tpattison

I think that this year will see a large rise in the number of webapps, especially with more browsers supporting locally saving webapp data. Expect to be doing your web developing online by the end of the year!

You're right it is your thread. Moosh, kindly start your own thread, please don't hijack another's! Phpboy - to answer your question, php needs to know a SMTP address from which it can send emails. You should have a php.ini file somewhere in your php installation. Look for the following in your PHP.ini file and paste in your isp SMTP address (this is the one you were given by your ISP for entering into Outlook or Thunderbird): [mail function] ; For Win32 only. SMTP = mail.myisp.net; for Win32 only smtp_port = 25 sendmail_from= php@home.com ; for Win32 only

@Susie - I hope you and your family get well very soon. As soon as I finished for the holidays almost a couple of weeks ago, I went down with a terrible cold. Typical! No too bad now though. Probably picked something up from the office... Anyway, I can say that 2009 is feeling pretty cold in my part of the world. Not only is it still below freezing (11:30am here), it's also dull and cloudy.

If all you're doing is stating the number of pages, then why not: $c = $_POST['page_count']; if ($c==1) { echo "There is 1 page."; } else { echo "There are $c pages."; }

Have a fantastic New Year everyone!

This is an updated version of the list of image editors and converters carried over from the old forums. Sometimes you don't need to fire up Photoshop to crop or resize an image for uploading to your webpage. I therefore have compiled this (by no means complete) list of free image editing software. I haven't got around to trying all of these yet, the information is mainly what I have gathered from websites and forums etc. If anyone has tried any of these, or have any to add to the list then post them on this thread. Of course, this list only contains software where Windows versions exist, so if anyone can help make this multi-platform, then please add your favourites to this thread. PowerBatch 6.0 - 1.3MB Batch renaming, resizing, converting, printing, rotating, colour adjustment, cropping. Crop with aspect ratio confinement. Built-in FTP client! All program files are contained in a single folder. Converts JPEG, GIF, PNG, TIFF, BITMAP and JPEG2000. Supports animated GIF and multipage TIFF. Image effects. Drawing tools. Add multi-line text. Watermarks. Stamp photos with EXIF data. Contact sheet. Paint.net 3.36 - 1.6MB Frequently updated. Clean GUI with tabbed document interface. Effects filters, image adjustments (brightness, contrast, hue, saturation, curves, levels). 3D Rotate/Zoom effect that makes it very easy to add perspective and tilting. Powerful drawing tools (clone stamp, recolour, splines, Bezier curves, gradient tool) akin to Photoshop. Powerful selection tools and selection manipulation. Developed with help from Microsoft. Active Online Community. Requires 22MB .NET Framework 2.0 to run. Layers and transparency support. Pixia 4.3d - 4.8MB Photoshop Filter support. TWAIN device support. Native support for Wacom tablets. Layers, transparency and masks. Image adjustments, filters. Photofiltre 6.3.2 - 1.6MB Free for non commercial or educational use. Multiple images open at once. Image adjustment functions. Vectorial selections, transparency masks. Drawing tools (pipette, displacement cursor, fill bucket, aerosol, brushes, blur, cloning stamp, smudge and magic wand) Adjustment functions (Brightness, contrast, dyed, saturation, gamma correction) Many plugins and more than 100 filters. Batch processing. Image browser. TWAIN support. Text effects. FastStone Image Viewer 3.6 - 4.0MB Free for home users. Convert major formats (inc. PSD and many digital camera RAW formats). Lossless JPEG rotation and cropping. EXIF and colour profile support. Resizing, flipping, rotating, cropping (with aspect ratio/size confinement), sharpen/blur. Colour, gamma, contrast, RGB level, sturation adjusting tools. Compare images side by side. Batch image converter/resizer. Supports animated GIF and multipage TIFF, PDF. Image management, including tagging. Watermarking, red-eye removal. Contact sheet, executable slideshow, image strip creation. Versatile screen capture, Dual-monitor, TWAIN scanning support. Xnview 1.95 - 3.7MB Free for non-commercial, educational and non-profit use. Multiplatform. Utility for viewing and converting graphic files. Imports 400 graphic file formats. Exports 50 graphic file formats. EXIF support. Copy, cut, resize, rotate and crop (lossless for JPEG). Brightness and contrast adjust. Modify number of colours. Filters and effects. Contact Sheet and TWAIN support. Supports animated GIF, ICO and multipage TIFF, DCX, LDF. Compare image side by side. Batch convert and rename. GIMP 2.6.3 - 15.0MB (Win32 version) (gimp-win.sourceforge.net Windows version) Multiplatform. Highly configurable GUI, menus, keyboard shortcuts. Probably the best open source contender to Photoshop. Requires GTK+ 2 runtime environment - 5.5MB. Painting tools including Brush, Pencil, Airbrush, Clone stamp, Healing tool. Perspective tools, image distortion correction. Multiple images open at once. Layers and (alpha) channels. Selection (inc quickmask) and transform tools. Paths. Text layers. Advanced scripting capabilities, over 100 plugins available. Animation inc. MNG support. Supported formats include bmp, gif, jpeg, mng, pcx, pdf, png, ps, psd, svg, tiff, tga, xpm. Advanced hardware support (tablets, mouse, monitor). Difficult to get used to GUI layout. GIMP Portable 2.6.3 - 16MB Version of the GIMP that can be run from CD or Flash drive (Windows only). All necessary files are installed including the GTK runtime environment. IrfanView 4.23 - 1.3MB Free for non-commercial use. Huge array of supported file formats (inc. movie, audio, multipage TIFF and saving ICO). Slideshows saved as EXE, SCR. EXIF IPTC support. Many plugins available and support for Adobe Photoshop Filters. Batch conversion. Multimedia player. Batch scan support. Crop. Image filters. Extract icons from EXE, DLL, ICLs. Lossless JPG rotation. Image Analyzer 1.3 - 1.3MB Automatic brightness, contrast, gamma and saturation adjustment. Conventional and adaptive filters for noise reduction, edge extraction etc. Retouch tools (inc. red-eye removal) Out-of-focus and motion blur compensation (very good by the look of the sample pics) User specified filters. Resize, rotate, crop and warping of images. Scanner, camera and printer support. Many file formats supported (inc. saving ICO). Distance, Fourier and discrete cosine transformation, Morphological operations (your guess is as good as mine!). Math expression module for creating and transforming images. Plugin system. PhotoPlus 6 - 19.5MB Creative Tools - paintbrush, airbrush, clone, smudge and erase. adjustable brush settings include size, shape, softness and fade. Adjust brightness, contrast, sharpness, color hue, saturation, remove red-eye. Layer Effects - Bevels and drop shadows. Add to images without affecting the originals. Deform tool lets you rotate, resize, skew, reshape and add perspective to selection or layer. Add editable, deformable text and apply layer effects. Create animated GIFs. Image slicing for HTML pages. Export Optimizer - View up to four simultaneous previews with varying file size and quality. QuickShapes - Including speech bubbles, starbursts and spirals. DrawPlus 4 - 19MB Vector art software. Drawing & Sketching - QuickShapes, Natural Curve Editing and Curve Smoothing. Backdrop Wizard - Easily add abstract or themed backgrounds. Studio Resources - Hundreds of pre-set lines, fills, transparencies and fonts. Colour Selection - Apply colour fills to backgrounds, shapes and your own drawings. Animation tools - onion skinning, backgrounds, overlays and frame management. Blend tool - Automatically 'morph' two images into one another. Transparency effects for photo-like realism and quality. Add watermarks and borders. Colour Schemes - Define colour sets as shades of a base colour. Editable Envelopes - Stretch and squeeze objects or text. Add text and convert to curves for editing.

How anyone in their right mind would think that would be an attractive design, I don't know.

How are you viewing the php pages? You should be accessing them through the server via http://localhost/page.php

Many of the guests will be from search engines which will still mainly be pointing to the old forums, until things start warming up here. There are after all, many useful threads back at the old forums, that people will keep going back to for information.

Have a great Christmas everyone!

The GIMP is very powerful - as powerful as Photoshop, but I find it more awkward to use. The tools are less discoverable and aren't as intuitive. Good if you can get used to it though.

Tried a new profile or safe mode? I actually loved IE6, thought it was the beast thing around until I happened to stumble across the "Smallest, fastest and most secure" browser that is now Firefox. Actually, after all the hype that Fx3 was faster and used less memory, I found that it was worse in both areas than Fx2. Have you tried scrolling pages with fixed background images in Firefox 3, terribly slow.

How about "Web Design Tips, Tricks and Layout Ideas". Bit of a mouthful I know. You have my permission to remove the FAQ's forum. Nice idea but diffucult to keep going.

We could have a general CMS/Blogs forum under "Web Design" but I think that separate forums for each major CMS or Blog would be overkill. We do definitely need the "Killer Tips and Tricks" forum back though. I think it was working better than the FAQ's forum and did a similar job, but more openly.

Even if you disallow cookies in Firefox, you can enable them per-site via: Options>Privacy>Cookies>Exceptions... Enter the URL of the site you wish to allow cookies and select "Allow". Alternatively, you can right click on the page you want to allow cookies and select "View Page Info". Next click on the "Permissions" tab and uncheck "Use Default" under "Set Cookies". Finally, make sure the "Allow" radio button is selected.

Yes, many thanks for setting up this fantastic new forum! I'm sure that this forum will quickly become the huge resource that the former forum had become. Of course, there are many more of us regulars now to do what we do best!