I'm trying to figure out how to program a website that looks very similar to http://www.renthop.com/.
I'm new to web coding, so I'm not really sure where to start. For example, is it Java or HTML? Or both? I really like how its setup, the responsiveness and smoothness of it. I just want to make sure I start off in the right direction in terms of choosing the right language etc.
If anyone has any idea of what this is based on it would be greatly appreciated!
Thanks - KC
The server-side code is PHP, the front-end is built off of the jQuery and jQuery-UI javascript libraries and a series of third-party plugins. The final product is a dynamic HTML application.
Do you want to launch your website? If so, creating a website from HTML would only make a website on your local hard drive, not public. You're going to need a domain name and hosting to make it public.
HTML is a markup language for formatting websites, but you can still create a website out of it. Not public, as I said above.
CSS is rulesets for telling the browser how to display the HTML formatted content. It is also not a programming language in the same way HTML is, although it can be a lot more powerful.
Javascript is a programming language. You use it to make the website interactive. Get Firebug or a similar add-on for Firefox, or just right click and 'Inspect Element' in Chrome to see the javascript for more detail on what javascript does.
AJAX is an extension of javascript to get data from the web server and update the page with it, without having to refresh the page.
PHP is code commonly used server side to interact with the filesystem and databases and output HTML. You can also use python, perl, .NET and a handful of other languages/frameworks to do this.
MySQL is a database.
Related
We have a web app that we want to integrate in the websites of several clients by a subdomain, since in most cases we cannot modify their webs. Besides, our web is build in a different language and we want to keep it in our servers.
At the moment, they are adding links on their site's menu to our subdomain, however, they want to keep the same header and the footer so that the user feels that they are on the same website.
For now, we are copying the html and inserting it in our template, but this is not a good solution for the future and we are having several problems due to javascript conflicts.
How can we solve this? An iframe does not allow us to modify its content, I think. Thanks in advance.
Don't know any good ways to do this client side.
First thought is to have all the pages link your Javascript to create the header/footer, but it's not good to require Javascript to display content.
HTML imports would really be perfect for this, but it not well supported. You can consider if you're willing to use a polyfill, like Google's webcomponents.
I feel like best approach here would be to do this somehow not on client side. Either use a server that lets you use a template engine, or some static site generator that supports templating.
I'm creating a website where I'd like the client to be able to add articles, images, and audio clips without having to edit the code of the website.
For example; on the sidebar of the site, there's 3 audio clips (they're demos of music) with images and text to go along with them. I'd like for them to be able to change all of those things at any time.
Any language that is server-side can be used. This includes, but is not limited to, Python, Ruby, and PHP. This question is otherwise too broad to give a definitive answer.
You should use a CMS (content management system) like Drupal. Your client will have access to a nice web interface to manage the site content.
You can use any server side Language like,PHP,JSP/Servlet,ASP.NET etc.
PHP will be easier for implementation.
It sounds like you want standard html and javascript.
Bootstrap would help aid the design process and jQuery would aid the coding.
A local nonprofit needs a new website. It's a very basic website that simply presents information, nothing past basic HTML/CSS is needed to make the actual site.
The marketing manager would like to be able to edit text sections (upcoming events, jobs) regularly. How would I go about creating the site in HTML/CSS and then allowing them to edit just the text in those sections in an easy way? is that even possible, or would this require more advanced knowledge of actual programming/database languages?
Thanks
No, you can't edit the site with just HTML and CSS. Even if you have JavaScript, you'll need server side code (ASP.NET, PHP, Ruby on Rails, Node.js etc) to store the changed text, since HTML, CSS, and JS run on the client (excluding server side JavaScript based frameworks).
The easy solution is to just use simple HTML and tell him to directly edit the HTML. If he's just a little bit technical, an hour or two of explanation of how HTML works might be enough to get you going.
A CMS solution that is prebuilt and has simple menus for editing things might work nicely. There's plenty of various options to suit your needs.
Otherwise, you can either build a custom site. A custom site that reads text from simple text files might be all it takes (Markdown might be preferable to plain text.) Of course, you can scale it up if you want until you've basically built your own CMS.
You can't do that.
HTML pages are stored on a server (which is just a computer accessible by other computers via an internet connection), when you type in an address in your browser's address bar it sends a request to a server to fetch the corresponding HTML page. Then this page is displayed in your browser.
Now, say you managed to change a text in your browser somehow using HTML/CSS, but you still need to find a way to send these changes back to the server so that these updated pages are accessible by other remote browsers, and the only way of doing this is to use server side languages. They are not really that difficult, you can quickly learn that.
You might like to take a look at this sourceforge project.
This is a file-based system that uses conventional HTML for the webpages, but allows online editing with CKEditor. Requirements are Apache 2 and php 5.3 or later.
There is a testdrive available.
Login with guest.
First, a short disclaimer. I have next to no knowledge about web applications. I come from an iOS background where I exclusively wrote native code, so if you write your answers like I know nothing outside the shallow parts, that would be great.
I'm interested in learning a stack to develop web applications, but I'm not sure what the right way to build the GUI is. I know that a web front end consists of html and CSS to create the display and javascript as the bridge between the back end and the GUI, but I don't know the best way to put something together.
I know in iOS, you can use the Interface Builder (part of xcode that lets you graphically create the xml that describes the display) to create GUI's without any knowledge of how iOS translates the xml to some rendering, or even what is written in your xml files. Is there any analog to the web front end?
I'm mainly just looking for a list of the accepted ways to develop the GUI for a web application. If I have to learn HTML and CSS, so be it, but I'd like to know what my options are and the tradeoffs between each of them.
I can answer shortly stating that (technically) you can design web pages without coding in HTML or CSS, or even Javascript - although, you would be somewhat limited in your creative abilities and applications.
You can read about WYSIWYG html editors on this link, or try out ckeditor (someone said it's good)...
...I think a bit of background will help you reach a correct decision...
so here goes:
The Long Answer
I would start by trying to put the world of web programming and design into concepts that correlate with iOS coding.
If we look at the whole of a web app from an MVC perspective, then the browser is the view, the server is the controller and the database is the model... although this is very simplified.
Just like in iOS, each of these can be (but doesn't have to be) broken down into sub-MVC systems.
Just like any model in MVC, the view (the browser) can talk to the model (the database), but really it shouldn't. that's just bad practice.
If we break down the main-view (the browser) to a sub-MVC system, I would consider the HTML as the model, the CSS as the view and the browser (through links and javascript) as the controller.
It's not all that clear cut, but thinking like this helps me practice better and cleaner coding.
The HTML is the view's model for the web-app - it contains the data to be displayed or used.
HTML is a variation on the XML format and it contains data organized in a similar way to an XML file.
The basic HTML file will contain:
<html>
<head>
</head>
<body>
</body>
</html>
this should look familiar to you if you read any XML.
The CSS (cascading style sheets) is the view - it states HOW the html DATA should be displayed.
if your web app does't have any CSS, it will use the browser's default CSS/styling to be applied on the data in the HTML.
This "language" makes me think more about dictionaries in iOS (I think that's what they're called in Objective C). They have properties and values (like key-value pairs) that determine how the HTML data is displayed (if it's displayed).
They could look something like this:
body
{
color: white;
background-color: black
}
The browser is the web-app's view's controller - it makes it all work together and serves it up to the screen.
Javascript and links help us tell the controller what we want it to do, but it is the browser that acts (and willfully at times).
You can have a whole web app that acts without javascript, using only the default actions offered by links - in which case the browser will usually ask the server (the main controller) what to do.
Javascript helps us move some of the legwork from the server to the client, by allowing us to have a "smarter" controller for our view - just like in iOS.
The issue of the errant main-view / browser
Not all views are created equal, and not all browsers are the same.
Because the browser is used as the controller for the web-app's view, and because some browsers act differently then others, we web coders have the problem of working around someone else's idea of how our view's controller should behave.
You might see us complaining about it quite a lot (especially complaining about Internet Explorer).
These days, this issue is not as big of a problem as it used to be... it's just that some people don't update their computers...
WYSIWYG web editors
There are website builders and editors that try to work like X-Code does, by allowing us to build the website much like we would write word documents.
But, unlike X-Code which codes only the graphical interface of the view, these website builders write the model as well and usually add javascript into the mix.
When we use these tools (which I avoid), the whole MVC model breaks apart.
We can use them as a starting point for dirty work, but then we take their code apart and adjust it to our needs - usually by taking the code we need for the view (CSS) and applying it where we need it (and discarding much of the nonsense they add to the code and the HTML).
To summarize
As you can tell, HTML and CSS (and Javascript) are only a small part of a web app - as they all relate to the main view of the web app.
To write the controller and models for web apps, we use other tools (such as Ruby, PHP, js.node, MySQL and the like).
Coding the HTML and CSS isn't as hard as you might think, although it might be harder then I present it to be.
You can avoid writing code for web apps and use applications that offer WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get), but that would limit your abilities and will take away from your control over what you want to create.
I have a small static website and every page of this site has a menu and a footer.
What is the best way to make sure changes in the menu and the footer only need to be done in one place and enable me to easily update all my pages which consist of them.
I am looking for some kind of simple template system that enables me to combine files together.
I have looked a bit into ruby .erb files but they seem too complicated for what I want to achieve as I would have to install rails and enable my webserver to use that.
For a simple site, there's nothing wrong with doing server side includes. Simply create the HTML snippets (they don't even have to be fully formed HTML) for your menu and footer. Then on each page, add the appropriate
<!-- #include virtual="/footer.html" -->
statement in the proper location. Since you're on a Debian server, I'm pretty sure Apache wil already have this enabled by default.
It may seem antiquated, but my wife works for a company that does a lot of maintenance for small websites and they still take this approach and it works just fine.
If your site goes above 10 pages, then I'd say look into some of the templating systems, just to alleviate the need to remember to add your SSI on each new page you create.
you could have a look at some Web Templating Systems and decide based on the language/platform you are familiar with
I use Octopress. It's a static site generator built on top of Jekyll which uses markdown for content markup and specific template language for constructing pages. So if you only need a site with a few pages you should try jekyll.
It requires for your system to have ruby since all site generation is done on client side and afterwards the site is deployed via rsync.
Try searching the internet for static site generator. It gives dozen of solutions in all sort of languages: Python, Ruby, PHP, Haskell, Sh, Bash…
Do you need to combine those on the server side?
For a small static site I simply created a little local script (I used PowerShell, but feel free to use whatever you want or have at your disposal) that does deployment from the local source files which represent the templates. While maybe not as flexible on the template side as full-blown templating engines it's easy, fast and works well for quite a while. Also it runs locally and doesn't need anything except a simple web server on the server side, cutting down on potential vulnerabilities.
I've used WML ("Website Meta Language"; NB nothing to do with the WML associated with mobile and WAP!) on Debian for years to maintain consistent templated header/sidebar/footer boilerplate for pages on my ISP's static page hosting.