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19Feb
2009

Improving Design by Using a Grid System

When I first heard of grids for design (and frameworks for CSS as a matter of fact) I was quite sceptical. Why limit yourself to a predefined outline? Mathematical precision in a creative process? Well needless to say I was surprised with the outcome.

Obviously you do tend to repeat certain pieces of code over and over in a project, but a framework? Behind a word like that usually stands a complex set of predefined elements. Though solid and reliable, these are often not very flexible and not easily modifiable. And the last two features seem to be crucial for projects that involve html and css. (more…)

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Posted by Joanna Chlasta at 02:49pm
17Feb
2009

Zend Framework Decorators - Labels and Checkboxes

Very often it is the smallest things that annoy us the most. It took me a while to figure out why the placement parameter was not changing anything. I started of with the following:

'decorators' => array(
	array('Label'),
	array('ViewHelper')
)

(more…)

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Posted by Joanna Chlasta at 11:16am
28Dec
2008

Using Zend_Mail and Google SMTP to send emails

You can set this globally, for example in your bootstrap.php file:

$tr = new Zend_Mail_Transport_Smtp('smtp.gmail.com', array(
	'auth' => 'login',
	'username' => 'YOUR_USERNAME@gmail.com',
	'password' => 'YOUR_PASSWORD',
	'ssl' => 'ssl',
	'port' => 465)
);
Zend_Mail::setDefaultTransport($tr);

(more…)

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2
Posted by Joanna Chlasta at 07:15pm
13Dec
2008

Strong ownership list approach

When you are your own boss, things like responsibilities and project ownership are pretty obvious - you are liable for everything, period. However when working at an agency with projects coming and going, and sometimes resurfacing after even years of dormant life things get a bit more complicated.

At some point we tried to introduce project ownership. This unfortunately gets a bit problematic when you hit the projects that no one has any clue about and the original developer has left ages ago (or it can even be unclear who the original developer was!). It does mean that someone eventually will know something about the orphaned projects once they take responsibility for them. Though again in case that person moves on, the situation will start over.
(more…)

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3
Posted by Joanna Chlasta at 01:17am
12Nov
2008

Wordpress NextGen gallery tweak

Recently I found myself in that very anoying situation where a very good piece of software seemed to lack just this one function… again. I have been doing a gallery website and used the NextGen gallery plugin to display the photos. Unfortunatelly it was a case of a gallery per post with about 1 or 2 photos per gallery.

The biggest issue with this setting was the process of creating galleries. By default in NextGen you create the gallery on one page, upload the images in another, and then create new post yet elsewhere. But there had to be a way to at least merge the gallery creation with photo upload, especially considering a new gallery form consisted of a single “gallery name” field. (more…)

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1
Posted by Joanna Chlasta at 08:39pm
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