specializing in digital media technologies

I’ve been meaning to post about this for a while, but in case you haven’t caught this yet, Adobe has created a resource called BrowserLab. First, there’s a Web-based version, which only requires an Adobe account to log in and use. After you’ve done that, enter a URL and you can view how that Web page looks in various browsers. Right now, only browsers on Windows XP (Firefox 2, 3, and 3.5; IE 6, 7, and 8; Chrome 3) and Mac OS X (Safari 3 and 4; Firefox 2, 3, and 3.5) are supported, but it’s a wonderful start. For anyone needing to see how their site renders on other browsers, including operating systems they may not have, this is a wonderful tool. There’s also a way to compare how a page renders on multiple browsers at one time, so that you can get that pixel perfect look. If you’re using Dreamweaver CS4, there’s even a BrowserLab extension, so you can have the same functionality without leaving your Web development tool.

For more, also see this video on Adobe TV.

I’ve been writing quite a bit about the Yii framework for PHP lately and thought a listing of useful resources would be in order. Yii is still a relatively new framework, so there’s not a lot out there, but people are taking an interest in the framework and making a point to share what they learn, which is always a good sign. To start, there’s the stuff at Yii’s site:

• The Definitive Guide to Yii, which is a descriptive overview of most of Yii’s features. This is a very accessible way to get into Yii.
• The Yii Cookbook, with lots of useful little recipes. Great for learning how to expand your application.
• The Blog Tutorial, which walks through the creation of a blog using Yii. Easy to follow, but not applicable to everything you’ll do.
• Yii Framework Class Reference, which details every class in the framework. This is the ultimate source for using the framework from a syntax perspective, but isn’t as easy to read and apply to your own code.
• The Yii Forum, for help and seeing what other people are doing.

All of the above are obviously linked on Yii’s own documentation page. That page also lists a Yii Cheat Sheet, plus some screen- and podcasts.

In working with Yii, I’ve also come across these writings:

Jonah’s Thoughts on PHP and Things Related has a handful of posts on Yii. They’re all from late-2008 and early-2009, so they’re getting to be a bit outdated but are still worth a read.

Kevin Korb has quite a few posts on Yii, specifically Yii+MySQL, plus a video tutorial on installing Yii on Mac OS X.

There’s a fairly long tutorial for beginners at SterlingSavvy.com.

My recommendation would be to start with the Definitive Guide, then move onto the other sources to help get a sense of a real-world use of those ideas.

After using Yii‘s command-line tools to build an application’s base structure, and then to create its Models and crud functionality, there’s still quite a bit of customizing to do (although Yii really does perform the bulk of the work). Previous posts discuss some of the common changes one makes to Models and Views at this point in the development stage; here I’ll discuss Controllers. I have personally found that I don’t make nearly the level of alterations to my auto-generated Controllers as I do to my Models and Views. This makes sense, as the Model should have the bulk of the code, the View is the interface the end user sees, and the Controller is largely an agent between the two (see my series on the MVC architecture for more on this). (continue reading…)