By David Foley 14th March 2017
If you're creating your own WordPress theme and you want to include functionality to enable users to send out emails, then you will need to set up a mail template. Before we get into creating a mail template, we need a way to test the mail functionality and a way to preview the created emails. Fortunately for us there's Mailtrap. Mailtrap is a fake SMTP server for development teams to test, view and share emails sent from the development a...
By Jordan Hall 7th March 2017
To help developers easily implement the basics of Stripe into their website and quickly accept payments, we created the open source PHP library SimpleStripe. SimpleStripe SimpleStripe is a package that allows you to really quickly setup a payment form on a website and charge customers. As you probably guessed by its creative name, it makes use of the Stripe payments system. Although Stripe itself is already a very developer friendly ...
By Ollie Reardon 21st November 2016
As Bootstrap 4 introduced some new welcomed features, it also has made some refinements to previous Bootstrap components. Base font size change To improve readability the base font size in Bootstrap 3, ~14px, has been bumped up to ~16px. Dropped support To help reduce page bloat and to aid Bootstrap maintainers with the codebase, there have been several components that have been dropped from Bootstrap 4 LESS SASS is the pre-proc...
By Ollie Reardon 28th October 2016
While Bootstrap 4 has polished up on the features of the previous major release, Bootstrap 3, several new features have been introduced to keep Bootstrap a solid, modern front-end web framework. XL Columns There is a new column breakpoint introduced in Bootstrap 4, Extra Large! Currently the Bootstrap 4 columns are as follows: Size Pixels Extra Small (col-xs) <576px Small (col-sm) >576px Medium (col-md) >768px Large (col-lg) >9...
By Tim Lees 20th April 2016
Local award winning, soft fruit growers, Littywood Farm approached Rapid Web Services to re-design their website to bring it up to date. Using their existing logo the brief was to give the website a more modern look, easy to navigate and to serve as a reference point for prospective employees and buyers alike. The client requested the website to be responsive across all devices and specified that they wanted to update the content on the websi...
By Tim Lees 8th March 2016
The maturity and flexibility that WordPress has grown in to in the last two to three years means that the platform is now is a primary option when we look at development and deployment of websites. With each WordPress development we undertake there a number of core WP plugins that we look to install as a matter of course that not only aides’ site development but also our work flow on the project. 1) WPCore Plugin Manager https://wpcore....
By Kirsty Gasston 4th March 2016
As web designers and web developers, there is a certain amount of terminology that we use on such a regular basis that it often doesn’t occur to us that other people that we’re working with, including our customers, might not know what some of the things we’re referring to are. We’re working on a bit of a ‘glossary of terms’ at the moment to help clarify some of words we use – this is helpful in that we can provide a copy to clients...
By Ollie Reardon 25th February 2016
At the end of 2014, Google reinvented the way website developers can combat against pesky spam bots on the web. Introducing Google ReCaptcha, a simple way to prove that you are a human reading the website. If you are a frequent Internet user, you may have seen previous methods of proving you are not a spam bot like the one pictured above. These have many problems - not only is the text hard to read (resulting in having to retry multiple ti...
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 Jordan Hall 19th October 2015
Google Contacts PHP library We're happy to announce that we have recently open sourced a Google Contacts API PHP client library. This library is MIT licensed (so anyone can use it) and available on our GitHub account. For more information about Rapid Web Services Services open source efforts, please visit our Rapid Web Services open source mini-site. About This Google Contacts API library is designed for use in PHP frameworks and general PHP...
By Mark Jones 19th June 2015
Inversion of Control (IoC) In the previous article (part 2), we talked about using Dependency Injection and Programming to an Interface to make your code more modular. However, we realised that we still had an issue with confusion and complexity whenever we needed to instantiate a class that requires a lot of arguments to be passed to it. Also if any of the classes arguments needed changing, then we would have to go through all our code and mod...
By Mark Jones 8th June 2015
Real World Example In the previous article in this series, I spoke about dependency injection using cars and engines as an example. In this article I will show you a more practical example by showing you how easy it can be for your system to switch between different database ORMs (Eloquent and PDO in this example) without having to recode everywhere that interacts with the database. Just in case you're not sure what an ORM is, ORM stands for O...