Web Design

OpenCart isn’t a system I’ve used before but Packt Publishing asked me to review OpenCart 1.4 Template Design Cookbook by Tahsin Hasan for them so I thought it’d be a good opportunity to learn more about an ecommerce shopping cart system. I spend a lot of time working on PHP/MySQL applications, including Drupal and CodeIgniter, but I haven’t used OpenCart before, so I’m coming to this book and application completely new.

OpenCart is a complete ecommerce shopping cart solution, with features including multi-currency support, product ratings and reviews, downloadable products and a discount coupon system, and it is of course customisable and templatable. OpenCart 1.4 Template Design Cookbook promises to help you get to grips with the basics of template design, as well as styling search results and customising the design of the administration panel to match either yours or your clients’ brand.

Here's an edgy stand-off I find myself in the middle of every so often – Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox as my default browser. From a day to day, quick browse, everything is on the web perspective I'd have to say I prefer Google Chrome. It's fast(er), simple and gets the job done. However, from a web developer perspective Firefox has the add-ons that you so sorely need. I've tried designing a Drupal Zen sub-theme with Chrome's 'inspect element' feature but it's not as comprehensive as the Firebug add-on for Firefox which I couldn't work without. However, when I want to check my daily barrage of social sites Chrome shaves off valuable seconds. For today, I'll leave Firefox as my default browser simply because of the add-ons – they're useful, I need them and I don't mind sacrificing a bit of speed.

This really is one of the strangest software bugs I've come across!

The Problem

Dreamweaver crashes and won't open again. When you try and open Dreamweaver it just closes straight away, with nothing more than a glimpse of the splash screen.

The Solution

One of the CSS files in the site you were working on has a file size which is a multiple of 8kb (mine was 24kb). You can try anything; rebooting, reinstalling, but Dreamweaver won't play ball if the file is still there. You need open the CSS file in another text editor and add a few dummy lines of comment text to increase the file size slightly; you should then find Dreamweaver will open again normally.

Thanks to David Powers for this. Please feel free to leave any comments below.

I've been taking a few Firefox add-ons for granted, so here's a little nod to some excellent add-ons which have made my life easier. I'm not going to list 50, simply because I've found either some do the same thing, or I don't end up using them as much as I thought. So here they are:

• Firebug
• Web Developer Toolbar
• Dummy Lipsum
• IE Tab

I ran into a spot of trouble recently with img_assist, in that it only displayed alt text if there was also a caption below the image. Img_Assist takes the alt text from a combination of the title and description, and these fields are filled by default from the title and body of the image node. Although there is no real need for a caption below each image, you will almost always need alt text.