Is targeting a single browser okay?

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When I encounter a website which is broken in Opera, my browser of choice, I hate it. I know that Opera is perfectly capable of displaying any site Firefox or Internet Explorer can. It makes me feel like lecturing whoever made the site about cross-browser compatibility, valid XHTML, valid CSS, you name it. But if you think about it, is …

What are the controller and model in MVC?

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A lot of people seem to be slightly confused about what the M and C, Model and Controller, of MVC are, in regards to web applications. What does the Model do? What does the Controller do? View is what everyone seems to know, though… I wonder why is that so? What is so confusing about Models and Controllers?

Quick introduction to using Zend_Layout

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Lately, the Zend_Layout component has been a very popular topic on #zftalk. It is indeed a very useful component, but a lot of people are having trouble understanding how it works. Adding to the confusion is the outdated documentation regarding the component proposal and the equally outdated articles about Zend/Xend_Layout. Let’s demonstrate the usage of the current Zend_Layout implementation, which …

Localize your site in 3 easy steps

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Internationalization and localization means making your site usable in more than one languages. Well, to be honest, you could call a site that’s only in english localized to english visitors too, but in any case… These two are also known as I18N and L10N. Can you guess where these acronyms come from? The first and last letter from each word …

The mythical HTTP protocol

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The HTTP protocol is what powers todays web. While not useful for most people, knowing how HTTP works is important for those who work with dynamic web sites. Still, it seems that the protocol is mostly a mystery to a lot of developers and some features of the protocol, such as the accept-language header, aren’t really used.

Geek humor

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Sunday morning, 5 AM… – Hi – Haven’t seen you in a while, but I have seen you in a foreach! Proof against homosexuality: You can’t connect two male cable connectors. note: I have nothing against sexual minorities, the above is just a funny fact ;) ) Camel-casing is fundamentally flawed You know how camelCasingWorks, right? Well, I think it’s …

Routing and complex URLs in Zend Framework

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We were talking about routing on the #zftalk IRC channel. One of the users mentioned that rather than using routes, he was using the __call method in the IndexController. I then asked him why is he doing that, as I knew routes would be more than a good choice for most kinds of URLs. I found out that he was …

Zend Framework initialization shell scripts

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I’ve had a couple of cases where I’ve wanted to quickly test some stuff with the Zend Framework. Now, to get the framework up and running, you’ll need a couple of things: Directory structure – controller dirs, view dirs, public_html, etc. etc. .htaccess files – To enable routing Bootstrap Controllers I can never remember what to put in the .htaccess …

How to improve your JavaScript

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There’s a lot of resources on the internet related to coding JavaScript, but many of them are poor and out of date, which I believe is one of the reasons why a lot of people still can’t manage to write JavaScript code which works in all major browsers (IE, Firefox, Opera and Safari – where possible to test it) Let’s …

How to automatically escape template variables in Zend_View

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Escaping any data which comes from the server is important to escape, as it prevents XSS amongst other things. The Zend Framework view component Zend_View let’s you escape template variables with $this->escape($this->variableName), but it doesn’t escape them by default. Wouldn’t it be much nicer if it did that by default, or at least provided you with a variable to turn …