdFusion seems intriguing with the tag concept. Having developed sites in PHP and Python the idea of using a new tool seems fun but I want to make sure it is as easy to use as my other two choices with things like URL beautification and scalability.
Are there any common problems with using ColdFusion in regards to scalability and speed of development?
My other choice is to use Python with WebPy or Django.
ColdFusion 9 with a good framework like Sean Cornfeld's FW/1 has plenty of performance and all the functionality of any modern web server development language. It has some great integration features like exchange server support and excel / pdf support out of the box.
Like all tools it may or may not be the right one for you but the gotchas in terms of scalability will usually be with your code, rarely the platform.
Liberally use memcached or the built in ehache in CF9, be smart about your data access strategy, intelligently chunk returned data and you will be fine performance wise.
My approach with CF lately involves using jQuery extensively for client side logic and using CF for the initial page setup and ajax calls to fill tables. That dramatically cuts down on CF specific code and forces nice logic separation. Plus it cuts the dependency on any one platform (aside from the excellent jQuery library).
To specifically answer your question, if you read the [coldfusion] tags here you will see questions are rarely on speed or scalability, it scales fine. A lot of the questions seem to be on places where CF is a fairly thin layer on another tool like Apache Axis (web services) and ExtJs (cfajax) - neither of which you need to use. You will probably need mod-rewrite or IIS rewrite to hide .cfm
Since you have both ColdFusion and Python available to you already, I would carefully consider exactly what it is you're trying to accomplish.
Do you need a gradual learning curve, newbie-friendly language (easy for someone who knows HTML to learn), great documentation, and lots of features that make normally difficult tasks easy? That sounds like a job for ColdFusion.
That said, once you get the basics of ColdFusion down, it's easy to transition into an Object Oriented approach (as others have noted, there are a plethora of MVC frameworks available: FW/1, ColdBox, Fusebox, Model-Glue, Mach-ii, Lightfront, and the list goes on...), and there are also dependency management (DI/IoC) frameworks (my favorite of which is ColdSpring, modeled after Java's Spring framework), and the ability to do Aspect-Oriented Programming, as well. Lastly, there are also several ORM frameworks (Transfer, Reactor, and DataFaucet, if you're using CF8 or earlier, or add Hibernate to the list in CF9+).
ColdFusion also plays nicely with just about everything else out there. It can load and use .Net assemblies, provides native access to Java classes, and makes creating and/or consuming web services (particularly SOAP, but REST is possible) a piece of cake. (I think it even does com/corba, if you feel like using tech from 1991...)
Unfortunately, I've got no experience with Python, so I can't speak to its strengths. Perhaps a Python developer can shed some light there.
As for url rewrting, (again, as others have noted) that's not really done in the language (though you can fudge it); to get a really nice looking URL you really need either mod_rewrite (which can be done without .htaccess, instead the rules would go into your Apache VHosts config file), or with one of the IIS URL Rewriting products.
The "fudging" I alluded to would be a url like: http://example.com/index.cfm/section/action/?search=foo -- the ".cfm" is in the URL so that the request gets handed from the web server (Apache/IIS) to the Application Server (ColdFusion). To get rid of the ".cfm" in the URL, you really do have to use a URL rewriting tool; there's no way around it.
From two years working with CF, for me the biggest gotchas are:
If you're mainly coding using tags (rather than CFScript) and formatting for readability, be prepared for your output to be filled with whitespace. Unlike other scripting languages, the whitespace between statements are actually sent to the client - so if you're looping over something 100 times and outputting the result, all the linebreaks and tabs in the loop source code will appear 100 times. There are ways around this but it's been a while - I'm sure someone on SO has asked the question before, so a quick search will give you your solution.
Related to the whitespace problem, if you're writing a script to be used with AJAX or Flash and you're trying to send xml; even a single space before the DTD can break some of the more fussy parsing engines (jQuery used to fall over like this - I don't know if it still does and flash was a nightmare). When I first did this I spent hours trying to figure out why what looked like well formed XML was causing my script to die.
The later versions aren't so bad, but I was also working on legacy systems where even quite basic functionality was lacking. Quite often you'll find you need to go hunting for a COM or Java library to do the job for you. Again, though, this is in the earlier versions.
CFAJAX was a heavy, cumbersome beast last time I checked - so don't bother, roll your own.
Other than that, I found CF to be a fun language to work with - it has its idiosyncracies like everything else, but by and large it was mostly headache free and fast to work with.
Hope this helps :)
Cheers
Iain
EDIT: Oh, and for reasons best known to Adobe, if you're running the trial version you'll get a lovely fat HTML comment before all of your output - regardless of whether or not you're actually outputting HTML. And yes, because the comment appears before your DTD, be prepared for some browsers (not looking at any one in particular!) to render it like crap. Again - perhaps they've rethought this in the new version...
EDIT#2: You also mentioned URL Rewriting - where I used to work we did this all the time - no problems. If you're running on Apache, use mod_rewrite, if you're running on IIS buy ISAPI Rewrite 3.
do yourself the favor and check out the CFWheels project. it has the url rewriting support and routes that you're looking for. also as a full stack mvc framework, it comes with it's own orm.
It's been a few years, so my information may be a little out of date, but in my experience:
Pros:
Coldfusion is easy to learn, and quick to get something up and running end-to-end.
Cons:
As with many server-side scripting languages, there is no real separation between persistence logic, business logic, and presentation. All of these are typically interwoven throughout a typical Coldfusion source file. This can mean a lot more work if you want to make changes to the database schema of a mature application, for example.
There are some disciplines that can be followed to make things a little more maintainable; "Fusebox" was one. There may be others.
Not a programming question I'm afraid, so moderators do what you will, but it is a question specifically for self-employed programmers running their own ISV sites.
If you publish your own shareware or freeware, do you use any CMS or templating system to streamline maintaining the website? Would you recommend any?
Two most important features I'm looking for that I couldn't find in any popular CMS/blogging engine, from my favorite TextPattern to WordPress, Joomla and Drupal are:
a templating system to maintain structural consistency of xhtml page layout
a hash table of user-defined values that works with the templates to substitute these values for identifiers.
Explanation: If you publish more than one application, the site probably contains several classes of pages that are nearly identical for each product: "Features", "Screenshots", "What's new", "Download", etc. These pages have the same layout and differ mainly in product-specific data. I'd like to be able to define "CurrentVersion=2.2" for product A, and "CurrentVersion=3.3" for product B in a "dictionary", and have the system generate two "Download" pages from the same template, replacing the "CurrentVersion" identifier with each product's respective value.
Other than that, I am looking for good support for static pages (the example pages above do not yield themselves to blog-like timeline treatment) and for design templates (themes), since I can't do graphic design at all (no skills, no tools, no talent). A good search function, esp. for the FAQs, is important. Another nice-to-have is easy (preferably wiki-like) way of linking to pages within the site. Some CMS-es, such as Joomla, make this simple and common task surprisingly inconvenient.
LAMP, and preferably free, since mine is a freeware-only shop.
I need no collaboration features and no multi-user content editing at all. My ISP doesn't support Zope, so that excludes some candidates.
I'm asking this question having spent months trying to find a solution that would help me leave static html behind and reduce the maintenance chores, such as updating the current version number on several pages manually. So what do others use to publish their software?
(Please do not reply by just saying "Try X". At least please say what makes it suitable or how it is better than other possible solutions. I've already tried a number of CMS engines, and they all seem to require extensive modifications to suit this particular need. Since my programming experience is strictly desktop-side Windows, tweaking these products is well beyond my skills (and my skin crawls to think of potential security WTFs I could unwittingly commit). Time is also a factor, since between my day job and my late-night coding, there's little left for learning how to write my own CMS from scratch - just typing static html would be more efficient.)
Wordpress is quite nice. It has a big community behind it so you can leech some plugins, like for SEO optimization, PayPal integration, Google Analytics statistics tracking, etc. And you also have a full-featured administration backend to manage all your content.
I would recommend Joomla 3.2.x. I have the same sort of project based websites, and this provides the flexibility for all of the different requirements. While WordPress is great the simplicity of it gets the better of it, Joomla is far more flexible and has a huge support network and extensions library.
Currently I'm using DokuWiki to manage my apps/scripts documentation, some articles I write and stuff like that... I like DokuWiki very much, it's simple and powerful but it's still too much for the use I've given it in the last 1/2 years.
I need something else, something different...
I'm looking for a way to integrate the little things I like in DokuWiki into my own website without needing a script, like DokuWiki, with it's own admin page. The website itself, my homepage, I like to code myself most of the things so it becomes exactly what I want. However, somethings I don't have much time for, that is why I'm using DokuWiki.
I want to ditch DokuWiki and scripts like these because I don't even use half of their capabilities. A wiki is a platform where people join their efforts and collaborate together to write stuff, it also has a revision system. These are two very important aspects about wikis that I don't care about for my own. I'm the only one writing stuff there and I don't care about revisions, never needed them.
What I like about DokuWiki is that I can point my browser to any URL within the wiki domain and create a page from there if it doesn't exist. I also like DokuWiki's syntax very much but sometimes it's very limited and I can't do what I want. The way you link between namespaces and such is also very nice. Too finish, a media/file manager is also very handy. These are probably the most important aspects for me in DokuWiki.
Basically, I'm looking for something, maybe a script, that would allow me to do the stuff I described above in a way I could integrate into my own website without needing a special administration area.
Does anyone know about such thing or I'm better off coding my own since my requirements are not that tricky to begin with, I just didn't want to have the extra work...
Or maybe any other suggestions?
Maybe you'll want to have a look at something like TiddlyWiki, which is a single-file wiki, that you can even put on a USB stick.
I chose xwiki over dokuwiki.
Another simple wiki is the one included with fogbugz. It is hosted for free for up to 2 users and might suit your project.
I may be off but very simple wiki with no administration and no users is LionWiki. I don't know how easy it's gonna be to integrate it into your website.
It's just one file and does not use database (like DokuWiki).
It does not have a lot of features though. It also uses a different syntax from that of DokuWiki.
First, some background information... I'm coming up on a medium-scale website for a non-profit that will require both English and Korean translations. Feature-set includes: CMS for normal content, a blog, some form submission/handling (including CSV/PDF exports), a job posting board, a directory of related businesses and non-profits (that accepts visitor submissions), and a basic (probably blog-driven) newsroom.
I have a fairly strong development background, and I've done some sites using Drupal, built some basic custom CMSes using frameworks like CodeIgniter, and I've recently started getting into Django. These are the primary options that I am exploring, and I would consider using different tools for different portions of the project, but what I'm mainly interested in, is if anyone has any experience to share with regards to localization/internationalization. I haven't yet put together a site that supports multiple languages, so before I get in trouble by underestimating the task, or making poor assumptions, I'd like to get some input to help guide my decision-making process.
Do you have any recommendations for frameworks (Drupal, Django, CodeIgniter) that handle localization/internationalization/translation well for a CMS? I know they all support it, but I'm looking for real-world experience here (or suggestions for modules/plugins given explanations).
Sorry for the longwinded question, but I wanted to be clear as possible. Thanks in advance!
There is a distinction between "site" translation and content translation. Django handles the site translation great, out of the box. The content translation, however, requires making some decisions (there's no one right way at this point). This probably makes sense, because of the very nature of Django as a lower level framework (when compared to something like Drupal, which is intended to serve as a complete CMS).
There are applications for Django which are meant to add this functionality (in the form of translations configured at the model level):
Django-multilingual
Transmeta
Also, I found this question that is related.
The bottom line though, is that this is still being explored in the Django world, and neither approach has been decided upon for the framework. Also, although I haven't used it, Drupal has module support for this in the form of the i18n module.
I will update with more conclusions as I come to them. If you have anything to add about content translation in Django or in Drupal, feel free to add your own answer as well.
You probably already know that the native i18n support in django is quite good. As for translation, you might try the django-rosetta app which allows you to grant translation rights to a subset of users, who are then able to translate through an admin-like interface.
Zend_Translate is pretty comprehensive. And if you decide to use PHP, I suggest you take a look at it. It provides multiple interfaces (e.g. an Array, CSV, Gettext, etc.) to manage your translations, which makes it IMHO unmatched when it comes to PHP.
I'm not sure how well it plays with Drupal, since Drupal is hardly a framework but more a CMS -- or maybe a CMS framework. I'm pretty sure that Drupal either has a thing build in or that there is a plugin for it.
With CodeIgniter you would start from scratch and Zend_Translate plays well with it.
I liked Drupal over Joomla. You should also look into DotNetNuke, out of the box it has lot of things that will meet your needs.
Checkout django-blocks. Has multi-language Menu, Flatpages and even has a simple Shopping Cart!!