Web Development Archives - We Rock Your Web

A Complete Guide To URL Escape Characters

In order to prevent the misinterpretation of special characters such as a space, bracket (< and >), or % in the URL (which stands for Uniform Resource Locator – it is the address you see in your browser’s address bar indicating the location of the website you are visiting), browsers parse certain special characters using escape characters. This explains why when you click on a link such as: domain.com/page one.htm you see it parsed in the address bar as example.com/page%20one.htm. In this case the %20 is the escape character for the space…

Comprehensive Guide to Testing Browser Compatibility

Woman on computerIt’s important for any web developer to thoroughly test the rendering of their pages by various browsers in use today. The question is – how do we know which browsers are currently being used? There are many sites out there that offer various browser usage statistics, but more often than not, the data is simply a reflection of visitor-usage stats for that particular site. For specific client bases, this may not be a problem.

Exporting and Importing Drupal Nodes

Before Drupal, I used development environments where I could comfortably update snippets of content on multiple pages (at times literally hundreds) in seconds. Since delving into the CMS (Content Management Systems) world, and particularly Drupal, I have become fond of all the features, and especially the support community, that CMS users benefit from. However, I wasn’t able to find a way to easily update all my nodes.

Useful XML and XSLT Tutorial with Example Stylesheet

XML stands for eXtensible Markup Language. XML is a meta language based entirely on user-specified semantics. It is therefore possible to create a page structure with user-defined tags and a DTD or XML Schema to describe the data. In other words, the XML describes itself. XML was designed to store, carry, and exchange data; not to display data…

What to Do When Firefox Stalls or Hangs

I have encountered this problem off and on. Read on for a list of possible reasons that cause Firefox to hang…

Drupal Multisite Configurations and Hosts

The ability for Drupal to run multiple sites from one account is a huge plus for admins that are deploying multiple Drupal installations. The simple reason for this is that all Drupal installations can be updated at once. Basically each additional domain “points” to the document root of your primary Drupal installation. All you need to do to update the files of each additional Drupal site is update the files in the root install once…

How to Vertically and Horizontally Center CSS?

Pre-css most centering was accomplished using the grid-like structure that tables provided. All fine and good, but the CSS positioning module offers layout options that tables could only dream of. Here’s how to vertically and horizontally center an element in pure CSS…

Looking for a List of Valid HTML Escape Characters?

HTML escape character lists often include characters between 128 and 159 – the problem is that these are Microsoft specific, and are reserved for control characters in the standard Internet character sets. In HTML they are undefined, and in XHTML they are completely invalid. Read on for a list of valid HTML escape characters you should use….

Joomla: How to Reset Super Admin Password

Before we begin, you must have access to your database. If you don’t, pass these instructions on to someone that does. It’s also a good idea to backup your database before making changes, just in case something goes awry…

Step-By-Step Guide On How To Setup MX Records

Setting MX records manually can be useful if you want to host your site on one server but handle email via another server or hosting company. If you have access to WHM (Web Host Manager – the interface you typically get with a cPanel-based hosting provider on a multi-site plan), you can usually set MX records yourself. If you do not, submit a support ticket to your hosting provider.

Integrating phpBB with Drupal

While Drupal’s forums function fine and provide simple forum functionality, many users want the advanced functionality and extra features that bulletin board applications such as phpBB provide. However, getting the two to work together can be a real pain. So here’s a tutorial on integrating the two. In this example we use Drupal 4.7.x and phpBB 2.0.x. We can’t guarantee that this tutorial will work for other versions, although it may be worth a shot. Finally, this tutorial assumes that you already have a working drupal installation…

How Do I Clear the Cache and Cookies in Chrome? Firefox? Safari? iPhone? Android? Internet Explorer? Google?

What is cache and why should I care? Your cache is used by your web browser, smartphone, and even gaming machine to decrease page loading time. By storing a copy of the page to load the next time you visit, your browser can skip the time associated with loading all the page’s objects and making database calls, something that happens every time the page is loaded. Typically the cache will clear on a page update – that is, when a page changes, your browser will reload the page’s objects and make new database calls to ensure you’re seeing the newest version of the page. However, sometimes caches get borked up and cause problems. That’s when you need to learn how to clear them. If clearing the cache doesn’t fix your problem, you may need to clear your cookies as well. We show you the quickest and easiest way to do that…