It is quite remarkable how far and how fast we, as in “we the people”, have come in the last 20 years with technology. Those of us old enough to remember the world before the World Wide Web and the Internet, are most amazed at this incredible transformation. Remember buying film for cameras? Waiting for film to be developed? Or traveling by car and having to buy road maps just to get to where you were going? Or getting in a phone booth and … Continue reading →

JavaScript is one of the most universally-used client-side scripting languages on the web today. When coders think of script languages, they are used to dealing with functionality that is more basic than what you would get in a full-blown object-oriented server-side language. However, what many developers don’t realize is that JavaScript actually has object-oriented capabilities under the hood. How can you create objects in JavaScript? While there are a couple of different ways to do this, one of the simplest – and easiest to maintain … Continue reading →

Many e-commerce plugins have been launched for WordPress in recent years, but is the blogging platform a viable solution for handling online payments?  E-Commerce is becoming an increasingly attractive business, totaling $194 billion sales in 2011 alone.  Many site owners are eager to capitalize on the growing market, but there is much more to e-commerce than activating a plugin.  What do you need to know? Onsite vs. Offsite Payments E-commerce can be easily grouped into two categories, onsite and offsite.  Offsite payments are much simpler … Continue reading →

Last week we introduced you to Views, one of the most popular modules for Drupal.  We reviewed how to create a View and customize the results for display on a website.  However, that alone won’t be helpful to most developers used to building templates from scratch.  Views has many more advanced features that we have yet to uncover. Filters Filters can be defined via the Views UI, and allows users to narrow down the results of a view depending on any of the fields available … Continue reading →

We at DBS have always believed strongly in supporting the open-source community. In the past, we’ve developed a variety of resources to help developers advance their abilities and offered them access to these tools free of charge. Our WordPress Reference guide has gained world-wide acclaim and has helped many aspiring developers brush up on their skills. Although we love WordPress, it is not the sole Content Management System that our team is considered to be knowledgeable. Drupal is one of our favorite CMS’s to use … Continue reading →

TinyMCE is a standalone platform that converts text-input fields into an editor instance with many user-friendly controls that are commonly associated with word processing software (Micosoft Word, OpenOffice Writer, etc.). WordPress includes a What You See is What You Get (WYSIWYG) editor by default, but the TinyMCE Advanced plugin adds additional functionality and potential for customization. What is a WYSIWYG Editor? To understand the benefit of TinyMCE Advanced, you must first understand what a WYSIWYG editor is, and how it adds value to a content … Continue reading →

At DBS>Interactive, we are always creating and improving websites and web applications – it’s what we do. A well-designed website should offer the end user an intuitive, easy to navigate gateway into what your company has to offer. If you sell products online, it should be easy for them to place orders. If they need more information, it should be simple to find. And the whole experience should be attractive and seamless. But beneath the sleek exterior of a well-done website, there is a lot … Continue reading →

WordPress is an amazing blogging platform that provides a solid foundation for over 20% of active websites.  However, every WordPress site is not a personal blog.  Many sites powered by WordPress use plugins to customize and extend the functionality of their installations.  WordPress.org currently hosts almost 20,000 WordPress plugins for download, but how can you find a reliable solution for your website’s needs?  Below we breakdown one of the most popular plugins on WordPress.org by critiquing it’s performance in three general areas. Overview The Advanced … Continue reading →

Generally when it comes to software, web-based or otherwise, a user should always have the most recent version available.  However, while Drupal 7 includes many functionality and performance improvements relative to Drupal 6, the latter has been extensively tested by the development community and has more complete documentation.  So which version of Drupal is the right solution for your project? Modules Most of the value from using Drupal comes from its extensibility through modules and themes. However modules built for Drupal 6 will not work … Continue reading →

SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (Protect IP Act), the controversial bills that have stirred an abundance of protests, were initially proposed as a solution to Internet users illegally downloading and/or accessing copyrighted material. Despite early support from the Senate and many major companies, the bills became a target of public scrutiny because of how they would restrict seemingly inherit freedoms of the Internet.  SOPA and PIPA are not protested because they attempt to enforce existing copyright law, but instead how they would enforce … Continue reading →

There is no debate; the Panda updates of the last year greatly changed the search landscape – however some would argue that it created more losers than winners. While the impact of the Panda updates was broad in its extent, affecting an estimated 11.8% of searches, Google’s recently announced “Freshness” update is estimated to dwarf Panda in comparison, affecting an estimated 35% of searches. But unlike Panda, which had a clear victim (That of course being the content farms producing the low quality content), the … Continue reading →

How does ownership of intangible property such as a “website” work? If you pay someone to create a website for you, what do really you own? If you buy a chair, that is pretty straightforward, but a website is full of intangible elements that might be owned by a number of different entities. Ownership of programming code, software, graphics and the various other bits and pieces that makes up a website, is not an easy thing to pin down, not even for people in the … Continue reading →

Google Code is a website dedicated to providing developers a myriad of tools and resources for both Google products and other open source development tools.  Google code is also home to many development blogs and discussion groups for communication between developers and at times Google employees. I’ve listed below some of the many ways that we developers use Google Code: Fun with APIs Google Code hosts documentation and discussion on the APIs based on Google’s popular products (Ads, Analytics, Calendar, etc.) and popular code libraries … Continue reading →

SQL injection is the most prevalent security weaknesses among websites and web applications. The malicious technique has a variety of applications, but the general concept is to exploit security vulnerabilities in database applications by injecting code into data inputs.  SQL injections are attempted/executed via interfaces built for accepting user input (i.e, registration forms, search forms, etc.). High awareness of this technique and the ease of detecting such weaknesses allow attackers to constantly ‘test’ the integrity of a site/application’s security with minimal effort. Dangers A successfully … Continue reading →

As an old wise man once said, “the only constant in life is change”. Nowhere is this fact more true than in the case of search engines and their primary search algorithms. According to Matt Cutts, Google made approximately 350-400 changes to their algorithm in 2009. That averages to over one change every day! The next year, Udi Manber, Google’s head of search, stated in a Wired Article titled, “How Google’s Algorithm Rules the Web,” that Google introduced over 550 changes to their algorithm in … Continue reading →

Continuing off from where we left off on CMS’s two weeks ago, this week’s blog post we’ll attempt to help those on the fence of deciding which content management system to choose for their web development project.  Although there are many options of CMS’s, we will limit our discussion to three of our favorites — WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla. Between these three options, you can pretty much create any type of site you can dream up. We’ve rated each of these 3 options based on … Continue reading →