Mark’s Site

Stuff you need to know about downgrading

When I first started web development, one thing I was always torn on was how to design my screens. I had loads of information that I needed to display in some meaningful, easy to search format. After many years of trial and error, I’ve now got my ‘template’ screens that I use for all my content management screens.

It can be confusing when you start developing in a new language to know about the rules for commenting.

It’s so important to have a separate staging environment, so you can make changes (major or minor) and test the results BEFORE releasing to your live server.

This article explains the importance of lightweight documentation.

My preferred approach to any moderately sized system is a modular, or component based approach.

A useful class I picked up somewhere, and possibly modified in the years since, that handles the work of file uploads. I’ve found it very useful, so hopefully you will to.

I try to use a central database class in my code, simply because if I ever need to migrate from MySQL to another database engine (such as Microsoft SQL or Postgres), all I have to do is alter the one database class file and my application is all converted. Since everything goes through the database class, it’s the only file you need to change in such an instance.

I find it’s always useful to keep this functionality in a function. This example relies on some global variables …pretty easy to understand.

Need to get a list of files from a folder on your server? Maybe it’s a list of photos that you want to manipulate with PHP, this function will grab all files from a specified directory and return them in an array for you.