Category: Frameworks
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Support My Local now sells digital raffle tickets for schools and charities
During the pandemic I founded an online marketplace to help small traders supply local people with food and necessities. Post-pandemic I have pivoted to supporting schools and charities that want to sell raffle tickets online. The technology that I have used is WordPress, WooCommerce and WCFM Marketplace and a lot of custom code that create…
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Designing secure applications with Formidable Forms
I use Formidable Forms for all my web application development using WordPress. The time spent learning the framework is repaid (just) by the speed with which I can build new front ends. In the last year the documentation is improved greatly and the team is targeting enterprise developers. Formidable Forms is stateless and all information…
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API first development (using Postman)
This is a great article about API first development https://medium.com/postman-engineering/api-first-software-development-for-modern-organizations-fdbfba9a66d3 It is often said that every generation thinks that it has discovered sex and in the same way sensible coding practices are “rediscovered” every couple of years. Nevertheless I like this article because it frames API development in a modern context.
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SAMR: Substitution, Augmentation, Modification, Redefination
As a management consultant frameworks are key tool for me; a well designed framework is quickly understood by the client and team and can aid understanding and adoption. I am presently working in the education sector and have encountered SAMR to describe how technology can be used. Although drafted for education the principles are applicable…
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Writing a WordPress plugin for multisite
I use Michael Simpson’s excellent template for writing WordPress plugins. At present it does not explicitly support multisite plugins. This is a cross-post of my investigation that I posted on his site. Cross-post Thank you Michael, I have done a little reading “Professional WordPress” by Brad Williams et. al. http://shibashake.com/wordpress-theme/write-a-plugin-for-wordpress-multi-site http://www.wphub.com/tutorials/plugins-compatible-wordpress-multisite/ http://www.onextrapixel.com/2013/01/08/how-to-properly-code-your-plugin-for-a-wordpress-multisite/ These are my…
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CSS: How to “sandbox” a DIV – a lesson in futility
I am writing this article in the spirit of the scientific principle that negative results should be published (but there is some helpful stuff later on.) Many of us today are not developing new applications but ones which must work with, or sit within other applications that generate HTML and JavaScript. One very common example is…
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A review of JavaScript drawing libraries for flowcharts, Gantt charts and timelines
Overview I manage my projects using my own ElephantPM project management methodology. This is a similar in many ways to PRINCE2 but is greatly simplified so that it is suitable for use by smaller organisations. My needs ElephantPM divides the Start-up stage into an analysis step and a planning step. During the analysis step it…
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Presentation tier: Smart Client vs Sencha Ext JS
For our current project Keyapt we have chosen to use Smartclient for the presentation tier. This is RESTfully coupled to business tier. Others I respect have chosen to use the Sencha tools for the same job. I thought it would be useful to find a comparison and found a good one on stack exchange. Smartclient…
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Creating data-driven graphs
I have a need to programmatically create flowcharts and organisational charts for use with an WordPress or Wiki site. This sort of diagram is called a “graph” (not be confused with “charts” in this context). Graph software falls into the scientific or commercial category. Good scientific packages include JUNG, Prefuse, Piccolo2D. These are optimised for…
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The semantic web on a platter – Google recipe search
The semantic web has made it to the mainstream in a rather surprising way. Recipe site owners have been marking up plain HTML pages with microformats that allow Google’s spider to understand the meaning of the content. This is much easier than creating two versions of every page – one for humans and one for…
Dr James Bayley 