Webmaster Projects

The Three Models of Web Form Validation

Today's article will outline the different ways of validating form data and relaying validation error messages to the user. In doing so, we're going to see why it's time to consider preferable alternatives to the ole' one field at a time style of error handling such as displaying all the form errors at once and inline validation.

Making Your Website Fun with Games

Everywhere you look you find games, games and more games. They are on your cell phone, connected to your TV via a gaming console and everywhere you look on the web. People love their games, even the corny ones. So, why not attract new visitors or keep visitors coming back with some games on your website? We'll show you how to do just that in this article!

An Overview of Open Web Applications for Developers

You may have heard about Google's coming venture in web-based applications. Now Mozilla has announced it will be opening its own Open Web App Store where similar apps will be available. So just what are these web apps? They are applications that are made using the core technologies of the web: HTML, CSS and JavaScript.

Do-It-Yourself Social Network with Ning

Ning is a Web application for building a social networking hub – one that can be private or shared. Point-and-click site building lets you quickly create a website without technical knowledge.

Cloud Computing Basics: How To Connect Securely To Amazon EC2

In our previous article on cloud computing, we went through the basics of signing up with Amazon EC2 and launching an Instance, which is a self-contained virtual server. Now we'll learn to connect to it from a typical Windows machine.

Cloud Computing Basics: Getting Started With Amazon EC2

It's now possible for any web developer to design and implement their own cloud-based business solution at a price that literally costs just pennies to get started. So cash in a few deposit bottles, sit down, and let's begin!

How to Add Facebook Style Instant Messaging to Your Discussion Forum

If you are a user of Facebook, you are probably familiar with its Instant Messaging feature which enables you to chat with your Facebook friends if they are online. Using CometChat, you can add that functionality to your site's vBulletin discussion forum.

Web Developer Tutorial: Building Your Community Page

Last week I wrote an article about how to use BBcode in forums and how adding a forum to your site can help foster a community, increase return visits and develop a loyal audience. This tutorial will give you some more ideas to help develop a thriving community for your site.

FeedBurner Offers Rich RSS Features for Developers

If your web site is currently up and running, chances are you already have some type of RSS feed running, especially if you have a content site with daily updates. It's time to revisit FeedBurner and discover a brand new set of resources!

WordPress For the Web Developer: Writing Plugins--Actions and Filters

The previous article in this series explained the basics of writing WordPress plugins: how to create the header, and write some simple PHP code that can operate as an action or a filter (and possibly both). In this tutorial for the web developer, we'll explore actions and filters in more depth.

Web Developer Class: Installing and Setting Up a Free Discussion Forum--SMF

Many web developers would like their site to feature a discussion forum, but can't afford the purchase price. Enter Simple Machines Forum (SMF), a free, professional discussion forum software package. In this tutorial, we'll walk you through the installation process and show you how to set it up and get it running on your site--for free.

WordPress For the Web Developer: How To Write Your Own Plugins

Previously in this series, we've covered simple ways of modifying the look, feel, and functionality of your WordPress website by using plugins and selecting and modifying themes. Now you'll be getting deeper into the internals of WordPress by learning how to write your own plugins and integrate them into WordPress.

Flash Tutorial for Web Developers: Create a Flash & PHP-Based Discussion Forum

While there are many discussion forum scripts available, often web developers are interested in creating their forum using Flash and the PHP scripting language. This tutorial will show you how to create your own Flash and PHP-based forum, and free source code is included!

Flash Tutorial for Web Developers: Save/Load Info Using Cookies

Have you ever made a huge Flash game and knew that there was no way a person could beat it in one day? Well, now you can save and load information via cookies so the game can resume when they're ready with this tutorial from the FlashKit community!

WordPress For the Web Developer: Working With Theme Templates

Once you've set up a WordPress website, your first instinct as a web developer will probably be to modify it extensively. Many WordPress themes allow you to change the look, feel, and even function of your site relatively easily--this tutorial will show you how to use them on your site!

WordPress For the Web Developer: Top 10 Plugins

In the introduction to this series, I promised to show you some of the plugins that can help make your WordPress site extremely functional right away. This article will detail the top 10 essential free plugins that are useful for the web developer.

Web Developer Tutorial: How to Protect SWF files From a Decompiler

Flash SWF files contain your important Intellectual Property, but once they are on the web, anyone can download your SWF file and decompile it with a Flash decompiler tool. This tutorial will show you how to protect your SWF files from decompilers using SWFProtection.

WordPress: A Web Developer's Tutorial

At some point in every web developer's career, one sits down, breathes a heavy sigh, and gets the feeling "I've done this all before, and too many times". Wouldn't it be nice instead to let someone else do much of that work and support? Enter the WordPress CMS!

ActionScript 3 Tutorial, Using Shared Objects to Show a Visitor's Browsing Time

Flash developer Paul Flashdaweb from the FlashKit Forums wrote this ActionScript 3 tutorial which will show you how a SharedObject can be used to show the time a user has been visiting a page on your site--even after they have closed the page.

Create a Flash Slideshow with MovieClips Using the Fader API

This tutorial will show you how to create a slideshow using the Fader API. The Fader API can be used to create a sequence of fade animations and slideshows using less code.

HTML Tutorial: How To Select and Modify a Site Template

Probably the fastest way to get a very capable site up and running is to use a Content Management System (CMS) such as WordPress, Joomla, or Drupal as the heart of your site. This article will show you how to select and modify a site template to use with such a CMS to provide an integrated look and feel to your site.

Blogging with WordPress

Just about everyone has heard the term blog, which is basically an online diary which allows the blogger a medium to post thoughts on everything from recipes to politics to technical subjects. In this article we’ll take a look at one of the most popular free blogging tools on the web today, WordPress.

Moving a vBulletin Discussion Forum From One Server to Another

vBulletin is one of the most popular discussion forum software packages in use today. Installing it is a breeze, but you may have a need to transfer your whole site, including the discussion forum, to a new server. Just how exactly do you do that? This article will walk you through the steps!

Opening The Source On Your Host

In this article you'll learn how to configure Apache to allow your visitors to learn from (or offer advice on) your source code through browsing it in much the same way that they would browse your ordinary Web pages.

Customizing a MySpace Page for a Band

Most musicians today have a Web site which they use to market their CD's, band schedules and merchandise. Among the many marketing options, one approach is to customize a Web page on MySpace to use for your band. This week you'll learn how.

Order Form Part 11: The PHP Script -- The MySQL Database

We have validated our data and sent out confirmation emails and a confirmation page. The only thing left to do is to add our order data to our MySQL database. This section completes our order form project, to provide a soup-to-nuts example of the development of a small project involving multiple technologies.

Order Form Part 10: The PHP Script - Confirmations

As we continue to process our order, we need to round off our compliment of data elements and send out the required emails.

Order Form Part 9: Building The PHP Script

Now it's time to process our order form. To do this we must build our PHP script. In this first part of our script we do some validation.

Building An Order Form

Our sample project continues as we now start the JavaScript calculations 'on the fly'

A Simple Order Form Page

This is the first part of a short series in which we illustrate the development of a web project from beginning to end.  These illustrations are intended to show you a more complete picture of a web development effort, spanning multiple technologies to accomplish a single objective.

Order Form Part 2: Adding the Form Itself

Our Order Form project continues as we add the form itself to our page.

Order Form Part 3: "On the Fly" calculations, step one

Our Order Form gets a bit smarter as we start to add 'On the Fly' calculation capabilities.

Order Form Part 4: "On the Fly" calculations, step two

We continue to build the smarts of our Order Form page by adding the first of the 'On the Fly' calculation functions.

Order Form Part 5: "On the Fly" calculations, step three

Our 'On the Fly' calculation capability cotinues as we add in the calculation function itself. (To see this entire project, click here.)

Order Form Part 6: Form Validation, Step 1

In this part of our Order Form project series, we start to add form validation routines to our Order Form

Order Form Part 7: Form Validation, step 2

As we continue with the form validation work in our Order Form project series, we validate all our input numeric fields to ensure proper values are entered.

Order Form Part 8: Form Validation, step 3

Now we add validation to our Order Form Project that will verify the integrity of data entered (or not!) in the different fields provided (or required) on our Order Form. This project illustrates the use of multiple technologies in the implementation of a single Web based solution.

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An E-Commerce Journal Part 1

My wife and I have spent the past year working to create our own e-business. I made a point of keeping a journal of all that happened during that year so that when our site finally went live, I could write about it. Read on to join us in our journey.

An E-Commerce Journal Part 2

Last week we began to plan our ecommerce project and created a business plan for our site. This week our story continues as we begin to set up the server and start working on the site itself!

An E-Commerce Journal Part 3

This week we pick up this project where we left it last week--we're ready for the search engines and our first customers!

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StreetArtist.com: Business Plan

Sample business plan for an e-commerce website.

How to Write a Request for Proposal for a Web Project

Probably the biggest source of confusion and cause for problems between clients and Internet development companies is a poorly written Request for Proposal (RFP).

Electronic Commerce Tutorial

Electronic commerce is growing rapidly and many merchants are asking themselves how they can benefit from this new technology. This paper provides a grounding in the basic concepts.