Your One-Stop Guide to Laravel Commands In this day and age, it's quite normal for a developer to have an understanding of consoles, and how to issue basic commands. But what if you could code your own custom commands to improve your workflow? If we look back to Laravel 3, you might remember that it offered tasks. What is Artisan? Artisan is the command line utility that was released in Laravel 3. If you're not familiar with Laravel, then you might not be aware of Artisan. Artisan offers many useful commands that can help you perform various tasks, such as generating migrations or publishing a package's assets. Artisan's Foundations This is where Artisan draws its power. In Laravel 3, Artisan was written from scratch by Taylor Otwell (Laravel's creator), thus it was quite basic (although still awesome). If we take a look at the source of the Artisan application at Illuminate\Console\Application, we can see that the class, itself, extends Symfony\Component\Console\Application. Common Questions Q Where should I put commands? Options
How to Integrate Slack with Github, Google Drive and more A few years back, the primary mode of communication for a team was via mailing lists (for example, those old Python mailman lists — remember those?) As time passed, Google Groups came to the rescue, and managing threads for team communications became a lot easier. Teams all around the world began to use it, and most were happy with its features. In recent years, however, tools like Redmine and Trello have arrived, providing greater control over projects — with features for project management a step ahead of forums. At IMG, IIT Roorkee, we used Google Groups as our primary mode of communication, until we realized the time had come to take it to the next level. Slack is a collection of chat rooms, both public and private. Getting Started If you are the team lead, just head over to Slack and create your team. You can create public or private chat rooms, with the option of one-to-one messaging as well. Here’s a bonus — you can customize almost everything. Search Custom notifications 1. 2. 3.
Speaking With the Ember.js Core Team Single page apps are the new hotness; everyone's trying to figure out the easiest way to build them. But it's more than just finding a couple of controls to slap together and sprinkling Ajax pixie dust on it. Building scalable and maintainable apps is serious business, which requires serious tools. Ember.js is a very serious framework for doing just that. Check out the interview I did with Ember.js Core Team leads, Yehuda Katz and Tom Dale, as they discuss what prompted them to begin the Ember project, its design philosophy, and where it fits into an already crowded library ecosystem. Q Tell us about your professional backgrounds. Yehuda: I was an Accounting major in college, with a whole bunch of interesting minors (Journalism, Philosophy, History, TV/Radio). I had rejected a computer science major on the grounds that it was too hard and "not for me," even though I had done a small amount of QBasic programming as a kid and some Visual Basic in college. Take bindings, for example.
10 Time Saving Online Color Tools for Web Designers Working with colors is a time consuming task for a web designer, for starters you need to pick out a color palette for your designs, then there’s all kinds of code values to remember and convert from hex to RGBa. To speed things up and make the designer’s life much easier a bunch of handy tools are available online. These tools help you pick, choose and convert your color selections with ease for your next web design project. If you’re starting a design from scratch with no brand guidelines or colour inspiration it can be tricky putting together a colour scheme that works. Here’s a few tools that will help you put together a pretty combination of colours that are guaranteed to work. ColourLovers ColourLovers is home to millions of user generated color palettes. Kuler Adobe’s Kuler is a powerful tool that only allows you to browse and rate existing color themes, but also includes tools for creating your own palette from scratch. Pictalulous color.hailpixel.com Hexu.al CSS Color Names Sphere
How To Clean Up & Optimize Your WordPress Install WordPress is a pretty robust application that is kept up to date with regular bug fixes and security patches, but it really benefits from a bit of maintenance to keep it running fast and efficiently. Over time WordPress saves snippets of information to its database, which can become bloated with unnecessary values, thus slowing down your site and putting more stress on your server setup. In this post we’ll look at 10 ways you can give your WordPress install a spring clean to trim the fat and put everything in its place. Hopefully you will already have some kind of database backup system in place. The most important parts of your WordPress install are saved within your database, this includes the post content and all the options you’ve configured for your site. If your site has been live for a number of years, think of all the plugins you’ve installed and since removed in that period of time. define('WP_POST_REVISIONS', false );
The Holy Grail of Conference Talks: Live Coding If you've ever been to a code-focused conference before, you can surely attest to the fact that the number of live-coding talks is incredibly low. The reason why is obvious: they're super, super hard! Imagine coding on stage in front of hundreds of people, when, all of the sudden, something goes wrong, and your code breaks! In real life, a few minutes of debugging is a non-issue. On stage, even a single moment of silence is a speaker's nightmare. So, should we never attempt such talks? What's Live Coding? Tip 1 - Make a Decision If you're the nervous type, this may not be a good choice. Certainly, when preparing a new talk, the most important question to ask yourself is if there's any value in doing a live-coding presentation. You might consider taking the live-coding route in the following instances: Your code samples require context to be as effective as possible. Tip 2 - Practice, Practice, Practice Practice. When speaking on stage, you should fully expect to blank at least a few times.
Responsive Design Is a Way Forward, Not for Everyone Though February 26th, 2013 Author: admin Category : Responsive design 2 Flares Twitter 1 Facebook 1 Google+ 0 StumbleUpon 0 LinkedIn 0 inShare0 2 Flares × Responsive Web design has proved that it’s not a fad but a surefire way to the future – one that makes us daring, and responsible too. But is it for you? Nobody knows what tomorrow holds for us. And thinking about it is often scary. Benefits You can give a rich Web experience to users from all kind of mobile devices – known or unknown.You need not worry about content parity when going with responsive Web design. Challenges Navigation is one of the trickiest of responsive design problems. There are many more problems with responsive design, such as site’s size, performance, images, etc., but everything can be and is being fixed. Is responsive design for you? Do you run a blog and the user behavior to your desktop site is similar to the user behavior on your mobile site? (Have been liking our posts for a while?
Headless Functional Testing with Selenium and PhantomJS Let's build a system for performing functional tests on web applications, using Selenium and PhantomJS. The resulting system will allow us to write easy test scenarios in JavaScript, and test those scenarios both in real browsers and a headless simulator. The obvious downside to Selenium is that it requires a full graphical desktop for any and all tests. To begin, we have to choose a browser control or emulation engine to simulate an end-user. For a long time, the primary player in this field was Selenium, and it still is. Selenium allows for automated control of real browsers on real operating systems, which is its primary advantage: you can be absolutely certain that the tests represent reality as closely as possible. The obvious downside to Selenium is that it requires a full graphical desktop for any and all tests. On the opposite end of the spectrum is PhantomJS: A small, but excellent project, running a WebKit engine with full JavaScript access, but without the graphical portion.
Check Out the New Recommended Resources on Nettuts+ We've added a new page to the site, which will help coders grab top quality software, tools and gear. It's filled with our favorite resources that we recommend for developers. You can jump straight over to our Recommended Resources page here on Nettuts+ or read on for further information. Hand Picked Resources for Coding Professionals Our Tuts+ editorial team has hand-picked these resources, which feature core applications, hosting recommendations, code resources, web services, and mobile apps. Keep an eye out for more of these site sections as our Resource pages roll out across the Tuts+ network. What Developer Tools Do You Recommend? This is version 1.0 of this Nettuts+ Resources page. Are there any awesome apps, tools, gear or services that you feel we missed?
Sites of the Week for February 22nd 2013 Line25 Sites of the Week for February 22nd 2013 Line25 Sites of the Week is a weekly roundup of the most outstanding website designs that I stumble across during my every day browsing. In this week’s collection, we have designs from Jim Ramsden, Grooveshark Mobile, Rick Nunn, You Know Who and OC Sport. Jim Ramsden View the website Grooveshark Mobile View the website Rick Nunn View the website You Know Who View the website OC Sport View the website 3inShare Join the mailing list to have new content delivered straight to your email inbox. No Comments Comments are now closed Streamline your Process with Volo Front-end developers face a variety of challenges when creating sites that have repetitive solutions. All sites use a similar DOM skeleton, as well as many common features and attributes. Volo aims to remove some of the effort out of the process, allowing developers to focus on the new aspects of a project, as apposed to the same. If you add a JavaScript file that isn’t AMD compatible, Volo will try and convert it for you. Volo is an application that aids front-end developers by automating their processes. Volo was created with a very special relationship to GitHub; it understands GIT repos, as well as branches and tags. Volo was created by James Burke, the same James Burke that created the very popular require.js library. It may not surprise you that Volo has a very opinionated workflow; it assumes you want to use proper AMD for files, as well as providing presets on where to put files. Is this a bad thing? So let's begin by going through some of Volo's commands. Creating Projects Volofiles
Beginning Test-Driven Development in Python Test-driven development (TDD) is a process that has been documented considerably over recent years. A process of baking your tests right into your everyday coding, as opposed to a nagging afterthought, should be something that developers seek to make the norm, rather than some ideal fantasy. I will introduce the core concepts of TDD. The whole process is very simple to get to grips with, and it shouldn't take too long before you wonder how you were able to get anything done before! In this tutorial, I will introduce the core concepts of TDD, and will provide examples in Python, using the nosetests unit-testing package. What is Test-Driven Development? This approach allows you to escape the trap that many developers fall into. TDD, in its most basic terms, is the process of implementing code by writing your tests first, seeing them fail, then writing the code to make the tests pass. The process can be defined as such: Write a failing unit test Make the unit test pass Refactor Success! Or:
Windows Apps for Web Developers When the editor of Nettuts+ requested an article to show Windows developers love by listing popular web development apps, I was all over it. OSX devs get a lot of attention, so it's good to mix things up a bit. What I want to do is list the development tools that I frequently use as a web developer on Windows. It may not include your favorite, and if it doesn't, please let me know within the comments section. I'm always anxious to find new tools to enhance my workflow! Writing Code Visual Studio 2012 I wrote about Visual Studio before, and I think it's an awesome IDE. Web Essential Extension for VS2012 Thank goodness browser-based debugging tools have evolved to what they are today. This is the extension that makes Visual Studio great for web development. Mads Kristensen, the creator of the extension, is a rockstar! Sublime Text 2 It's the little editor that can. Browsers I shoot for cross-browser sites, so having the broadest possible coverage is key. Browser-Based Dev Tools Browser Extensions