Web Design Tutorials, Interviews, Articles and more...

In this tutorial, Jeffrey Way, co-author of SitePoint’s Build Your Own Wicked WordPress Themes, has a look at WordPress’ Settings API. Using it, you can add your own custom settings pages to your themes or plugins.

In the second part of his series on Adobe Business Catalyst, Rob builds on part one and shows us how to add back-end ecommerce functionality, custom reporting, and additional users and roles to a Business Catalyst site.

Raena, co-author of SitePoint’s Build Your Own Wicked WordPress Themes, shows how to boost your theme development efforts using the Thematic theme framework. It will save you heaps of tedious setup time, leaving you free to dive into the fun part of making your theme look great.

In recent years, WordPress theme frameworks have arrived on the scene in a big way. From commercial frameworks like Thesis and Genesis to free alternatives such as Thematic and Hybrid, frameworks aim to make your life as a theme designer easier and more satisfying. Raena, co-author of SitePoint’s Build Your Own Wicked WordPress Themes, breaks down some of the most popular frameworks, weighing up their pros and cons.

How will your web application scale? When you reach millions of users, it’s likely you’ll need to rethink parts of your application’s architecture. In this article, Jack gives us a quick tour and demo of Apache’s Hadoop project, an open source framework for scalable distributed computing.

Windows Azure is Microsoft’s entry into the cloud computing space. In this quick overview, Maarten shows how to leverage this platform in PHP applications.

Raj takes a look at a lesser-known WordPress feature that’s of great potential use to plugin developers: the ability to schedule tasks for periodic execution without relying on operating system cron jobs.

In the final article in our Expression Web series, Alex shows us the ins and outs of the SuperPreview feature, which lets you preview your site across many browser rendering engines right in the editor.

Thanks to some machine images provided by Microsoft and preloaded with the Web Platform Installer, firing up an EC2 instance running WordPress on a Windows server has never been easier. Bill walks us through it, step by step.

In his last article, Jordan showed us how to connect to a PHP web service from a Silverlight application. This time, we’ll take that knowledge and build a simple Twitter client using a PHP proxy.