Punctilious

Using PHP For Modular Design - Introduction

This may be old news, but Dreamweaver’s templating system has some serious drawbacks. To begin with, even if you’ve gone through a great deal of trouble to nest templates, you have to be very confident that the pages you intend to change are still in fact associated with the template. What if you move between your laptop and your desktop system pretty regularly? What if you have several dozen (or hundreds of) pages that will all be affected by a template change? That’s right, you’ll be re-uploading all those pages.

I propose that you work smart, not hard, next time you set up a site. If you get used to a system like I’m proposing, you’ll get to reuse code over and over again, making your future worktime more efficient, and thereby driving more profits your way. I’m sure many designers out there are doing this already, but this series of articles is intended to help those designers out there who are struggling with the learning curve. I hope this helps a little.

In a nutshell: We’ll be using PHP to perform server-side includes for the header, navigation, and footer of all pages on the site. We’ll set up some associative arrays for the header information, and if you choose to use a database, I’ll throw in some tips for that method as well. The beauty of this system is that when you need to update the an individual piece of your site, all you’ll need to do is update one PHP script and upload it.

Turing Tests And Sacrificing Accessibility

I’ve been using Turing tests (CAPTCHA images) for quite a while now, but a huge drawback is that making a CAPTCHA image more accessible also compromises its inherent security. None of us like spam, but I’m sure we also don’t like the idea of refusing to accept forms from (even a small percentage) of our users.

So with that, I’ve recently turned away from CAPTCHA images and started using a simple math problem. It’s no big deal to create a random one-digit addition problem and ask the user to solve it, and if you incorporate server-side and client-side validation, you’ll have a very user-friendly and accessible form on your site.

Can a script figure out the math problem? Sure. But so far I’ve been using my script on every site I’ve developed, and I haven’t had one report of spam through an online form. Is it perfect? No, far from it. But it seems to work well for now, and it’s very simple to implement.

Want to see an example? Check out my firm’s contact form at 107 Designs.

Hello World!

Well, after spending years on the sidelines of the weblog playing field, I’ve decided to launch Punctilious. Although there are a lot of great PHP/MySQL developers out there on the Interweb, I feel that loads of the tutorials, scripts, and how-tos are sorely out-of-date. Specifically, I’d like to address development and design in one blog, focusing on web standards, usability, accessibility, and modular code. Since I do it all, I feel like I’m in an interesting position to write about it.
So with that, I begin my journey into the great blogosphere, boldly going where ~~no man has~~ many men have gone before.