I am an absolute beginner in programming and I have set myself the goal of creating an app for our small association.
I would also like to create a kind of news feed on a page in which I can post local newspaper articles
can add manually. So selected articles. I know that it is probably very complex at the beginning, but I want to get an idea of how and what I need for it.
My question is, what hardware or software items do I need? Or how can that be done?
For now, I don't need any codes, I just need an overview of the means by which I can get there. And then I try to get used to it bit by bit.
Related
I'm learning about Google Analytics for Unity and also learning about Google Analytics in general. For some games, it would be really useful to have page views:
Imagine your game has 20 levels. You want to track what level people get to before they quit because that correlates to how engaged they were and how fun the game is.
As you can see above, the Audience Overview already has a Pages / Session metric. If you could define each level in a game as a page, then the Pages / Session would give you a lot of useful information.
Unfortunately, I don't see a way to set pages in the reference documentation. Does anyone know how I could do this? Is it really easy to make something equivalent with a custom metric/dimension?
To summarize, there are two different answers that would help me and I'd accept either:
A way to use this plugin to define page views
A way to use this plugin to give me something equivalent to Pages / Session (i.e., Levels / Session). But, I'd like an answer for this to include how to view the Levels / Session, not just collect the data.
I figured this out. The mistake I made is creating a GA view of type "Website." I should have created one of type "App." The difference is explained here: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/2649553#WebVersusAppViews
The plugin has the ability to send ScreenName's which are effectively PageViews. But, unless my view is setup as App, GA won't really give any reports that show the ScreenNames.
So, it was a matter of creating a new view, then sending ScreenNames as described here: https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/unity/v4/reference#screen-basic
I would like to create a text based RPG game for iPhone. In this user will have some questions with answers, and navigate to the next page depends on the answer in which the user selects. As per the requirement I have to store the entire story in the app itself. And I need to access each event in the story, when the user selects. So which kind of database can I use?
Please share your ideas.
Thanks.
I'm not so sure you need to create some type of off-device database. If the game has predefined answers and questions then you should probably load the app with each of these on the device.
I'm sure there are plenty of ways to go about this, the simplest being if/else statements. This would obviously be a hindrance and easy to mess up if the storyline is long.
One thing that comes to mind would be to design the story using a Tree representation. The starting point would be the root of the tree, and from there the user would progress down the tree until it eventually reaches a leaf (end). Depending on the number of options a user has for each page, this really wouldn't be too tough to implement if you have any knowledge of this type of data structure.
But, this is just off the top of my head. I would definitely consider the use of a Tree data structure though.
I'm new to iOS Development and am trying to make an application that essentially sorts through a list of 300 names or so. I've got the Drill-Down part of the application down, aside from the detailView, but am now faced with a challenge.
What I would like to do is have users select from 3 fields with a UIPickerView to come up with shorter lists for every time a user is looking for a person. I'd like to use a .plist, but I also have an XML feed of the information. Before I waste all of my time structuring these data sources, does anybody have a good overview as to how I should approach this?
Also, I've asked some this question before, and they tell me to read up on introductory iOS development topics. I understand the mechanics of development, I just can't ever figure out how to approach a task properly. (I'm working on it!)
Thanks in advance. I'd share an image to help clarify, but my rep isn't high enough.
Snip: It looks like I misread your intention which makes my earlier comments irrelevant, you want to have the user select one of 3 options to shrink the list, if I'm not mistaken.
Some more questions for you, so I take it that this XML feed is going to be potentially changing between times that the user loads up the app? Will it only ever grow or are those 300 or so names that are loaded once set for good? The reason I ask so that you can maybe see my train of thought is whether or not using Core Data might be useful. You could easily store your large list locally, save time having to reload this large list frequently, and also you can use the built fetchedObjectController to search your collection of names. I'll keep thinking about it and once you get a chance to answer these questions we can continue.
Ill check back for an edit or comment, and see if I can give you an approach. Also, maybe edit your question with any of your own approach ideas and we could also start from there and refine them if needed.
Edit 2: From the information in the comments this is one of the ways that I could see this being done that make sense to me:
Since you seem to be able to control the information you receive from the feed I would set it up to send you only the contacts that need to be added/removed. You could handle this a few ways depending on your deployment intentions but I would go with the following:
Find a way to signal a first time run of the application, and as a result all contacts would be new, and you could populate your list fully with a slightly longer first time setup. Then any further changes could be quickly handled by smaller edits made to the local list.
You would need to set up Core Data for your application, which should be fairly straightforward in your case, and after this you can use the built in NSFetchRequest to do your searches that will then quickly return a list of narrowed down contacts. As for the physical picker that is just a matter of building the UI which will require some design from your end as you are the only one that knows what you are going for in that regard. Depending on the complexity of your app and what functionality you will want to include you could get away with 1-2 views that simply do the displaying of the contacts in a table and then the picker just reloads when appropriate.
I'm not familiar with the implementation of XML Feeds and receiving data from them, but I have done XML Response parsing into Core Data from a SOAP service before and they shouldn't be terribly different.
Regarding resource to get you started should you need them, I would recommend the following:
eBooks:
http://www.techotopia.com/index.php/Objective-C_2.0_Essentials
http://www.techotopia.com/index.php/IPhone_iOS_4_Development_Essentials_Xcode_4_Edition
Tutorials:
http://www.raywenderlich.com/
The eBooks I have linked are both absolutely fantastic and one of the few xCode 4.0 books that I was able to find that seemed to be of an actual usable quality. They both contain easy to follow and clear tutorials on simple and more advanced aspects of programming for iOS.
Ray's site is an immensely helpful resource as it contains both a very active forum base for iOS programming in addition to a constantly growing tutorial collection as there are 4-5 people that constantly are creating new tutorials that the community votes on and suggests every week. It contains some more advanced topics than the above books and I would recommend looking at it after doing a few walk through/tutorials from the books.
I'll stick around if you have any further questions, otherwise you can send me a notification via these comments, or just post another question and someone is bound to help you out!
-Karoly
I'm creating a site for a video store and it needs to be CMS. I'm doing this for free so I need to use a free CMS like Wordpress, Drupal or Joomla.
Do I need a new CMS, a plugin or some PHP of my own?
What I need:
User accounts
Categories
Custom post
Here's the site as it stands with WP: http://sundancevideo.ca. Right now an experimental site to try to work this out.
What I've done now, is created a "Draft" that includes a template table with images and text and so on. The user would then have to copy everything, past into a new post and replace necessary. This really isn't working well. As you may notice by the condition of the posts.
What I would prefer is if it was integrated into the WP UI. Like a field for "Description" and field for "Image" where they can upload the images as necessary. This would then generate post, with a table including all the information and images, for as many movies that were added in the UI.
I would suggest taking a look at PodsCMS as a great way to implement real CMS functionality in to WordPress. It allows you to create various content types, relate these content types, and more importantly live outside of the "WordPress bubble".
You'll find a fairly good codex and user guides (the ones authored by Johnathan Christopher are a great start). There is a solid API for this in the event that you need to integrate Pods in to an existing plugin or one you are creating. There are also developer and user contributed packages for Pods and there is even a YouTube video package you may want to check out.
PodsUI (soon to be merged with PodsCMS) allows you to create administration menus in WordPress very easily and allows you to pretty much make it look and feel how ever you want.
Flutter is a dead project and while it may be a little more user friendly than PodsCMS it lacks in in development, support, and over all usability.
Feel free to drop in the Pods Chat or # them on Twitter.
As for the user accounts you should read up on WordPress user roles/capabilties and also check through the WordPress PHPxref. A lot can be done in the way of using WordPress' current user system and you can even add other meta information for users if needed.
If you want a full CMS backend then you can't use Wordpress without extensive customising. You might want to check out pods cms for Wordpress which is an extension to attempt to turn Wordpress into a CMS. However, I have tried using it before and you will still be left with a confusing UI for your users. It will allow you to do the custom fields you want, however.
If you want full control over the UI, you will have to use either your own PHP or Drupal. Which one depends on how complex the project is and how much experience with Drupal you have had. If it is simple and your Drupal experience is limited, definitely go with your own PHP because Drupal is hard to learn. I think it would take you more time to learn Drupal than it will be to get a simple interface going with PHP.
I think this post will be helpful, depending on your experience, if you go with your own code.
i don't have particular suggestion for you custom need. Except beware for how much you give permission for your member. Please make sure they were a contributor and not author. In wp, the contributor role has no ability to publish. They have ability to post something just as a review. Thus, Administrator can review them and then published if it appropriated.
The problem with this situation is when you need them to upload things. The member with contributor role has no ability to upload video, image, or song. You have to custom this.
But if you only need their snippet or HTML link to the video (probably in youtube), then you don't have to change default wordpress role.
sorry if i mislead by your question. just trying to help as much as i can
I guess it depends on your shop's needs. I understand wanting to use wordpress, and you can do it, but at this point it almost makes people think... 'why?' If youre just going to use paypal and have a few products it might be a good idea but I think carts like zencart and oscommerce that are much better suited to store's needs. Though they are a little older. Magento and opencart are more modern, and all free. Though I've only ever used zen cart. None of these are terribly hard to set up. I guess You could always have you wordpress from page and use a link to your carts store menus.
MODx is brilliant for customisability - it was designed from the ground up to be extensive. It runs on PHP and MySQL.
You can create your own templates, add fields to those templates that appear in the UI when someone wants to create or edit a page based on that template. It has widgets for different data types, like images, dates etc that your users can use to add data to a page.
You also have full control over the HTML because you write the templates yourself. If the core code doesn't do what you need, you can write snippets in plain PHP to change the behaviour.
I've used it on a few projects over the past 3 years and I love it. I'd recommend MODx Evolution (v1.0.3) as that's stable. There's a brand-new rewritten version (Revolution 2.0.0) which is a release candidate at the moment, so you might want to have a play with that instead.
I reckon once you know MODx enough to create the site design, it'd be fairly easy to implement an off-the-shelf shopping cart into it (there may even be a MODx plugin that already does this.)
This is a question about the development workflow of front end engineers. I am starting a project for a rather large site with lots of pages, each page has multiple steps, and it's very difficult to lay out all the content in a spreadsheet.
The content of each page will be delivered in a spreadsheet cell, and some pages have multiple variable section that are determined by user's preferences.
I was asked my opinion about how to structure the deliverable. I am wondering if there is a best practice out there for structuring this kind of deliverable? Because when you have a poorly structured deliverable it can be almost as mindnumbing as using pen-and-pencil to write code.
Do you have any tools, formats, practices for creating deliverables that are easy to work with?
It sounds like you are just doing the UI design and then giving it to the front-end engineers.
If that is correct, I would suggest that you see if you can do the rough html/css work to get the page to look as you want, and then they can go in and give it the functionality, but that way you have an idea what is possible.
You can do much of the work, then leave comments about trying to center something a bit better, for example.
I am not a big fan of just getting the design on paper or as an image, it would be easier to just get the html/css.
There are plenty of tools now that make css and html easy to do, even if you have the css inside the html, they can separate the two, but, it would be a huge help to the designers.
Just do one page, and give it to them, and then come back in a day or two and get feedback as to what their thoughts are, and how you can improve what you give them.
As you go through this process, after a while both groups will know what to expect and you can get the rest done quickly.
This is more of an agile methodology with the front-end engineers as your customers.
My suggestion would be mockups or wireframes for the pages. Mockups would be examples of the pages in various states while the wireframe is a detailed document of the structure of the page.
HTML and CSS is way too complicated for mockup use. I usually first create a requirement backlog for UI/functionalities as well (just a list of priorized reqs in Excel).
Especially for a large site development you should also have the process and data flow definitions done (UML or other way of description) to help you define the mentioned requirements.
Based on these you will know what kind of steps does the whole site funcionality need (i.e. pages) and what the page hierarchy and structure will be like. This way it's much easier to get a grasp of the whole thing.
After that we'll create fast wireframes and visualize the end result with fast mockups done as images with Photoshop or similar. These are absolutely vital in my experience as it helps the customer (and other stakeholders) to actually understand what is beind done. For this the html and css are simply too slow to run multiple iterations with.