(I'm quite new to programming so forgive me for any incorrect terms! HTML and CSS are my strenghts.)
I'm currently working on a Joomla website for a music festival. One of its pages contains a schedule with a list of performing acts.
My ambitious goal is to build a feature that makes my website's users able to mark certain acts as their favourites. In practice, clicking an icon would give it a visual highlight or something like that. The ideal situation would be that the user shouldn't have to sign in to save one's choises. I guess the solution would have something to do with the browser's local storage?
Here's one example for what I mean. (This is NOT my site, just an example of something I'm looking for).
Can anyone help me to get started? Thanks in advance!
This extension, http://extensions.joomla.org/extension/my-shortlist , should help with little or no modifications to the template.
If the above doesn't help, then you can the JED (the Joomla Extensions Directory) for an extension that is better suited to your needs.
I'd like to use polymer.dart to build a set of portable web components that can be embedded in any random html page (including pages outside of any dart project). The idea is that a customer could embed my polymer.dart elements on his html pages without the customer needing to create a dart application. I would think this would be an obvious and straightforward thing to do - but after going through many tutorials and instructional pages, and reading through lots of dart/polymer.dart documentation, I haven't found any explanation of how to go about this. Presumably the dart/polymer code would have to be compiled to javascript for inclusion on the customer's html page. Could someone comment on if this is possible, and if so, provide an explanation with examples of how to go about it? This dart/polymer.dart newbie would be grateful for any assistance.
I don't think this will work with Dart.
You need to run pub build over a Dart application to get a deployable result.
I guess this would work better with JavaScript Polymer elements.
There are plans to support this scenario but I guess it will still take a while.
I remember reading a while back on some random website about a program that would look at multiple pages on an HTML site and detect the differences/similarities between the pages to automatically detect which parts were template "boilerplate" and which parts were new content, and then based on this, automatically spit out just the parts that are content.
Unfortunately, I didn't remember enough details about this utility to actually find it on google, so I wonder if any of you guys have run across anything like this, and CAN remember the name of it.
Thanks.
Murphy's Law (or is it some other law) has stricken, and I've found it just moments after I'd given up and posted this question. The project I am thinking of is this:
http://code.google.com/p/boilerpipe/
Thanks.
As I was working on this project for a friend of mine who is terrified of changing from HTML to flash, I realized that maybe there could be a bridge between them. So I started working on a flash project that would grab the HTML from his page and parse it to display it in flash. Although I am sure there are resources available for this already, I figured that the experts on SO might be willing to suffer through the logic of one user trying to develop this script.
So basically, I am not asking for an answer, I am asking for some step-by-step direction that could be posted so other people could see the logic behind breaking down this project. I think it would be really useful (not just for me, but for anyone wanting to learn more about objects and oop).
So, much like the thread between primarily Senocular and Rampage, this would be a thread where I would be the student asking the questions in a logical step-by-step manner and someone else (or someones else) could provide guidance.
Let me know if you are interested and I can start by posting what I have already written. We can go from there and I am sure it will prove insightful to anyone who reads it. If no one is interested, or no one has the time or inclination, no problem.
Best wishes,
Jase
Who in their right mind would change from html to flash for displaying a simple website? I don't see the logic behind it, it's more like you are trying too hard. Flash has its function in the web, as well as html does. If it's just for simple displaying, using flash is just the wrong way and won't make your website any better but worse because its loading time will be too long.
Goole Search retrieved these:
HTMLWrapper
Groe.org HTMLParser
There is an article about the 1st on *drawlogic. I think the seconds' home is on sourceforge here.
Thing is, browsers already do a fine job at parsing html code. Having the flash player parse html files not only does away with any accessibility advantage your markup can offer but it also feels like reinventing the wheel. If you need to display html content, leave it to the browser.
Slightly offtopic - Flashpaper can convert most HTML pages into swf format.
Given properly "disciplined" HTML, you can use the XML parser in the player for the basic parsing. Are you really talking about writing an HTML renderer in Flash though? Or just being able to pull information from HTML dynamically?
Although I've done programming, I'm not a programmer. I've recently agreed to coordinate getting a Website up for a club. The resources are--me, who has done Web content maintenance (putting content into HTML and ColdFusion templates via a gatekeeper to the site itself; doing simple HTML and XML coding); a serious Web developer who does database programming, ColdFusion, etc., and talks way over the heads of the rest of us; two designers who use Dreamweaver; the guy who created the original (and now badly broken) site in Front Page and wants to use Expression Web; and assorted other club members who are even less technically inclined.
What we need up first is some text and graphics (a gorgeous design has been created in Dreamweaver), some links (including to existing PDF newsletters for download), and maybe hooking up an existing Blogspot blog. Later (or earlier if it's not hard), we may add mouseover menus to the links, a gallery, a calendar, a few Mapquest hotlinks, and so on.
My question--First, is there any real problem with sticking with HTML and jpegs for the initial site? Second, for the "later" part of the site development, what's the simplest we can go with? Third, are there costs in doing this the simple way that will make us regret it down the road? Also, is there a good site/resource where I can learn more about this from a newbie perspective?
If you don't require any dynamic content, heck, if you don't plan on editing the content more than once a week, I'd say stick to basic HTML.
Later, you'd probably want a basic, no-fuss and easily installable CMS. The brand really depends on the platform (most likely PHP/Rails/ASP), but most of them can be found by typing " CMS" into Google. Try prefixing it with "free" or "open source" if you want.
I'm pretty sure you can do all this for absolutely free. Most PHP and Ruby CMS's are free and web hosting is free/extremely cheap if you're not demanding.
And last/best tip: Find someone who has done this before, preferably more than once. He'll probably set you up so you never have to look at anything more complicated than a WYSIWYG editor.
Plain old HTML is fine, just as long as you don't use tags like blink and marquee.
I personally love tools like CityDesk.
And I'm not just plugging Joel. (There are others out there in this class I'm sure.) The point is they make making a static website very easy:
The structure is just a filesystem structure
pages have templates to consolidate formatting
all resources are contained in one file
easy and fast Preview and Publish functions
For a dynamic collaborative site, I would just install one of many open source CMSs available on shared hosting sites.
If you're familiar with html/javascript basics I'd look into a CMS - wordpress, drupal, joomla, nuke, etc. All of these are free. Very often your web hosting company will install one of these by default which takes all of the hard part out of your hands. Next is just learning to customize the system and there's tons of docs out there for any of those systems.
All that being said there is noting wrong with good old fashioned html.
In addition to some of the great content management systems already mentioned, consider cms made simple.
It makes it very easy to turn a static site into a content managed site (which sounds like exactly what you might need to do in the future), and the admin area is very easy to use. Our clients have found it much simpler to use than the likes of Joomla.
It's also free and open source.
Good luck!
There's no reason to not go with plain old HTML and JPGs if you don't know any server side scripting languages. Also, once you want to get more advanced, most cheap hosting services have tools that can be installed with one click, and provide things like blogs, photo galleries, bulletin boards (PHPBB), and even content management tools like Joomla.
I had the same problem myself, I was just looking for something really easy to smash together a website quickly. First I went with just plain old HTML, but then I realised a simple CMS would be better.
I went for Wordpress. Wordpress is mostly known as a blogging platform, but in my opinion it is really great as a deadly simple CMS as well.
why not simply use Google pages?
Here is an example of a website I did, takes about 2 hours, easy to maintain (not that I do (-: ) and FREE.
I think that suggesting you mess with HTML for what you need is crazy!
Plain HTML is great, gives you the most control. If you want to make updating a bit easier though, you could use SSI. Most servers have this enabled. It basically let's you attach one file to many pages.
For example, you could have your menu in navigation.html and every page would include this file. That way you wouldn't have to update this one file on every page each time you need to update.
<!--#include virtual="navigation.html" -->
I agree with the other commenters that a CMS might be useful to you, however as I see it, probably a solution like Webby might do it for you. It generates plain HTML pages based on Templates. Think about it as a "webpage preprocessor" which outputs plain HTML files. It has most of the advantages of using a server-based CMS, but without a lot of load on the server, and making it easy for you to change stuff on any of the templates you might use.
It's fine
Rails (or purchase / use a CMS)
Not unless you start becoming crazy-popular
It really depends on what you go with for 2. Rails has a plethora of tutorials on the net and any product you go with will have its own community etc.
To be perfectly honest though, if the dynamic part is someone elses blog and you move the gallery out into flikr you may find that you can actually live with large parts of it being static HTML for a very long time.
If a to Implement a website With User Profiles/Logins, Extensions, Gallery's etc s a Newbi then a CMS like Joomla, Etc are good , but Else if you presently have only Static Content then Its good to go with Good Old HTML, About JPEG , I though Presently Its better to use PNG or GIF as its Less Bulky.
Also About you Query About Shifting to Server Scripts , When you have Database Driven Material or When you have Other Things that Require Advanced Prog Languages , Just use PHP Scripts inside PHP , and Rename teh File as a PHP, Thats IT, No Loss to you HTML Data.....
Do Go Ahead and Launch you Site ......
Dude, you're talking about HTML, obviously you'll be styling your content with CSS. Wait till you run into IE issues and god forbid your client wants ie6 compatibility.
Go with the HTML for now, I'm sure you guys will hack it through. Our prayers are with you.
Personally, I'd never use JPEG images on a website, mainly because of three reasons:
JPEGs often contains artifacts.
Quality is often proportional
with filesize.
Does not support
alpha transparency.
That said, I'd recommend you to use PNGs for images since it's lossless and a 24-bit palette (meaning full colors + alpha transparency). The only quirk is that IE6 and below does not support native alpha for PNGs, however this could be resolved by running a javascript which would fix this issue.
As for designing a website, there's both pros and cons for this. I suggest you read through:
37 Signal's Why We Skip Photoshop
Jeff Croft's Why We Don't Skip Photoshop
As for newbie resources, I'd recommend you flip through the pages at W3 Schools.