Wouldn’t it be nice if you could get all essential WordPress services besides the actual hosting from one provider? The rather new solution by 10web offers just that. WordPress: Much Light, But Also a Lot of Shadow WordPress is as popular as ever. More and more websites of the modern web are powered by the...

On the Sticher.io site a new tutorial has been posted introducing you to Laravel view models. This functionality allows you to remove view-only logic from other parts and isolate it for transformation. View models are an abstraction to simplify controller and model code. View models are responsible for providing data to a view, which would otherwise come directly from the controller or the model. They allow a better separation of concerns, and provide more flexibility for the developer. In essence, view models are simple classes that take some data, and transform it into something usable for the view. The post starts with some of the basics behind the "view model" design pattern and jumps in to an example for a blog site. In it, the code pulls in the category listing that's needed to display the page, removing the need for it to be in the controller code. It also includes the addition of custom logic to the model and the refactoring that can help move the logic into it. The tutorial also includes a section covering some of the "niceties" that can be added including passing it directly to the view method, returning it as JSON and returning individual properties as JSON.

Most good website-building tools have the necessary features to enable a designer to create an excellent UI and/or UX. Yet, these terms are seldom mentioned in their promotions. UI and... The post Useful Tips and Tools for Better UX/UI Design appeared first on Speckyboy Design Magazine.

In a new post to his site Cees-Jan Kiewiet covers a new library he discovered - Cigar - and how to use it for smoke testing a ReactPHP application. Smoke testing (or "sanity testing") is the evaluation of the major functionality of an application rather than individual pieces of code. Last week I came across Cigar, a smoke testing tool by Matt Brunt. Which, to me, is great stepping stone for my personal projects/sites to integration tests. In this post we not only go into Cigar, but also how to start your HTTP ReactPHP application, run cigar against it, and shut it down again. (Note that it doesn't have to be a ReactPHP application it can also be a NodeJS app, or PHP's build in webserver you use for testing.) He then walks through the process of installing Cigar and creating the initial configuration file of endpoints to test (along with expected statuses). He then shows how to automate things further and creates a bash script that starts the ReactPHP application, runs the tests then shuts the application down. It's a simple script but can help save a few keystrokes every time the tests are run.

An assorted collection of helpful tools and incredible graphical stuff is waiting for you in this month's edition. As usual, we have focused on tools and objects that were created to improve, enhance and enrich interfaces of different scales, make the user experience more sophisticated and pleasant, and simplify ways of crafting stuff. Here you...

This is the second half of a series on transforming content between text and speech on AWS. In part one, we used Amazon Polly to narrate blog posts and embedded the content in a website using an audio tag. In this article, we will use speech-to-text to draft transcripts of podcasts and interviews for publication. Finally, we will evaluate the overall accuracy of these format-transformation technologies by running a few samples through round-trip transcriptions.

Templates are the super tool of regular Microsoft Word users. Templates establish a set of style rules and visual guidelines so that your documents have a unified look and feel. Templates are a great starting point for elements such as letterhead other documents. Here, we'll look at how to open, edit, and use templates in […]

We took a surface level look at Pipedream the other day, which really does look cool. It’s like a much more modern and fancy version of what Yahoo Pipes was. A better comparison might be Zapier, except you … The post Napkin appeared first on CSS-Tricks. You can support CSS-Tricks by being an MVP Supporter.

(This article is kindly sponsored by Adobe.) As businesses become more consumer-oriented, competition grows fiercer. Thousands of companies worldwide are struggling each day to gain more market share and to win over new consumers. A significant number of companies concentrate only on acquiring new customers -- they allocate enormous marketing budgets trying to strengthen their customer base. But acquiring new customers only becomes harder and more expensive. According to the 2017 Digital Advertising Report by Adobe, ad costs are seeing growth five times faster than US inflation rates.

Infographics are essential to any company, business, or even anyone whom is dealing with things such as design, advertising, or development. There are many infographics this year that are extremely successful, and the reasons why are because they have all the points of design that become important to things such as this. One reason an […] The post A List of Successful Infographics (and why they work) appeared first on Line25.