User Interface Enhancement Techniques with Drupal and Ubercart 2.x

In the previous article by George Papadongonas and Yiannis Doxaras, authors of Drupal E-commerce with Ubercart 2.x, we saw how to implement more complex marketing technique such as cross-selling using taxonomy and recommendation systems for Drupal with Ubercart, how to create an alternative layout for products using panels and enhance user interface using views. In this article we show we will you how to offer a better browsing experience to your visitors, and how to use enhanced marketing techniques to attract more clients and to make them spend more money in your store. In this article we are going to show you:

• How to improve the shopping cart
• How to manage product prices and discounts in a better way

User Interface Design in ICEfaces 1.8: Part 1

In this article by Rainer Eschen, we will take a look at what a desktop-like presentation means to modern web applications. We will learn the design principles and start with a common page layout based on the Facelets templating.

User Interaction and Email Automation in Symfony 1.3: Part1

After developing an application in Symfony 1.3, the next aspect we will cover is creation of forms. Symfony incorporates a subframework that handles forms, which once mastered, makes creating forms an enjoyable task. In this two-part article by Tim Bowler, we are going to see how easy it is to create and validate forms by creating a newsletter signup module for our web site. We will then convert our new module into a plugin so that we can use it with other projects.

By the end of this article you will know how to:

• Add a third-party library to send automated emails
• Create and modify Propel-based forms
• Use flash variables
• Create a plugin and package it up for redistribution

User Extensions and Add-ons in Selenium 1.0 Testing Tools

In this article, by David Burns, author of Selenium 1.0 Testing Tools, we are going to look at how we can expand Selenium. This is for those times when Selenium's API is not verbose enough.

Selenium has the ability to allow developers to create functions, in the same three-column format, to all tests to reuse snippets of code instead of evaluating them with getEval calls.

User extensions and add-ons are all written in JavaScript. This is due to Selenium's core being written in JavaScript. Let's now have a look at user extensions.

In this article, we shall discuss:

• User extensions
• Add-ons

So let's get on with it...

User Authentication with Codeigniter 1.7 using Facebook Connect

In a previous article we covered User Authentication with Codeigniter 1.7 using Twitter oAuth. In this article by Adam Griffiths, author of CodeIgniter 1.7 Professional Development, we will continue our discussion on how we can utilize third-party authentication methods by using Facebook Connect.

Facebook Connect is just like Twitter oAuth, but for Facebook accounts. It doesn't use the oAuth protocol, so its workings might seem slightly different to developers. To users, however, the difference is marginal. Just like in Twitter oAuth, users do not need to enter any of their account credentials on your website or application—it is all handled by Facebook.

User Access Control in Drupal 6

In this article by David Mercer, we will look at an entirely different aspect of running a Drupal website. Once we have added the functionality to the site, we now have to give some thoughts about how this functionality is to be accessed, or by whom. As the site grows, you will most likely feel the need to delegate certain responsibilities to various people. Alternatively, you might organize a team of people to work on specific aspects of the site. Whatever is required, at some stage you will have to make decisions about who can do what, and Drupal makes sure that it is possible to do precisely this.

Having Drupal simplify the implementation of your access control policies does not mean that the task is a trivial one. There is still much thought that needs to go on behind the scenes in order to create a sophisticated, and above all, effective policy for controlling access to the site. Because of this, we will spend a bit of time exploring the ramifications of the various choices available, instead of simply listing them. Taking a holistic approach to implementing an access control policy will ensure you don't end up with any nasty surprises down the line.

Specifically, this article will look at Planning an access policy, Roles, Users, and Access rules.

Useful Maven Plugins: Part 1

In this article by Brett Porter and Maria Odea Ching, we will take a closer look at some of the plugins from two locations: those hosted as part of the Apache Maven project (http://maven.apache.org/plugins/), and a number of plugins from the Codehaus Mojo project (http://mojo.codehaus.org/plugins.html), which is oriented directly towards Maven plugin development.

Where possible, we will apply the plugins to our example application to see how they can be used in practice, and then cover some of the other use cases and best practices for their use.

Use of Stylesheets for Report Designing using BIRT

BIRT is an open source business intelligence and reporting tool built on top of the Eclipse Framework. BIRT is used by developers for building reports that can best represent data and tell a story of that data that is easy to follow. In addition, BIRT can be integrated into a product to allow that product to provide reporting capabilities. 

In this article by John Ward,author of BIRT 2.6 Data Analysis and Reporting we will look at how BIRT uses stylesheets in report designs and how styles can be grouped in a library to create themes. This will allow us to have certain sets of styles ready for use any time we develop a report so that we, as a report developer, can focus strictly on the technical aspects of the report while maintaining a consistent visual presentation.

URL Shorteners – Designing the TinyURL Clone with Ruby

This article by Chang Sau Sheong, author of the book Cloning Internet Applications with Ruby, explains about the popular Internet application, TinyURL. It describes how to create a TinyURL clone, its basic principles, and algorithms used.