Creating Tax Rules in Magento

In this article by William Rice, we will see how to create Tax Rules in Magento. In the real world, the tax rate that you pay is based on three things: location, product type, and purchaser type. In Magento, we can create Tax Rules that determine the amount of tax that a customer pays, based upon the shipping address, product class, and customer class.

When you buy a product, you sometimes pay sales tax on that product. The sales tax that you pay is based on:

• Where you purchased the product from. Tax rules vary in different cities, states, and countries.
• The type of product that you purchased. For example, many places don't tax clothing purchases. And, some places tax only some kinds of clothing. This means that you must be able to apply different tax rates to different kinds of products.
• The type of purchaser you are. For example, if you buy a laser printer for your home, it is likely that you will pay sales tax. This is because you are a retail customer. If you buy the same printer for your business, in most places you will not pay sales tax. This is because you are a business customer.
• The amount of the purchase. For example, some places tax clothing purchases only above a specific amount.

Creating Skeleton Apps with Coily in Spring Python

Spring Python has many useful building blocks. These illustrate the bottom line task for software developers: delivering runnable applications.

To speed up the process for building apps, Spring Python provides the Python script coily. This script is built to support extensible plugins. The first plugin provided by the Spring Python team is gen-cherrypy-app, which is based on creating a skeleton CherryPy application using Spring Python IoC and security.

In this article, by Greg Lee Turnquist, author of Spring Python 1.1, we will learn:

• The plugin driven approach of coily, which allows us to utilize plugins written by other developers or to write our own
• The easy-to-code requirements of creating a plugin
• Building a CherryPy application from scratch, with fully configured security, using the template-based gen-cherrypy-app plugin

Creating Pseudo-3D Imagery with GIMP: Part 2

This is the second part of the two part article series by Reynante Martinez. In this article series, we will learn how to digitally sketch/draw your scenes, give them subtle color shifts, add fake lighting, and apply filter effects to further emulate how 3D does its job in a step by step process. Read Creating Pseudo-3D Imagery with GIMP: Part 1 here.

Creating Our First Module using Drupal 6 (Part2)

In the first part of this 2-part article series we had created a basic module that uses hook_block() to add block content and installed this basic module. In this article by Matt Butcher, we are going to extend the module's functionality. We will add a few new functions that retrieve and format data from Goodreads.

Creating Our First Module using Drupal 6 (Part1)

In this two-part article series by Matt Butcher, we will create our first Drupal module. This article assumes basic knowledge of Drupal module development. Our first module will make use of an existing web service to pull in some XML data, format it, and display it as a block in the site's layout.

We will cover the following topics in this article:

• Creating the .info and .module files
• Creating a new module
• Using basic hooks
• Installing and configuring the module
• Using important Drupal functions

Creating New Types of Plone Portlets

Plone's portlet system makes it easy to place chunks of additional information on your site. Plone ships with a variety of built-in portlets, and you can easily create custom portlets that meet your particular needs. You can associate portlets with different sections of your site, with different content types, and with different groups of users. In this article by Jon Stahl, we will look at creating new types of protlets.

Creating Modal-Dialogs Grids and Collapsible Blocks

In this article, we will:

• Discuss how to link to and create dialogs – also how to handle leaving them
• Demonstrate grids and how you can add them to your pages
• Show how collapsible blocks allow you to pack a lot of information in a small amount of space

In this article by Raymond Camden, co-author of jQuery Mobile Development Essentials, we will look at dialogs, grids, and collapsible blocks.

Creating Media Galleries with ASP.NET 4 Social Networking

This article by Atul Gupta, Sudhanshu Hate and Andrew Siemer, authors of ASP.NET 4 Social Networking, covers details on how to build a generic media management system that will allow you to host video, photos, resumes, or any number of physical files with minimal tweaking. It also addresses the issue of multi-file uploads via RIA technologies like Flash and Silverlight.

In addition to that, we will build the concept of having user-specific sets of files as well as content that can be shared among many users. This article will create a basic framework from which you can easily grow to suit the file management needs of just about any community site.

Creating Line Graphs in R

With more than two million users worldwide, R is one of the most popular open source projects. It is a free and robust statistical programming environment with very powerful graphical capabilities. Analyzing and visualizing data with R is a necessary skill for anyone doing any kind of statistical analysis.

In this article by Hrishi V. Mittal, author of the book R Graph Cookbook, we will learn some intermediate to advanced recipes for customizing line graphs even further. We will look at ways to improve and speed up line graphs with multiple lines representing more than one variable.