By Jordan Hall 14th February 2018
Country information is used so frequently in modern web development. This is especially true in customer relationship managements systems and e-commerce websites. Since we do a lot of e-commerce and CRM development here at Rapid Web Services, we developed an open source library to easily retrieve country information. The rest of this post will detail how you can use this library, PHP Countries, and what it is capable of. Installation To inst...
By Jordan Hall 3rd November 2017
If you've ever needed to display opening times for a business on their website you'll probably have encountered the edge case of differing opening times on UK Bank Holidays. The UK government provides information regarding all UK Bank Holidays, and we've written a small open-source PHP library to take advantage of this. Installation You can install the PHP UK Bank Holidays package using Composer. If you've never used Composer before, you can fi...
By Andrew McDonald 12th October 2017
So the new long-term support version of Laravel has been released taking us from the last long-term support version v5.1 to v5.5 with all the improvements that brings, however while there is plenty of guides around for upgrading from v5.4 to v5.5 there are none for upgrading from v5.1 straight to v5.5 unless you painstakingly upgrade to every version in between. But don't worry I have already been doing the upgrades to our current projects in ho...
By Jordan Hall 17th August 2017
This article is aimed at developers looking to migrate existing data from one database schema to another. It should be very useful if you are planning to move from one system to another, such as moving from Drupal to WordPress, or wishing to migrate external data into a new bespoke system. The UXDM (Universal Extensible Data Migrator) is an open source PHP library we have created to simplify the process of moving data from any source to any dest...
By Jordan Hall 7th January 2016
In 2015, Rapid Web Services made a commitment to increase their contributions to the open source community. We therefore started several open source projects. This post will go over some of the most interesting open source contributions we made last year. Direct Share Buttons Including large amounts of external JavaScript and 3rd party code for all the various social media sites can be a pain. They can slow down the loading and rendering of you...
By Peter Chiu 5th March 2014
When creating your ecommerce website, one of the main things you need to consider is what type of payment gateway(s) you wish to offer. There are a number of payment gateways which can be integrated in to ecommerce websites from big names such as PayPal and HSBC to lesser known gateways that use crypto currencies such as Bit Pay which utilises Bitcoin. Sage Pay is a popular option for many online businesses as it is a proven and trusted gateway ...
By Jordan Hall 27th February 2014
I previously discussed the reasons why you should accept Bitcoin payments on your e-commerce website. Now, it is important to mention how to actually go about accepting bitcoins on your website. One of the concerns merchants can raise regarding bitcoins is their volatility. Due to how new the bitcoin economy is, their value can fluctuate significantly during the course of a day. Although investing in bitcoins by holding them can be quite profit...
By Jordan Hall 20th September 2011
We recently posted about the launch of BanksyTshirts.org. If this interested you, you may also be interested in the recent launch of another Banksy t-shirts website! Rapid Web Services is happy to announce the recent launch a t-shirt website based solidly on our main and highly, flexible e-commerce system. This website offers a full e-commerce experience for both the visitors browsing the advanced front-end shopping basket/cart system, and for ...
By Jordan Hall 9th September 2011
Rapid Web Services is happy to announce our latest client's website launch, a brand new Kids t-shirts website! If you want a t-shirt for your child, or maybe your young one wants to pick our a t-shirt of their choice - this brand new kids t-shirts website may be the place to look. :) This websites for young t-shirt buyers, is powered by our primary e-commerce system. This e-commerce website system can be highly enhanced and modified to fit the ...
By Jordan Hall 5th September 2011
Several of us in the Rapid Web Services office are into some quite geeky hobbies, myself especially. Rapid Web Services is proud to announce the recent launch of Something Geeky, a brand new e-commerce website which sells geek t-shirts and other general geeky products. This e-commerce website is based on our custom in-house e-commerce system, which allows our clients to administrate their products and site options via a secure, custom and b...
By Jordan Hall 31st August 2011
We're very happy to announce to recent launch of Banky T-shirts.org, a website that sells t-shirts from the graphic artist Banksy, and donates £1 of each Banksy t-shirt to a charity of your choice! This website uses our in-house e-commerce system to power the online e-commerce shopping experience and the Wordpress blogging system to power the Banksy News section. This Banksy t-shirt website is a great example of how our in-house e-commerce sys...
By Jordan Hall 26th July 2011
The PHP scope resolution operator in PHP is a useful feature when you need to access methods or variables within a static context. It can often be useful in reducing namespace conflicts. Especially when using custom code with off the shelf systems to avoid conflicting function redefinitions. There have been a few cases where previously defined function errors have cropped up when adding a pre made system to a custom developed application. This i...