Codeigniter describes itself as “a powerful PHP framework with a very small footprint, built for PHP coders who need a simple and elegant toolkit to create full-featured web applications.”. It also provides the underpinnings for Expression Engine and powers a lot of sites across the web.

There are a lot of CoffeeScript guides out there. I’ve even written some myself. When I was asked to contribute to the 12 Devs of Xmas with a piece on CoffeeScript, I was keen but knew I needed to take a different angle on it. So I’ve decided that instead of slowly introducing you to CoffeeScript from the base up and writing some typical “Hello World” (does anyone learn from that, really?) I’ve taken a simple piece of JavaScript I’ve written, and together we’ll convert it to CoffeeScript. The original JavaScript and the CoffeeScript rewrite will be available from Github so you can play around to your heart’s content.

In this article I’m going to give you a brief introduction into custom post types, and the great thing is no matter how you decide to use WordPress, custom post types can be damn handy. Lets do this!

Picture the scene: after a hard year of geekery, you’ve decided to spend a week out in the sticks to get away from it all. You’re cosied up by the fire in your remote cottage when suddenly you get the call every dev dreads – “the site’s down!”

Keeping track of UI state in web applications can get very complicated very quickly. Data is coming and going; the user is opening and closing components, selecting, filtering and rearranging; and just relying on DOM inspection to understand where things are is likely to end in frustration. Trust me, I’ve been there.

LESS is a dynamic style sheet language. It’s like CSS but much more powerful, saves time and has a bunch of neat features rolled in to make our lives easier. I’m going to run you through setting up LESS, some of its features and finally, writing some LESS.