CategoryTutorials

December 27, 2011 — A few days ago, a tutorial on how to Create A Christmas Wish List With PHP was published on Smashing Magazine’s Coding section that frustrated me. It frustrated me as it was incredibly easy to predict the comment reactions it caused. It also frustrated me as it was a classic example of a tutorial resulting in very happy readers who will go out and cause a lot of terrible things on the Web unless they understand that this was meant as a “beginner tutorial”. A lot of the bad feedback was about security — something we shouldn’t take lightly. Read more…

December 14, 2011 — There is no doubt that WordPress is the best content management system (CMS) for your website. Sure, countless CMS’ are available, ranging from open-source to paid, and you’ll hear evangelists on all sides swearing that their choice is the best. But Drupal, Joomla or any other CMS doesn’t hold a candle to WordPress for its ease of use, security and reliability. Read more…

December 7, 2011 — People often ask how I arrived at a finished illustration. Honestly, it’s different every time, but it always starts with a hand-drawn sketch. Read more…

December 1, 2011 — Computing is full of buzzwords, “cloud computing” being the latest one. But unlike most trends that fizzle out after the initial surge, cloud computing is here to stay. Read more…

November 8, 2011 — Creating WordPress tutorials is a fantastic way to help build the WordPress community and to increase your Web traffic. That’s no secret. Just Google “wordpress tutorial” and you’ll see hundreds of results. The complete novice will find scores of well-written tutorials clearly demonstrating the basics of the WordPress dashboard and of activating the default template, in simple jargon-free language. Read more…

November 3, 2011 — WordPress list tables are a very common element of the WordPress admin interface but creating one of those tables is not really an intuitive thing to do when you haven’t done it before. In this article, we’ll see how to generate some native admin tables the right way. Read more…

October 20, 2011 — Using tabs in a user interface can help you better organize content, so it’s only natural that WordPress themes that have a lot of options would benefit from tabs on their settings page. In this tutorial, you will learn how to create a tabbed settings page, and you’ll get to download a WordPress theme that implements the code. Read more…

September 16, 2011 — Created by Ryan Dahl in 2009, Node.js is a relatively new technology which has gained a lot of popularity among Web developers recently. However, not everyone knows what it really is. Node.js is essentially a server-side JavaScript environment that uses an asynchronous event-driven model. Read more…

August 12, 2011 — Layer Styles are nothing new. They’ve been used and abused again and again. Despite their ubiquity, or perhaps because of it, many designers do not yet realize the full potential of this handy menu. Read more…

July 28, 2011 — Adobe Illustrator is one very useful program for creating vector artwork. The tools and features available in Illustrator make it easy to create digital illustrations, whether from scratch or by tracing a photograph. But this is not all Illustrator can do. Businesses can create impressive graphs using Illustrator’s Graph tools. Marketers can use the impressive Type tool and other type features to design single-page ads. “Examples And Tips For Using Illustrator’s Warp Tools”)](https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2011/07/28/examples-and-tips-for-using-illustrator-s-warp-tools/) Designers create logos and other marketing graphics that need to be scalable in Illustrator. In short, Illustrator is a comprehensive vector program that is difficult to master. The aim of this article is to provide one more resource for those of you yearning to learn more about Illustrator. We’ll look at one of the less-mentioned features: the Warp tools, also known as the Liquify tools. Read more…