Tech, Gaming and Food Enthusiast
Archive for March, 2010
Top 5 must have WordPress plugins
Mar 23rd
I thought it was high time I released a list of the best plugins that I use with my WordPress installation. So here goes…
1. All in one webmaster
This plugin thanks to ArpitShah is a bundle of all the best tracking and analytics solutions available to the web and I would highly recommend it. Here is the description provided by ArpitShah:
If you are a webmaster you probably heard of “Google Webmaster Tool“. Both Yahoo and Bing have their own versions called “Yahoo SiteExplorer” and “Bing Webmaster Central“. All in One Webmaster has option to add Google, Bing, Yahoo Webmaster Meta-Tags. Single click sitemap submission to Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask. Add tracking code for Google, Clicky, 103Bees analytics. It uses the wphead() and wpfooter() hooks built in to WordPress to add content to your header and/or footer.
Ajax callback validation routines with CodeIgniter
Mar 21st
The CodeIgniter Form_Validation library is an extremely useful tool especially the ability to extend all core routines. Some validation requires real time PHP & MySQL processing, for example checking an email against those already registered with your site.
To use a PHP function to return values to the jQuery validate function, the only important theory to understand is that the function needs to echo, not return. Returning values will not send the output to the DOM and so the validation routines will not know what to do with it.
Client side searching with jQuery
Mar 20th
In my previous post about sorting data I explained the brilliance of client side sorting using jQuery. When researching various other jQuery plugins I discovered tablesearch which can be invaluable when searching smaller data sets.
As in my previous jQuery post we will start with a standard HTML table, giving it an id of “myTable” of course if you wish to use multiple instances on the same page a class is a far more elegant solution.
High level search with PHP and Apache Solr
Mar 18th
When data sets get large and MySQL database querying to search become too load heavy and slow, full indexing is required. Several solutions are available but in this article I will be demonstrating the Apache foundations Solr Java Lucene implementation. For this a Java build will be required. Linux or Mac is less of a problem but for windows I use the Apache Tomcat server.
Sorting table data with jQuery
Mar 18th
A plugin for jQuery called “tableSorter” makes life so much easier when you wish to sort certain columns on a table, for example filtering a table to make total amount (£) ASC or DESC.
The only HTML markup requirement is to assign the table with an id or a class in this example I have created a table like this:
<table id="sortingTable">
</table