I recently came across an article titled “9 Ways to Make the Payment Process Easy for Online Customers”. The article describes nine best practices for e-commerce sites: what you should do to have the best possible conversion rate. I definitely stress most, if not all, of these points in my “Effortless E-commerce with PHP and MySQL” book, but they are policies and approaches worth repeating. If you do any kind of web development, and especially if you do e-commerce, give this quick article a read. The only thing the article leaves out is how to convince your client that you’re right when it comes to implementing these policies, especially the one about not requiring accounts to complete orders!
Continue Reading...Archives For Web Development
The great people at the Northeast PHP conference have made videos of all the presentations available online at YouTube. How great is that?
All of the videos, linked by presentation, can be found on this Northeast PHP page: http://www.northeastphp.org/pages
Continue Reading...
Whenever you begin working with a database, you introduce more possible causes of errors. Thus, you must learn additional debugging strategies. When using PHP to run queries on the database, the problems you might encounter include:
An inability to connect to the database
A database error thrown because of a query
The query not returning the results or having the effect that you expect
None of the above, and yet, the output is still incorrect
On a non-framework site, you just need to watch for database errors to catch the first two types of problems. There’s a simple and standard approach for debugging the last two types:
Use PHP to print out the query being run.
Run the same query using another interface to confirm the results.
Debug the query until you get the results you want.
When using a framework, these same debugging techniques are a little less obvious, in part because you may not be directly touching the underlying SQL commands. Thankfully, Yii will still be quite helpful, if you know what switches to flip.
I’m looking ahead to writing Chapter 20, “Working with Third-Party Libraries,” of “The Yii Book” (I’m currently writing Chapter 19), and was wondering what people wanted me to specifically demonstrate. Originally, I had intended to use the Zend Framework as my example. I like how ZF components can be easily used on their own, and I’d frequently used ZF with my own Yii projects. Lately, I’ve been thinking about using Symfony in the chapter. I’ve not touched Symfony yet myself, but have heard good things. Of course, the examples don’t have to use frameworks; they could use any type of library.
Continue Reading...
I’ve created a three-part series posted as a guest blogger on the site of my hosting company, ServInt. The series is titled “‘Going Big’ With a Website”, and is based upon a series of newsletters I put out a couple of months back. In the series, I attempt to explain how one should navigate the process of having no site, to having a site, to having an active site, should you be so fortunate. The series isn’t so much about the X’s and O’s (e.g., caching, using gzip, Apache vs. nginx, and so forth), as it is about general philosophies you need to consider in order to best use your limited resources (although there are a few specific recommendations in there).
Continue Reading...
