Ed Zynda
Coder | Hacker | Superhero
Recently I needed to add some social media functionality to a project. I needed to be able to post to Twitter and Facebook whenever a user created a new item in the web app. I had never done this before in PHP because normally I would use some sort of plugin in WordPress to do this. Since this was not a WordPress site, I needed to do it by hand. Luckily this isn’t as hard as you might think.…
Read more »For a lot of HTML forms you really don’t need much more than the basic form fields that HTML provides. For some projects however you might need a little more. If you want your users to be able to add some styling, formatting or links you’re likely to use a third party editor like CKEditor or TinyMCE. Both of these are fine if you need all of the cool features they provide but sometimes those are overkill.…
Read more »Frameworks make it easy to hit the ground running when writing web apps. The one hurdle I run into consistently when starting any app though is creating a base user authentication system. It’s pretty simple to do with most modern frameworks like Laravel but it’s also just an annoying boilerplate task. This is just one of many boilerplate tasks that I’ve decided to eliminate by creating a basic starter app that I can pull from GitHub and modify from there.…
Read more »I’m a very visual person so when I’m developing something, I like see and interact with my projects exactly how I would if it was in the production stage. The problem is, I don’t have a handful of test users on call to register on my test application and start using it. Laravel already has an easy way to populate your databases with users and other data but there’s still some manual data entry involved.…
Read more »While reading about different Javascript frameworks and utilities, I kept running across a design patter or technique called ‘promises’. It seems every shiny new Javascript thing utilizes them in some way or another. At first the concept seemed difficult to wrap my head around but eventually it clicked. It isn’t really as difficult as I thought. Javascript as well as other modern languages uses a what are called callback functions. These are functions passed as arguments to other functions and are used to do something with the data that the top level function returns.…
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