In a recent implementation, I also found that it wasn’t persisting data across an entire website but only for particular pages. So I started to look for an alternative and found this implementation of session variables without using cookies.

Cookies are never a good thing and should be reduced at all costs. Remember that they get sent for every request from the domain, even for images and other static files so that’s using up a lot of bandwidth. Anyways, back to this very clever javascript implementation. This small script allows you to use session variables by manipulating the window object in javascript. It’s not incredibly secure but it is a very useful means for storing arbitrary pieces of data and is really incredibly clever.

The first 200 tickets are on sale for €115. The normal cost is €175 so you’re better off to buy early.

Frameworks

When creating websites, development frameworks are an ideal way for back-end developers to rid themselves of the repetitive tasks that are required on each and every occasion – tasks like building a user management system, handling database access and even the structural organisation of the files and code so that it is easily maintainable and consistent across projects. Rather than having to make these kinds of decisions for each website that you build, a framework can take care of them and leave you to focus on the new websites indiviual features and requirements. Essentially, you’re starting your project with 25% already completed rather than starting from scratch. And that just makes good sense.

CSS Frameworks can provide similar benefits to front-end developers. So rather than tackling the same tiresome display issues every time you create a website, you can just let the CSS Framework handle it for you. I took a look at a few of the options out there – YAML, Yahoo UI, 960 and decided on using the Blueprint CSS framework. It seems to have the best press associated with it and once I looked through the source code I realised that it’s not too different from the styles I usually like to use.

Blueprint

Blueprint contains seperate source files for each section of the typical CSS file – reset, grid, typography and forms. It also contains a compressed CSS file containing all the styles to save the amount of http requests your website has to make. Some of the frameworks main features are:

A mass reset of browser default styles.
Excellent defaults for typography using relative sizes, ensuring it will scale well in all browsers.
Easily understandable grid layouts. It only takes 2 minutes to mock up a simple html page with as many columns as you want.
An actual print stylesheet.
Easily modified to use your indiviual syles.

The main aspect of blueprint and most of the other CSS frameworks is its grid-building capabilities. By default, the grids.css file sets up a 950px wide grid of 24 columns. This grid is suitable for any website trying to fit into the typical 1024px width dimensions. It is customisable though so if you do want a larger/smaller grid then that isn’t an issue.

At this point it’s important to remember that all the elements can be modified. Blueprint is a set of base styles that any developer can use or update to realise the goals of the website. It should not be treated as the complete CSS solution for your project.

Conclusion

Many developers/designers will tell you that CSS frameworks aren’t neccessary, that talented individuals can write their own code. This is a fair argument, it was my first impression too but having tried Blueprint for a while I’ve been impressed by its capabilities and I will be using it in future projects. Its class naming system goes against some of the “semantic” guidelines that you’ll see elsewhere but I dont really rate this as an issue. If you think the styles are named incorrectly, then just change the names. The actual CSS code is excellent and cross browser compatible so it’s worth a look for developers of any level. It’s also an excellent resource for web designers trying to branch out into the CSS world. And maybe the next step for CSS frameworks is to get included in a web development framework like Rails or Cake. Wouldn’t that be nice.

Check it out: Blueprint

UPDATE: There’s a cheat sheet available at digitalart.net  – a reference page with all the important class names that you can print out and keep while you work.

Symphony was created by a small web development team operating out of the Gold Coast in Queensland, Australia. It’s free to use and having a template engine of pure XSLT appealed to me. From their website – “Symphony lets you create small blocks of XSLT code called utilities, which you can use as building blocks to construct your site’s pages. Due to the nature of XSLT, these utilities are highly reusable, so the next time you’re developing a website you’ll probably find you’ve already done half the work.”

I had a lot of issues installing the system, it took about 2 days in total. I run vista on my laptop and have apache and php installed and configured prior to this. When I ran the symphony install file, it said i was missing some components like libXSLT. Which is fair enough, as this is is listed in the requirements. I altered my php.ini file to load the libxslt library, restarted apache and the page loaded correctly. I was presented with a set of options for configuring the database, put in my default mysql settings, created a new db in mySQL and created an admin user. This is where I had a lot of issues. It seemed to install correctly and presented me with a login screen. I put in the username/password that I had selected and I got an error – invalid username. I was confused!! I ran a query on the symphony db to check the users in the db but it returned nothing. Empty table!!

After spending a few hours going through the php code I found that the sql queries were looking in tables prefixed with tbl_ but the tables in my db were prefixed with sym_. I changed the prefix, added my admin user directly into the mysql table and it worked, i could log in.

Next i found that my admin user didn’t have admin privileges, so i couldn’t create any pages. Back to the db, gave my user super privileges. Fixed. All options were available. But no pages were being displayed. I ran the default website but I was getting xslt errors. Strange, surely there should be some default home page or something that works out of the box.

And there is, but the install had tried to put them into tbl_pages instead of sym_pages. I found a whole bunch of sql statements in a workspace text file which showed that there should be 6 or 7 pages created by default. I grabbed the sql, replaced tbl_ with sym_ and executed the script. Fixed.

Next I created a new page, browsed to it and got a 404 error. God damn. Back to the product forum again (which is really good by the way). I had to make an alteration to the directory settings in my apache httpd.conf file and enabled mod_rewrite in php.ini – Fixed. Completely. It works 100%.

The sql table names was really the root of my issues. If they had installed correctly the majority of the issues listed above would not have happened. I’m not sure why that happened, maybe it was my fault but i just selected the default settings in the install file. The flip side though is that I became very familiar with the php code in symphony, and it’s good. The admin publishing system is really nice. it looks great, it’s easy to use and despite the installation issues I am impressed with the product and the xml,xslt idea is great. What’s really impressive is the debugging feature when you’re running a website. Append ?debug to a page name and you get to see the xml and xslt that’s formatting the page. VERY NICE!!