You may find we don’t write on our blog every day like a lot of other companies. We try to focus on publishing quality posts about a certain area of the market that we feel strongly about. Although we probably should be posting more frequently, most of our time is spent developing web solutions that will be eventually released as open source or as a commercial solution for you and your company.

If you’ve installed Mac OS X Leopard 10.5 already and you use the built in apache server “Web Sharing” you will need to follow these steps before your web server works again. If you’ve tried to visit a page on your local server, you will be greeted by this message: Forbidden (403) You don't have permission to access /~danielerrante/ezslide/ on this server. Leopard fails to copy the settings from apache in Tiger to apache2 in Leopard. Therefore, you will need to follow these simple steps to get your server up again.

We released our open source authorization system today. It helps you manage your users on your website, taking care of the following: - user registration (with optional e-mail verification) - user login - lost account retrieval - password changing - user session management - password protecting certain pages or sections of your website It is built using the CodeIgniter PHP framework so you will need that installed until we port it for general use. Check it out, there’s a fully working online demo and user guide with lots of documentation as well!

We launched a great new web2.0 service the other day called ListRankr. ListRankr allows you to make lists about anything. For example, if you want to find some great Italian restaurants in your local area, you can go to ListRankr and view the list of local restaurants, in order of people’s preference. Users can vote restaurants up or down, mark their favorite (which counts as an extra vote), and read reviews about every restaurant in the list. If the list doesn’t exist, create it! Then invite your friends to review and rank your list. You can make a list for pretty much everything....

I have written a few articles on CodeIgniter now because it truly has changed the way I develop websites. It has cut the development time in at least half, preventing redundant work by providing great built-in features that I can use in every one of my projects. Plus, CodeIgniter is so easy to pick up. You can start building CI apps in about 10 minutes after watching the CI tutorials and reading my tutorial on getting set up. If you are new to Object Oriented Programming, you can read my introduction to OOP also. The way CodeIgniter keeps you organized is this: It keeps everything separate and...

I use the CodeIgniter and MooTools frameworks for my website projects nowadays. They are far easier to work with and understand if you understand Object Oriented Programming. If you are spaghetti coding your websites line by line, you will be in for a treat when you learn OOP. Here is how it works: Say you want to describe a human being with code. You will create a class called Human: class Human { } Now, you want the human to perform a few functions. This is simple also; you create functions within the class to describe the human’s actions. class Human { function Eat($food) { } ...

CodeIgniter is great because you can separate your content from your styling with controllers, models, and views. Another great thing is when you create a website with CI, you automatically use friendly URLs (if you use an .htaccess file). If you have a bunch of unrelated pages however, you might wonder how you can keep those URLs as tiny as possible without having thirty different controllers for each page. For example, I have a CI application with a home controller that has about 20 different functions inside of it. To access each one of these functions, I would normally visit http://localhost/home/contact...

CodeIgniter is an awesome tool if you want to learn PHP or start to use object oriented programming (OOP) with your new website. CodeIgniter is flexible with a small footprint and offers tons of features already built in, such as session management, active record use with mysql databases. The best part is it lets you use Model-View-Controller (MVC) programming. This way, your styling (view) is separate from your content (generated by controller) and lets you manipulate your raw data with a model. There are two awesome video tutorials on CodeIgniter to show you how powerful and easy CodeIgniter...