The first thing you will notice that is different about ZF1 and ZF2 is how to install and set up an application. With ZF1, you would typically download the files to a directory on your server (MAMP or WAMP) and set your PHP include path (php.ini) to reference the ZF library. This will keep you from having to download the entire framework for each project. With ZF2, there is a huge emphasis on Composer.  If you are unfamiliar with Composer, it is a package/dependency manager for PHP that Zend uses to install the necessary libraries for your project. Once Composer has set up a new application from Zend’s skeleton application, the last step is configuring a vhost for your project. Once that is complete, you are now set up with a ZF2 project.

Modules are now a big part of ZF2.  From the ZF site, “Zend Framework 2 uses a module system and you organize your main application-specific code within each module”.  For each different section of your site, typically you would set up a different module to handle the different functionality. For instance, if a web application has both users and albums, you would create a module for users (e.g. users/my-account) and one for albums (e.g. albums/{username}/{album_name}).  This is what Zend is referring to as application specific code. There are a few key files that your module needs to have in order for it to be registered {module_name}.php and a module.config.php. These files tell Zend what to load and where to load it.

The last big difference in configuration and setup between ZF1 and ZF2 is the application configuration and routing.  In ZF1, it was very easy to set up an application.ini and routes.ini file and have Zend load these settings. In ZF2, it is very different and much more complicated. It has now been split up into a module with different directories for each section (modules, DB, memcache, etc.). In order for Zend to load your modules, you will need to register your module in the module auto_loading array.

For more detailed information, with working examples, you can visit the ZF website (http://framework.zend.com/learn/).

The post Introduction to Zend Framework 2 appeared first on TECKpert.

Some of the features included in this plugin work with:

• Post title and meta descriptions
• Robots meta configuration
• Breadcrumbs
• Permalink clean up
• XML Sitemap
• RSS Feed enhancements
• Robots.txt and .htaccess custom configuration

Now you are probably asking yourself, c’mon Tony what does this Yoast plugin look like? Well here is your chance to see the plugin work on one of our previous posts WordCamp Miami 2013.

WordPress SEO is not about adding a bunch of plugins to your site and hope for results. TECKpert takes pride in creating the proper campaign based on the client needs to fulfill a successful online experience.

Click here to give the WordPress SEO by Yoast plugin a try.

Want to learn more? Get in touch with a Web Expert

The post Plugin of the Month: WordPress SEO by Yoast appeared first on TECKpert.

Now I know what you might be thinking.

“Why should I care about the aesthetics of a part of the website that no one else but I will be seeing?”

Your website plays an important role in building your brand and business. So why not remind yourself of that fact when logging in?

Here at TECKpert, we do a bit of branding for our clients’ WordPress websites in the backend before launching. It gives our clients a sense of ownership and it’s a neat personal touch, like a doormat saying “Welcome.”

So without further ado, I’ll show how to accomplish this!

1. Upload logo

First off, drop your logo in the images directory of your WordPress theme (‘yourtheme/includes/images/’). It should preferably be a PNG with a width of 274 pixels and a transparent background. Name it “login-logo.png” for the sake of this example.

2. Create an admin stylesheet

Step one, make a new custom stylesheet file titled “admin.css” and drop it in the following directory: ‘yourtheme/includes/css/’

Now add the following code to your stylesheet:

#login h1 a
{
background: url('../images/login-logo.png') no-repeat scroll center top transparent;
}

3. Create filters and actions in functions.php

Once you’re done with that, copy and paste this code into your theme’s functions.php file:

/**
* Function: admin_login_url
* Description: Updates the URL for the logo on the WordPress admin login page
* */
function admin_login_url($url){
return get_bloginfo( 'url' );
}
add_filter('login_headerurl', 'admin_login_url');

/**
* Function: admin_css
* Description: Adds a custom stylesehet to be included in the login.
* */
function admin_css() {
wp_enqueue_style( 'admin_css', get_template_directory_uri() . '/includes/css/admin.css' );
}
add_action('login_head', 'admin_css');

This function makes sure that your stylesheet is only being loaded when you are in the login screen of the site. Nothing special, just a little efficiency.

And you’re done!

Afterward, navigate to yoursite.com/wp-admin and presto, your login page is branded. Now even though your website is built on some really awesome content management software you didn’t make, it feels more like home!

For the more advanced, you can take it a step further even and quickly change the background color of the page and other elements.

Want to learn more? Get in touch with a Web Expert

The post How to Easily Customize the WordPress Admin appeared first on TECKpert.

Here are the steps to get this bad boy up and running:

1. Connect your iPhone (Running iOS6 or later) to your computer using the standard USB cable
2. On your phone go to: Settings -> Safari -> Advanced and turn on the Web Inspector
3. Close Settings, open Safari and Navigate to the site that you wish to debug
4. Open Safari on your computer and go to the Develop tab in the top navigation

5. In the options you will now see your iPhone with the current website you are viewing

6. Once you open that link, you will be greeted with a full web inspector with for your mobile site.

Enjoy and happy debugging!

The post Debug Safari on IOS with your Desktop Inspector appeared first on TECKpert.

Here’s a solution to get rid of that aspect ratio lock.

Note: This is not the best solution as your modifying the core (something we don’t do) but BuddyPress leaves us no option.

Browse to: /wp-content/plugins/buddypress/bp-core/bp-core-cssjs.php

Go to line 62 and comment out the aspectRatio property:

jQuery('#avatar-to-crop').Jcrop({
onChange: showPreview,
onSelect: showPreview,
onSelect: updateCoords,
// aspectRatio: <?php echo $aspect_ratio ?>, */
setSelect: [ 0, 0, <?php echo $full_width?>, <?php echo $full_height?> ]
});

The post Fixing Aspect Ratio Issue with BuddyPress Avatar appeared first on TECKpert.

As a workaholic web developer who has grown so much over the past year, it’s crazy how often my perception of my own skills and my philosophies change the farther I go down this career path. I keep looking back with retrospect and seeing the way I did things only a couple of months ago and I feel like I’ve been consistently improving. Constantly looking back at an inferior or antiquated way of doing things.

This last month and a half, my internship at TECKpert was a catalyst for that process.

But before I go into just how awesome of a time I’ve had so far, I’ll say some things about myself first.

I’m a bit of an odd case. I went up to the University of Florida two years ago as a transfer student fully intent on studying  journalism and making a career out of news reporting. It seems like just yesterday that I took a simple web design class and then shortly after picked up my first book in PHP.

I was hooked. I called it a hobby at first, setting up simple websites for friends and family, and even going so far as to declare a minor in computer science. But at some point, I started enjoying writing code more than I did writing news and decided I wanted to fully commit to the profession. So I came back down to my hometown and enrolled at Florida International University and started studying computer science. Naturally I looked around for internships and that’s how I ended up here at TECKpert.

Now, I look back at where I was as a programmer earlier in this summer and he’s miles apart from where I am today. One reason I’m so different now is because I didn’t have mentors early on when I switched majors from journalism to computer science in college. I didn’t work with people. I was too afraid to interact with anyone. It was hard taking something I saw just as a hobby at the time and seeking to study and live it out to the fullest with no one to give you advice on how to approach a field that you couldn’t understand the complexity of yet. I tried keeping to myself as much as I could these past two years so I could fail and learn quietly.

I reached a milestone this summer when I really started working with frameworks and tinkering with coding database driven websites. Just when I thought I was approaching what I thought could be my peak, when I had just given it my all into making a website for my school business organization, I got a web development internship at TECKpert.

In the first couple of weeks, I worked on two websites and really went nose-to-nose with WordPress, an old friend of mine. I learned some pretty cool tricks and got out of so many jams thanks to David, the senior developer here. David does a lot of work on clients’ websites and in-house web applications. He actually went to University of Alabama so he and Adrian, the guy who runs things around here and happens to be a University of Florida alumnus, become bitter rivals during college football season.

Working with David and Adrian, I learned what it was like to interact with my own kind. To figure out my role as well as other peoples’ roles in the website development process.  I haven’t really worked closely with our two designers, Sebastion and Eze, but I hope to learn a little more about them soon. They usually hand off design elements to me like logos and markup code but I don’t interact much with them other that. I’m also curious to see if I’ll get to interact with our marketing team as well at some point.

On the work environment, I’d say that while we may work with corporate clients, it’s far from corporate here. The closest thing to a dress code is a simple polo embroidered with the TECKpert logo that we could choose to wear to work in place of our usual casual attire (granted that we of course dress respectfully, and not in boxers or profane t-shirts).  When I started, I could tell right away that there was no need for formalities here. Like most tech companies, we were meritocrats. At the end of the day, what mattered was what we could accomplish and how well we implemented it. Adrian went out of his way to show me the ropes these first couple of weeks and give me plenty of guidance. Even though he manages things around here, he’s a still a programmer and an experienced one at that, so it’s incredibly easy to know what he expects of me and to generally discuss technical things.

Now, it’s not like I was put to work in my own corner and did nothing but type away in an IDE. When I wasn’t churning out code, Adrian  had me contacting clients to get content from them or walk them through features we were working on. At first, I’d send emails to clients that would go through him. Then he put more trust me and had me call them myself with no real script other than, “just ask them if they have this or that yet, and tell them about this or that.” I did quality assurance forms. I communicated with other employees on our Basecamp account. I was fine tuning and learning what role I played on this team as a developer. As the guy who took things from the design phase — things like the front-end code and concepts and ideas about functionality– and made them a reality. Sure, I was also learning how to code better and more efficiently, but it was bigger than that. I was learning project management, the “big picture” of it all.

Working with WordPress was eye-opening too. Thing is, I learned a bit about theme development a while back but I stayed away from any kind of work with WordPress this past year because I thought it was “too easy.” I thought I needed to learn how to build my own systems and backends so I could call something “my own.” What I didn’t realize was that if you ever want to make anything cool or useful, you have to stand on the shoulders of giants sometimes. You have to take a solution that someone’s already made, and build on top of that. That way, you focus on the “uniqueness” of a website or application, the interesting and unsolved problems that lured you into the project in the first place. I understood that concept before I started this internship but never truly applied or knew it to be true until now. That’s the crazy learning curve for you.

It’s a curve that people in our field say is different from your standard learning experience. It’s exponential. As I’ve already experienced, it’s hard at first but with momentum and persistence, new skills and enlightenments come more and more frequently. It’s only been a month and a half now at TECKpert, but at this rate, there’s no telling how much I’ll learn by the end of this internship.

If you’re interested in a career at TECKpert, stop by our Careers page and find the position that’s right for you.

———————————————————————————–

Stay tuned for Miguel’s next entry in November.

The post Internship Log – My First Entry appeared first on TECKpert.

Good news for Developers waiting for access? Not quite, they’re still no official word on public access outside of Google saying they are expanding to ‘hundreds’ of new businesses. However, if you’re a business providing social media tools, you can fill out a form http://goo.gl/33ayr and request to get access to the API.

The post Access to Google + API is Expanding appeared first on TECKpert.

What does this mean for html5 developers?

This is a major road block for web apps that are converted into mobile apps, specifically apps that use Phonegap. Apple now deems this data as temporary, meaning that app data can be deleted at anytime. There are a large number of PhoneGap apps the use this localstorage method and will be affected by this change. Many users will now loose settings and data within existing apps when upgrading to the lastest iOS version.

Apple has to review every app that it allows in the app store. This change was, more than likely, due to Apple seeing a large number of apps storing databases of information within the app. This can cause an app to be large in size but there is a size limit to this localstorage space (5MB).

Bottom line: Apple doesn’t seem to be a big fan of web apps being ported by PhoneGap. Either that or they just didn’t care or notice this update would break the way localstorage was being utilized by web apps. Building in html5 makes it easier to create apps for both iOS and Android with the same codebase.  By making these changes, it is now necessary to build  apps that utilize local storage in objective c (native) which in turn hinders the cross platform approach of building in html5 thus making apps more expensive to create across multiple platforms. Hopefully Apple finds a way to address this issue.

Some references on the web about this topic:

• PhoneGap response
• Apple breaks web storage in iOS 5.1, does not care about web apps? via  itwriting.com

Do you have an IOS app affected by the this recent change? If so, sound off on our blog.

The post Apple not helping to bridge the HTML5 “Gap” with iOS 5.1 appeared first on TECKpert.

Check it out on Prezi

The post WordPress as a CMS : WordCamp Miami 2012 appeared first on TECKpert.

 html { margin-top: 28px !important; }	* html body { margin-top: 28px !important; }

The reason this is happening is WordPress is making space for the new admin panel that displays when admins view the live site. There are two fixes for this:

1. Insert wp_footer() in your footer.php file
2. Or you can open your user profile (Users > Your Profile) and uncheck the ‘Show on Front’ option to make it disappear.

Hope this helps someone.

The post WordPress 3.1 Feature Causing a headache? appeared first on TECKpert.