Premium Content


Premium Content articles are the very best articles from the world's leading internet technology, subject-matter experts. We have many categories of content below on a wide variety of subjects that have all been commissioned from big name authors.

Explore the Premium Content

Photoshop CS: File Browser, Matching Colour and Life Histograms

There have been quite a few changes from Photoshop 7.0 to Photoshop CS – some really cool new tools, cunningly hidden away. Let’s take a look at some of the more interesting ones and how they can benefit you, the web developer. In this article we’re going to start with the more general changes – some alterations to existing Photoshop systems, some altogether new. The most exciting of the new features is the ability to take one image and match the colours of a second image to it. The most useful of the new features are the live histograms and the new file browser which makes searching and retrieving images much more efficient.

Read More

PHP: Dynamic Arcs, Circles and Polygons

Not all graphics on web pages are for design only. A lot of sites used in business or financial reporting need to show dynamic information graphically, and because that information updates constantly, the graphs need to be drawn on the fly. In this weeks tutorial we will continue on with some more complex shapes – curves, ellipses and polygons. We’ll also take a look at some of the maths involved with drawing polygons. As the series progresses, this will lead up to a routine that will plot graphs on the fly from dynamic data.

This tutorial contains some maths, but the code is provided and is suitable for intermediate PHP developers using either Dreamweaver MX or MX 2004.

Read More

Real-World JavaScript: The Date Object

We've all seen a JavaScript calendar or date-picker function. When logging on to buy an airline ticket, picking dates of a graphical calendar removes confusion about various nations' date formats (mm-dd-yy? mm-dd-yyyy? dd-mm-yyyy?) and can be used to ensure that a return date that is earlier than a departure date cannot be chosen. It's a visual way of combining error-checking validation with a usable interface to avoid user confusion.

In this series of tutorials, Tom shows how to build a customisable, skinnable JavaScript date-picker. In the first tutorial, Tom introduces us to the Date Object - the heart of all JavaScript date processing functions -and shows how to use it, as well as showing how to avoid the legendary gotchas, and therefore save you time and frustration.

This tutorial is for the intermediate developers in JavaScript.

Read More

Dynamic Web Development: ASP Foundations

So you want to start learning how to design dynamic web sites that make pages on the fly customised for the user? Or take advantage of all that logon-functionality? Or don't want to code a seperate html page for every product in your on-line catalogue?

Then you need a dynamic web site. The most common way for Dreamweaver users to get into dynamic web development is to use the ASP language. Rob explains concepts and code so that you can start to use the built in ASP server behaviors and extend their limited functionality with your own hand-crafted ASP code. This tutorial looks at the "life cycle" of an ASP page.

Read More

Using HTML for Presentation

In this second in the "Cornerstones of Dreamweaver Design" series, Molly shows you how to use Dreamweaver to make presentational HTML. If you really want to understand Dreamweaver MX and web site design, you have to learn how to do this, even if it’s not the recommended method anymore. Chances are you will find yourself in many instances having to use HTML for presentation rather than CSS, and in all fairness to our profession, that you know it now rather than later will provide you with an understanding of why we prefer CSS. It's also useful if you find yourself updating an old non-CSS web site that you've made before you started to use Dreamweaver.

This tutorial can be used with Dreamweaver MX and Dreamweaver MX 2004. Read More

PHP Shape drawing tools

In a number of tutorials towards the end of last year we took a look at working with images in PHP.  The functionality and techniques that we looked at all worked with existing images that you had already taken with a digital camera, scanned in, or created yourself.  We saw how to make thumbnails, save these thumbnails in different formats and how to play with the colours within these images.  And this is all great if you have existing images to work with, but what happens if you want to draw simple shapes dynamically within your image?  The image functions within PHP can also do this and there are a number of functions, some of which you have already seen, that allow us to do this.
 
When most people think of creating images for web sites, they think of a program like Adobe Photoshop or Macromedia Fireworks and think of all the creative things they can do to make the page look good.  With enough time and effort you could get similar results using the PHP image functions, but this is not why we use them – these functions are aimed at more practical uses for images – creating simple navigation buttons on the fly, drawing maps or diagrams from raw data, annotating existing images or drawing graphs from dynamic data.
 
In today’s tutorial we will take a look at some of the basics for drawing shapes on an image; this tutorial can be used by itself, or as part of a series over the coming weeks which will demonstrate how to build  diagrams and charts on-the-fly from dynamic data. Read More

Using the .NET Collection Classes Part 2

This tutorial is the final part of a 2 part series on .NET Collections, and focuses on a real world use for the ArrayList class. It will demonstrate how to use an ArrayList collection to display all the image files stored in a directory as well as display each image file’s associated file information. The display layout of the images and data is handled using a DataList control. The image browser will also utilize classes in Namespaces other than System.Collections to incorporate paging, providing the end user with a mechanism to view a specific number of images per page view and also to display image specific file system information.  Read More

CSS Tips and Tricks for Dreamweaver MX 2004

This article is a round-up of a variety of CSS tips and tricks for users of Dreamweaver MX 2004. I’ve based these tips on questions that I have either received or have seen people asking on mailing lists and mails to me, and they cover a wide range of the CSS tools in Dreamweaver. I'm using MX 2004, but the tutorial is appropriate for both DMX "Classic" and DMX 2004.

Covered in this article:
 
  • What’s the difference between longhand and shorthand CSS?
  • What’s the difference between a class and an ID – and which should I use?
  • How do I style a horizontal rule so that the color displays in Mozilla based browsers and Internet Explorer?
  • How do you make those boxes with borders? (covers CSS-P and tables layout method)
  • How can I make the text scroll and the background stay still?
Read More

PHP: Working with Image colour

Using the free GDLib extensions to PHP, we can dynamically make thumbnails, save images to disc and manipulate them in other ways. in this tutorial, Allan shows how to manipulate the colours within an image, either to tint them or greyscale them (we've seen this technique used in an application that allows you to upload images into an on-line "newspaper" complete with black and white photographs!).

This tutorial assumes no prior knowledge of PHP. Read More

Formatting User Form Data

Often when you have a form, the user inputs data that either doesn’t match the format you desire, or it isn’t as nice looking as it could be. A good example is the phone number. The typical 7 digit phone number looks like 555-1212. Quite often, people entering phone numbers on web forms omit the dashes and enter 5551212 instead. While there isn’t anything wrong with this, there is a chance that an error is harder to spot by the user.
 
What you could do is check the value of that phone number after it has been entered. If the dashes have been left out, you could simply add them. You could do the same thing for a 10 digit phone number or even an international phone number. Of course the more data you handle the more difficult it’s going to be.
 
In this article we’ll take a look at 7 and 10 digit phone numbers and how we can format (or mask) them to look nicer should the user decide not to enter dashes. While we’re doing this we can introduce some handy string methods and talk about a very basic regular expression. Read More

PHP User comments system

In this tutorial, we’re going to build a system to allow users to add comments to the bottom of your web pages, which is becoming more and more popular lately for a variety of different applications. For example, blogs are now starting to allow users to add comments so readers can join in the discussion, and tutorials have comments sections where users can add their own notes, or comment about the brilliance of your writing for example. The system could also be used to create a guest book application for a site; in fact the principles can be used for pretty much any system which allows users to add data.

We first build a page that allows the user to add comments, which are then stored in a table in a MySQL database. We place the MySQL connection parameters in an include file, so they can easily be added to any page which uses the database, without having to retype them each time, and so they are easily changeable in future if you change servers for example.
 
We then create a PHP include file which can be added to an existing page to show the relevant comments from the database for that particular page.  Read More

Cornerstones of Dreamweaver Design: Setting Up Your Site

Recently, we sought out reader opinion on premium content. And, many of you emailed me and DMXzone that while you have found the information very helpful, the tutorials often assumed complex knowledge when most folks reading are just beginning to work with Dreamweaver as a pro tool, and many of you are even fairly new to web design. You clearly expressed that you wanted helpful tutorials that take you right from the very start of using Dreamweaver on through to using it in more complicated ways. This way you can begin building professional sites in a sophisticated manner, tapping into the workflow that Dreamweaver provides. This way, you can build a sturdy foundation of Dreamweaver knowledge upon which to grow your skills.
 
The series will cover the real how-to about the Dreamweaver program from a no-nonsense, step-by-step, practical perspective. Whether it’s something seemingly simple as today’s topic, “Setting up Your Site” to more involved topics such as collaboration and site testing, the point is to lead you through Dreamweaver so you learn it from the bottom up.

In order to work most effectively with any given site in Dreamweaver, it's important to define the site. Defining the site in Dreamweaver means that you first gather all of your materials (HTML pages, images, media, and so forth) in one place, create a directory structure for the materials that makes logical sense, and in many cases, set up remote server access to the server where your site will reside. Then, you can begin working on your pages in an organized way as well as tap into many of the useful tools Dreamweaver provides in terms of file protection and collaboration (which we'll address in future Cornerstone) topics. Read More
Newer articles Older articles