Programming

Image courtesy of daveynin

You should use Ajax popup windows, why? Because an Ajax popup window is:

• More effective marketing tool. You can advertise anything without to disappoint your visitor with nasty old timers popup windows that are ugly.
• Much quicker to load as it can preload contents.
• Much more stylish, which makes it indestructible to its older brother.
• Dynamic which means that you can determine what will be displayed.

And it has much much more features.

Here are some of the best Ajax popup windows scripts ready to use to your website:

GreyBox

A web developer who is developing applications in Php & MySql spends the most of his time developing functions and libraries to support his applications. You should not reinvent the wheel, because that takes time and time as we know means money. Your project will have a deadline far more than expected and your boss or employer will be angry.

Let's see the problem.

So your daily development activities involve:

• Developing a database library which sends and retrieves all the queries to and from the database.
• Developing libraries like add / get /set for each function.
• Developing the scripts which are responsible for the printing of the site.
• Etcetera etcetera etcetera

You see all this code takes time and is very boring because you have to write it without having real results yet.

The solution is simple.

You should use Frameworks. Open source, with lots of community support, and lots of functions and libraries to make your life easier.

Image courtesy of Leo Reynolds

If you don't know what PHP frameworks are, here is a little explanation:

web application framework is a software framework that is designed to support the development of dynamic websites, Web applications and Web services. The framework aims to alleviate the overhead associated with common activities used in Web development. For example, many frameworks provide libraries for database access, templating frameworks and session management, and often promote code reuse.

So now you know what a framework does. It helps you reduce your daily code as it gives you all the mandatory libraries and functions you need to develop your app right a way.

PHP frameworks are the latest hot topic in the PHP community, and new frameworks are being released daily. With over 40 frameworks available it's difficult to decide which framework works best for you, especially as each framework offers different functionality.

I will list the most known PHP frameworks:

Akelos PHP Framework
The Akelos PHP Framework is a PHP port of the Web application framework Ruby on Rails. Like Rails, Akelos claims to simplify and improve the process of developing database driven web applications.

CakePHP
CakePHP is an open source web application framework written in PHP, modeled after the concepts of Ruby on Rails, and distributed under the MIT License.

In my Ask-Nik.info blog I wanted to display at the front page all the recent posts but not ordered by date.

I wanted to display every of my categories by 3 posts each. I've searched a lot of plugins but none did the job for me.

So I searched about a day how to do it by myself.

I finally manage to write a front page template which does this job for me. If you take a look at the Ask-Nik.info blog you will understand what I mean.

Here is the code :

<?php get_header(); ?>
	<div id="content" class="narrowcolumn">


	<?php

		$all_categor = get_all_category_ids();
		foreach($all_categor as $cat) :
			$page = (get_query_var('paged')) ? get_query_var('paged') : 1;
			query_posts('paged='.$page.'&showposts=3&cat='.$cat);


	?>

			<?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
				<div class="post" id="post-<?php the_ID(); ?>">