jQuery 1.2 is finally here! If you are a web developer and you have not had the chance to play with jQuery, I highly recommend that you do. This library will change your life. OK, well that may be a little extreme, but I must say that before I found out about jQuery, any time I heard the words “ajax”, “interactivity”, or even just “javascript”, I’d head for the door. jQuery allows you to do what you want with javascript in a standards-friendly, unobtrusive way. It allows you to forget about all the tedious details of DOM scripting and just get down to business.

The release was announced yesterday on the official jQuery blog. They also posted the official release notes where you’ll find the links to download the source, both compressed and uncompressed, as well as instructions on how to upgrade, and documentation for the new release.

Yep, I said it, and like well-known web development expert Jeff Croft, I am prepared for the onslaught of angry “standardistas” that may disagree with me. I read an article today by Jeff that was really a breath of fresh air. I am so used to seeing web development experts proclaim that every little piece of a website must be 100% standards-compliant, but sometimes, that is just not a priority. I’ll let you read his article since he’s a bit of a better writer and he explains it better than I ever could. Enjoy!

Jeff Croft: On standards, Web Standards, and “standardistas”

And since it’s Thursday, here’s a light-hearted definition of Web Standards from the Devil’s Dictionary:

web standards, noun
A large stick or cudgel, used by the slightly more anal-retentive to beat the slightly less anal-retentive.

Magento Commerce’s inaugural preview version was announced on Friday by Roy Rubin at Varien. Varien is a web development company with a special interest in creating rich, ecommerce websites and innovative user interfaces. For the past several months they have been boasting about an ecommerce platform they’ve been writing. According to www.magentocommerce.com, Magento is written in PHP on top of the Zend Framework, making it one of the first real applications to utilize this framework to its full extent.

I have been looking forward to salivating over this release for quite some time, and to be quite honest, I am having a difficult time even finishing this article because I am so eager to start playing around with it. Please feel free to check it out yourself. The official release was made on the following page:

Announcing Magento Preview 0.6 and Launch of the Community Site

Also, just in case there was something unclear about the words “preview release”, this version should not be used in any kind of production website. It is a preview and has only been released so that the community may get acquainted with how it works and begin developing tutorials, plugins, articles (such as this one), and to generally create a buzz about the software.

I’ll keep you posted with updates and tutorials as they are made available.

You’ve probably heard of ecotourism, disaster tourism, and other tourism niches. The latest trend is ag-tourism, which started growing rapidly once agricultural businesses discovered that “tourists will pay to play on the farm,” as Chico Enterprise Record business editor Laura Urseny explained in an Aug. 19, 2007 article.

Her piece highlighted UpstateCaliforniaAdventures.com, a Sacramento Valley Resource Conservation and Development Area Council project that launched last year. Developed by MC2 Design Group, Inc., the Web site uses a member database and Google maps to help ag-tourists plan trips along the Highway 99, Highway 70, and Interstate 5 corridors.

“I’m excited about anything that can be done to get ag-tourism on the map,” Kathy Landini, co-owner of Elk Creek Buckarettes, told Urseny.

Website: www.indigenousdesigns.com
Formula:

• Ecommerce/Miva
• Clean/verbose urls
• Valid XHTML 1.0 Strict
• CSS2.1

Debut: August, 2007

We are pleased to announce the launch of IndigenousDesigns.com. Indigenous Designs is an organic fair trade clothing company that reflects a commitment to sustainability and socially responsible actions. The site’s official launch was August 16, 2007. MC2 Design Group provided the technical and online marketing expertise to bring the site to reality.

Miva Small Business Solutions, creator of Miva Merchant announced on Monday that they have been purchased by a former Miva Small Business management team led by Russell Carroll.
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Magento is an open-source shopping cart solution built on top of the Zend Framework (PHP). It looks very promising–I can’t wait to get my hands on it. The beta is set to be released some time this month. Anyway, on their development blog, they’re looking for examples of usable, and interesting ecommerce sites, so head on over there and tell them what your favorite ecommerce site is!

http://www.magentocommerce.com/blog/what-are-your-favorite-ecommerce-sites/

UPDATE: Magento recently posted the results of their request for good ecommerce sites. It is a pretty comprehensive list. Check it out!.

Today is the 3 year anniversary of the extremely popular scripting language PHP5. As exciting as that is, today is even more exciting due to the end-of-life annoucement of PHP4 by the PHP team. I have been waiting for this day for a long time. For the last three years there has been this vicious circle of inability to rid the world of PHP4. Now with PHP6 on the way, I think we must move on.

The reason it has been so difficult to get the world to switch to PHP5 is because there are some subtle differences and backwards-incompatibilities. Nothing intensely difficult to upgrade, but to some the benefits just have never been worth it. Still, to others it was due to the fact that web hosts refuse to upgrade to PHP5 for fear of breaking their customer’s PHP4 code due to backwards-incompatibility, so developers, in order to maintain portability do not take advantages of PHP5’s features. Do you see the vicious circle I’m alluding to?

Due to the end-of-life of PHP4 by the official PHP team, along with a wonderful little movement called GOPHP5, all of this may be about to change. GOPHP5 is an initiative by many open source projects to stop support for PHP4 in an attempt to get web hosts as well as other developers to make the switch as well. We have been a PHP5 outfit for some time now, but I strongly recommend if you are a developer to hop on the bandwagon. Go PHP5!

You may read more about the GOPHP5 initiative on their website, as well as all of the projects who are committed to it.

On Monday, the Zend Framework team announced the first production release of its open source, community-driven framework. I’ve watched this framework grow since version 0.2.0 and many many things have changed. I have actually been using the framework in production since version 0.6.0. Well, I shouldn’t say I’ve been using the whole framework. There are pieces of it which have proven very useful since almost its conception. For instance, we’ve already relied heavily on its front controller, session handling, authentication, and several other components. So far though, we’ve been hesitant to rely too much on the framework as a whole, due to the fact that it has been somewhat of a moving target. Now that the framework is officially released, the developers have an obligation to keep a stable API, so we’ll likely be integrating it into our projects quite a bit more. I imagine that for those same reasons, other companies will start using it as well. This means we’ll likely see more (or at least better) documentation, tutorials, and innovation surrounding this framework.

The thing I’ve always loved about this framework is that it doesn’t lock you into using more than you want to. For instance, I’ve never cared for the framework’s input validation components, but since the framework is so loosely coupled, it is trivial for me to use a home-baked solution. The same goes for its mail component. I have been a happy swiftmailer user for almost a year now, and I don’t plan on abandoning it simply because my framework has its own mail component. Luckily, this framework doesn’t make me!

Andi Gutmans (co-founder of Zend) has written a blog post regarding the release as well, and I imagine he has significantly more beneficial information, so be sure to check that out.

You can download the new release or even help with a future one at the framework’s homepage. Oh, and happy Zend Frameworking!

MC2 Design Group, is proud to announce a flagship ecommerce project. BagSelect.com is a brand-name bag distributor located right here in Chico, Ca. With over 17 name-brands and dozens more coming online, there is something for everybody at BagSelect. They have a strong reputation as a customer service oriented company, and we built them a robust, user-friendly ecommerce website to match their nack for satisfying their customers. See more information in our site showcase or check them out online at http://www.bagselect.com.