Poplar ProductivityWare Articles:
Resources for Web Developers
by Jennifer Hodgdon

This page contains my recommendations of web sites, software, and books related to development with HTML and other Web technologies. They are all resources that I have found useful, as an experienced software developer, so they probably tend more to be references rather than tutorials. Everyone has his/her own preferred style of books, and these are all my style -- so I suspect you'll either love all of them or hate all of them. You may also want to check out our other articles, since some of them contain Web programming information.

Disclaimers: For the books, I have not listed the complete publication information, since many come out with frequent new editions. Several of the book titles, publisher names, and technologies below are trademarked, so assume they all are referenced as such.

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Web Technologies and Languages

HTML and CSS

HTML, or Hypertext Markup Language, is the main language for writing Web pages. CSS, or Cascading Style Sheets, is the main technology for specifying flexible formats for HTML.

• W3C (World Wide Web Consortium): the organization that maintains the standards for HTML, XML, CSS, and other web-related technologies. In my opinion, it is a good idea to invest a little time learning how to read their standards documents, because they are the only complete and accurate reference to the syntax and meaning of the languages.
• Official Getting Started Guide: an HTML tutorial from W3C.
• HTML Validator: checks to see if your HTML page follows all the standards
• Our CSS tutorial

PHP and MySQL

PHP is a freely-available scripting and programming language that generally runs on the web server, and is often used in conjunction with the freely-available MySQL relational database to make web sites with database-backed content.

• Book: Web Database Applications with PHP & MySQL, by Williams and Lane (O'Reilly)
• MySQL home page
• PHP home page

Perl

Perl is a freely-available scripting-style programming language, commonly used for web applications and operating-system-level utility scripts.

• Book: Programming Perl, by Wall, Christiansen & Schwartz (O'Reilly)
• Perl home page
• ActivePerl, Windows distribution for Perl

XML

XML, or Extensible Markup Language, provides customizable ways to exchange data between programs and platforms.

• W3C (World Wide Web Consortium): the group that maintains the XML standard
• TopXML: tutorials on XML

General References and Miscellaneous Technologies

• Our article "Which Web Technology Does What"
• Ultimate Web developer Links, thousands of categorized links on web development, from the eConsultant
• Book: JavaScript, the Definitive Guide, by Flanagan (O'Reilly)
• HTML Goodies: many articles on HTML, JavaScript, Perl, and other technologies, ranging from a "non-technical introduction" to advanced guides
• W3Schools: free on-line classes (including quizzes) on Web technologies
• Our tutorial on setting up Apache .htaccess files for password protection and custom error pages

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Software and Tools

Content Management, Site Management, and Blogging Packages

• WordPress is (in my opinion) the best blogging software around. It's open-source, and easy to use and install. It also works very well as a content management system for relatively simple web sites, where all the content for the site fits neatly into the concepts of "static web page" and "article". (See this series of articles on BlogHelper for more information on using WordPress as a content management system.) If you need help with WordPress, Poplar ProductivityWare creates custom WordPress sites, plugins, and themes. Poplar ProductivityWare also has four WordPress plugins available for free download. There is also an article on my personal blog on Choosing Blog Software, which compares WordPress with some other blogging packages.
• Drupal is (in my opinion) the most powerful open-source content management system out there. It is rather complex and time consuming to set up a Drupal site, and it's not anywhere near as easy for the site owner to use as WordPress, but it is much more suitable for complex sites, due to its underlying software architecture and the huge number of add-on modules available. Poplar ProductivityWare creates custom Drupal sites, modules, and themes. I've also written a "Drupal Cheat Sheet" article, which describes the process of building a Drupal site. You can also manage multiple web sites from a single Drupal installation.
• I recently tried Joomla, another open-source content management system, but I wasn't impressed with its features or usability. Also it looks like the members of the Joomla developer community are less interested in contributing to the community than making money, which means that as a user, you'll end up with ads in "free" templates and plugins. You don't see that as much in WordPress or Drupal -- people tend to make their useful add-ons available without ads in them, and the official sites for distributing themes, plugins, and modules forbid embedded ads.
• I've also tested another open-source content management system, PostNuke. It seems to be OK, but it doesn't seem to have anywhere near the capabilities or the maturity of Drupal, or the user community.
• Other people have recommended Plone/Zope (Plone is a content management system built on the Zope platform; Zope is a platform for building content management systems), but as Zope and Plone are written in the Python language, rather than PHP or Perl, I haven't tried Plone or Zope. Most web site hosts support Perl and PHP, but not that many support Python, and (at least as of yet), I do not program in Python.
• Someone I know also recommended WebGUI for web site content management, but I haven't tried it. WebGUI is normally installed as a complete package including the Apache web server, the MySQL server, etc. In other words, it is meant to manage the entire web server, rather than being installed on an existing web server, though apparently it can be installed along-side an existing web server. It's probably more aimed at web hosting companies, or companies that offer start-to-finish solutions that include building a web site and hosting it, than at individual site owners.

Software Tools for Web Developers

• Mozilla makes the free Firefox web browser, which I highly recommend. Firefox has many nice features, such as tabs rather than separate windows for visiting multiple web pages, and tends to be more secure than some of the other free browsers in the market. You will also want to get the Firebug plugin for Firefox, if you are doing web development. It has lots of great features for looking at the structure of web sites, and debugging JavaScript, among other things.
• If you are trying to make web pages that work on multiple browsers, you will probably also want to get Opera. I don't use it as my main browser, but it is a good one, and has some nice features for developers, such as a mode that lets you see what your web page might look like on a small mobile device (such as a smart phone).
• FileZilla is a great graphical FTP client.
• The GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) is an excellent free image editor, for tasks such as creating images from scratch and photo retouching. It's not the industry standard for a professional graphic designer, but it's good for someone technical who only occasionally has to do some basic image editing.
• Emacs is a free, full-featured programmer's text editor.
• PuTTY is a free telnet/SSH client for Windows.
• If you are getting into more complex projects, you will want to get some kind of version control system set up. Subversion is the best open-source version control system I am aware of, and it rivals many commercial systems. You might also want to install the Eclipse platform and its SubVersion plugin (SubClipse).

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Other Web Information

Web Hosting, Domain Registration, and Internet Access

• Host Help, a site with all kinds of information on finding a web host
• QWK, my web host -- I've so far been quite happy with them, and their prices are good for shared hosting with Perl, MySQL, etc.
• Go Daddy, an inexpensive place to register domain names -- I haven't heard of anyone having trouble with them, unlike some other domain registration outlets, and my experience has been good so far
• DSL information

Miscellaneous Web Considerations

• How to make accessible web sites for disabled people
• Search engine submission and optimization for your Website - this site has quite a few articles on how to optimize your web site for search engines
• Another article on search engine optimization
• To choose keywords, try at least the free trial at Wordtracker; the two previous articles also have suggestions of other sites that can help you choose keywords.
• Our article on avoiding spam email, which includes suggestions on how to put your email address on your web site safely
• Matt's Script Archive, Inc., a great source for free (and not-so-free) CGI scripts you can use on your web site
• copyscape.com, where you can check to see if someone has infringed on your copyrighted web pages

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