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 David Foley 5th May 2017
Custom post types are the same as a basic post type that are already present in WordPress. However, the beauty of custom post types is that you can tweak them to your individual needs, allowing for great customisation. Custom post types are perfect for those projects where the default post type just isn't up to the task. In this blog post, I will be going over how to create a simple custom post type in WordPress and then provide a number of ex...
By Andrew McDonald 21st March 2017
The importance of functionality testing during large scale projects cannot be underestimated and is even more important while using version control. What happens if the lovely login process you have just completed suddenly stops working because another developer has inadvertently uploaded new functionality that, while not directly influencing your login process, has still caused it to break? One way to go about fixing this would be by testing ...
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 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 20th June 2014
Note: The following article is satire. We urge you not to follow its advice. So, you want to make yourself (or your client) a terribly insecure website? No worries, here is our guide to making your easily hackable dream come true. Passwords - Passwords are a complete waste of time, aren't they? They inconvenience youÂ...
By Jordan Hall 27th January 2014
It is commonplace in web development to make use of a development and/or testing environment where websites live before they go in front of the ever watchful public. Many web development testing platforms exist, such as: A single development server which all developers share over a network Individual installations of web and databases servers on each developer's workstation Testing environments built into developer IDEs These methods all ha...
By Jordan Hall 9th February 2010
Facebook, one of the largest and most well known PHP powered social networking websites has made significant changes to its web design. Facebook have taken a more minimalistic web design approach in many respects, removing most of the bottom application and instant messaging bar, and moving to a left hand side bar. From a technical perspective, Facebook have increased their use of many web technologies such as JavaScript and AJAX in an effort to...
By Jordan Hall 4th February 2010
Will Apple's release of the iPad slow the surge past few years of mobile web development? Some people think so. The release of Apple's ever popular smartphone, the iPhone, back in mid 2007 caused a huge development spike in websites and dynamic web applications designed the mobile devices. Of course, the vast majority of these mobile website were developed specifically with the iPhone in mind, however the results were beneficial to pretty much a...
In a move that should help with mobile web design and development for Nokia's mobile devices, the Symbian operating system which powers these devices has been made open source. Nokia is releasing their Symbian operating system, which includes the Symbian web browser, under an open source license. Symbian is the most popular smartphone operating system, and its total code base is valued at "billions of dollars". The open sourcing of Symbian hopes...