This round-up covers some of the most useful resources for Django lovers and those of you who are not yet familiar with this framework, but are interested to learn about it. The list includes good Django related material such as great tutorials, books, applications, videos, and so on. Enjoy!

Articles & Tutorials

Django documentation

Covers pretty much everything you need to know about Django in order to use it in your development projects, from the first steps to advanced development process.
check it out

Choosing an API framework for Django

“This works pretty well in a number of simple cases, but doing things like pagination, posting of data, metadata, API discovery, and other important things ends up being a bit more work. This is where the resource oriented API frameworks come in…”
check it out

Building a Higher-Level Query API: The Right Way to Use Django’s ORM

“In this article, I’m going to argue that using Django’s low-level ORM query methods (filter, order_by etc) directly in a view is (usually) an anti-pattern. Instead, we should be building custom domain-specific query APIs at the level of the model layer, where our business logic belongs. Django doesn’t make this particularly easy, but by taking a deep-dive into the internals of the ORM, I’ll show you some neat ways to accomplish it…”
check it out

A Guide to Testing in Django

“For many people, testing their Django applications is a mystery. They hear that they should be testing their code but often have no clue how to get started. And when they hit the testing docs, they find a deep dive on what functionality is available, but no guidance on how to implement…”
check it out

Deploying Django on Heroku

“The following assumes you’re fairly proficient with Django and these steps are only useful for getting a barebones proof of concept site up and running. I do provide the database and caching bits for you, so you can use this as a stepping stone for trying out more full-featured projects on Heroku…”
check it out

Using Signals in your Django App

“Django includes a “signal dispatcher” which helps allow decoupled applications get notified when actions occur elsewhere in the framework. In a nutshell, signals allow certain senders to notify a set of receivers that some action has taken place…”
check it out

A Django setup using Nginx and Gunicorn

“This is a howto on setting up Django on a Linux (Ubuntu) system using Nginx as a reverse proxy and Gunicorn as a Django service. The conventional way to run Django in production these days is usingApache2 and mod_wsgi. While there’s nothing wrong with that approach, I prefer Nginx. I also like to be able to control Django server separately from the web server…”
check it out

Behind the Scenes: From HTML Form to Storage

“In this post, we are going to see what happens behind the scenes when a file is uploaded to a django powered web application…”
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Backbone.js and Django

“The main task is to develop a RESTful handler to support the Backbone.js RESTful JSON interface. In the case of Django there’s no way to directly implement a function to handle the corresponding HTTP method (or perhaps I couldn’t find one). So in order to avoid too many if’s I’ve created a dictionary (methods) with the HTTP methods (key) and the corresponding function (value). When the restful function is called it returns the corresponding function by getting one of the dictionary values with request.method as the key…”
check it out

Django Requirements for a project

“An article about required Django applications packages when starting new django project.”
check it out

Tools & Applications

South

“South is a tool to provide consistent, easy-to-use and database-agnostic migrations for Django applications.”
check it out

Django Debug Toolbar

“The Django Debug Toolbar is a configurable set of panels that display various debug information about the current request/response and when clicked, display more details about the panel’s content.”
check it out

Haystack

“Haystack lets you write your search code once and choose the search engine you want it to run on. With a familiar API that should make any Djangonaut feel right at home and an architecture that allows you to swap things in and out as you need to, it’s how search ought to be.”
check it out

Sentry

“Sentry is a realtime event logging and aggregation platform. It specializes in monitoring errors and extracting all the information needed to do a proper post-mortem without any of the hassle of the standard user feedback loop.”
check it out

Django Extensions

“Django Extensions is a collection of custom extensions for the Django Framework.”
check it out

Django ImageKit

“ImageKit is a Django app that helps you to add variations of uploaded images to your models. These variations are called “specs” and can include things like different sizes (e.g. thumbnails) and black and white versions.”
check it out

Django Easy Maps

“This app makes it easy to display a map for given address in django templates. No API keys, manual geocoding, html/js copy-pasting or django model changes is needed.”
check it out

Pinax

“Pinax is an MIT-licensed, open-source platform built on the Django Web
Framework. By integrating numerous reusable Django apps and providing starter projects and infrastructure tools, Pinax takes care of the things that many sites
have in common so you can focus on what makes your site different.”
check it out

Django CMS

“A Django application for managing hierarchical pages of content, possibly in multiple languages and/or on multiple sites. Django CMS handles the navigation rendering for you with clean, slug based URLs, and this navigation can be extended by custom Django applications”
check it out

Django Notification

“Many sites need to notify users when certain events have occurred and to allow configurable options as to how those notifications are to be received.”
check it out

Books

The Definitive Guide to Django: Web Development Done Right

“Django, the Python–based equivalent to Ruby’s Rails web development framework, is one of the hottest topics in web development today. The Definitive Guide to Django is broken into three parts, with the first introducing Django fundamentals such as installation and configuration, and creating the components that together power a Django–driven web site. The second part delves into the more sophisticated features of Django, including outputting non–HTML content such as RSS feeds and PDFs, caching, and user management. The appendixes serve as a detailed reference to Django’s many configuration options and commands.”

check it out

Beginning Django E-Commerce

“Beginning Django E-Commerce guides you through producing an e-commerce site using Django, the most popular Python web development framework. Topics covered include how to make a shopping cart, a checkout, and a payment processor; how to make the most of Ajax; and search engine optimization best practices. Throughout the book, you’ll take each topic and apply it to build a single example site, and all the while you’ll learn the theory behind what you’re architecting.”

check it out

Django JavaScript Integration: AJAX and jQuery

“This book will teach you how to enrich your AJAX applications with Django and jQuery in a practical manner with minimum fuss. It introduces AJAX basics, gets a little deeper, and then goes chapter-by-chapter through a carefully chosen case study. It demonstrates how different pieces of a Django AJAX application work in themselves and are put together and specifically leads you through building an intranet employee photo directory with social networking features. This book is for people looking to integrate AJAX / JavaScript functionality into their web applications. It is for Django users who are looking to easily integrate AJAX features into their applications.”

check it out

Django Design Patterns

“Django design patterns is an ebook to help you with writing better Django code. It collects Django design patterns classified in views, urls and logical areas, and contains more than 50 tips.”

check it out

The Djen of Django

“You already know a bit of Django but you would like to take your skills to next level. This book is for you. Through real, live projects this book allows you to improve your Django skills. Build a blog, build a wiki, build a project management system to put your skills to work.”

check it out

Videos & Podcasts

Advanced Django Tutorial

Hacked Existence – Django Tutorial

Getting Started with Django – Best Practices

Building a blog in 30 mins with Django

A Django Podcast

Greg and Bryan work the Django beat with a weekly podcast that covers everything that is new in the world of Django. With regular guests and topics on a variety of subjects that matter most to the discerning Django developer.
check it out

Django Screencasts

Django Screencasts delivers periodic screencasts that help beginning to intermediate programmers get the most out of the Django Framework, a web framework built on top of the Python programming language. Each episode will either feature short focused tips and tricks that you can apply to your own project immediately, or longer tutorial pieces that help guide you in new subject areas.
check it out

Complicated maps, technical writing, mathematics, science and other fields usually go for infographics in order to represent the information clearly and as simple as possible. Infographics are meant to represent conceptual information without intimidating the end user.

Designers should definitely pay more attention to representing information easier because in some cases using infographics is more than necessary in order for the big flow of information to be pleasant for the eye as well as understood. Once you opt for minimalism in infographics, there is a bigger chance the end user will be able to understand what you are trying to say much easier. If the flow of information is too big, you can simply split it up into logical categories or chunks of information and try to represent it by using graphics and numbers.

Even from the beginning of humankind, people used to represent what they were trying to say through simple drawings and shapes on the walls, this happened before languages appeared. It is definitely much easier to communicate something visually if you don’t find the right words at the moment.

Infographics split up into categories as well depending on the type of information and the way it is more convenient to represent it. These are some of the categories that are the most popular and that are mostly used when thinking about graphic representations of data.

Representation of Maps

These are the most popular infographics and they are highly used when representing geographic elements like oceans, continents, countries, their development or other factors that affect them.

Statistics

Whether it is about charts, graphs or other visual elements, infographics are the most popular and easy way to represent data through visuals.

Timeline

When you would like to represent the evolution of a certain phenomenon, then timeline infographics come into power.

We would like to showcase some cool infographics we found on the net. We hope you will find them interesting and helpful in order to get inspired for future data representation. Let us know if you have some other interesting designs in the comments below.

Pet Insurance company stats

Drupal stats

Pinterest social stats

Corporate branding

“How to” guide infographics

Years From Slavery To Black American President

Misunderstood English Words

Travel Industry stats

image sources: loveinfographics.com

Trash longevity chart

source: coolinfographics.com

Travelling Information

image source: loveinfographics.com

SMO Periodic Table Infographic

image source: loveinfographics.com

We have decided to find some free themes that you can preview and download whenever you feel like it. Drupal is a steadily growing content management system preferred both by freelance developers and big web development companies. It is also a great solution for every type of websites – from personal blogs to big corporate websites. It is up to you what design you choose to use and the good thing is that there are already premium and free themes that are compatible with the latest version of Drupal 7.

When choosing a theme for your website, no matter the CMS, it is important to find something that would suit your needs and tastes, regarding the information you would like to display and the website architecture you would like to use in the future. There are plenty themes on the Big Web that you can choose from that would suit your needs and expectations.

This post aims to showcase a variety of Drupal 7 free themes available on the net that would probably suit personal websites and blogs, rather than big company websites but still it might work as an inspiration source for web designers. We hope you will find them as interesting choices and even end up downloading and using one of them. You can as well leave comments with the Drupal 7 free themes you like best or something you might also suggest to our readers. Most of these themes were taken from the Drupal.org official website. You can find more themes to get inspired there.

Mega Drupal

“Features: 6 colors: blue (default), brown, green, orange, pink, purple; Cross-browser tested in IE6+, Safari, Firefox and Chrome; You can change logo, favicon…”
download it here

Busy

Simple, minimalist yet elegant Drupal 7 theme targeted mainly at corporate sites.

get “Busy” theme here

Drupalace

“”Drupalace Theme is an ideal bright theme for the blogging site. Here is basic features:11 regions for blocks (including node top and node bottom!); Configurable layout; Social sharing of nodes; Nodes navigation…”

find out more about Drupalace

Acquia Prosper theme – Ubercart catalog page

“Acquia Prosper is an advanced Drupal theme by TopNotchThemes, with a monochromatic look and clean lines. It is designed as an Ubercart e-commerce theme that is easy to customize, but is extremely flexible for any type of site.”

check it out

Blue Masters

“BlueMasters for Drupal by More than (just) Themes is based on the homonymous PSD template, which was designed by Wendell Fernandes and released for Smashing Magazine and its readers…”

read more info on this

Elements

“Revolution Elements is a dark, two-column theme with unique style that showcases images alongside the text of recent posts on the homepage.

The theme is based on the old site of well-known WordPress designer Jason Schuller for…”

check it out

Journal Crunch

“Features: Front page with:One column layout, Special rendering for sticky posts, 2-column layout…”

see more about this theme here

Photogenic

A simple theme designed to display photo galleries. It is great for personal photo blogs as it has a dark background which emphasizes the importance of your photos.

download theme

Soft Technology Theme

“Here we are introducing you a eyes catching professional free drupal theme from our drupal theme designers. It is mainly developed for company profiles.It is a powerful base theme, with only single layout options. Its having…”

read more about this theme

The question is: what do you choose from a variety of specialists offering web services. Should it be a freelancer? or maybe a web design company?

Before asking yourself these questions, you might want to make up a list with all the features you would like to see on your website.

Having a website that would be user friendly and present all the important information you would like to deliver is essential. Simple and clean design is sometimes the perfect solution, but it all depends on what the client wants. That’s why put all the questions you would like to be answered before agreeing on a certain design and development in order to get a clear definition of what the website is going to represent right from the start.

Clients and service providers often get into conflicts if things aren’t clear from the beginning. You might want to add or remove some tweaks on the design you have for your website during the development process and having someone to help you with that would be great.

Research

Research is obviously one of the most important things you should consider doing in the first place. You should already know that it is practically impossible to find a person who is a good web designer and a brilliant developer at the same time. It is usually a misconception that a person can do both of the jobs perfectly and be up to date to the latest updates.

So if you would like a good websdesign, the proper lookup for good web designers should be implemented. You can start with job boards. These are the most traditional ways of finding work and usually these websites are categorized by industry so that it will be easy for job hunters to interact with hirers according to their interests.

You can either choose from local web designers and web developing companies that offer web design services or opt for freelancers that might agree to come on site if it will be needed. It depends on your interests and what you would like the final result to look like.

Don’t forget about the list of predefined question you will have to make before you complete your research. You can also compile one for the prospective web designers you like. Making lists will make you more organized and will definitely be more efficient.

Look for Visuals

A good web designer will definitely have a portfolio for you to see before you decide hiring one. Check out his previous projects and start analyzing what you like and what doesn’t really fit in to your needs: like navigation for instance – is it user friendly? Is it easy to find information in his design and does it look pleasant for the eye.

Some designers like to have their own style while designing their projects, this is why by seeing something common in all of his projects you can see what are their default traits that they would usually put into practice.

It is also advisable to look for testimonials and referrals concerning your future candidates. They can usually help and can give you real feedback from people that have already worked with these people or the web agencies providing design services.

How Good is your Match?

Before hiring a web design professional, make sure you have studied his portfolio and ask for references. You can learn from the mistakes of others by just asking for advice and hopefully find the best match for you and your business.

Web design companies usually offer professional services, references, a wide portfolio to choose from and support during your collaboration, but they might turn out to be pretty expensive and you will often have to pass through bureaucracy.

source: tumblr.com

Freelancers are much cheaper when it comes to providing web services, and they can also easier agree on meeting you on site if you need them. However you will need good references for these, making sure he will provide what quality work in time.

It is definitely up to you to choose someone that matches your business needs and good research is needed beforehand. We would love for you to share more tips with us in the comments so that they will be helpful for people in need of good web designers.

The goal is to get as many permanent contributors as possible and we wanted to create a solution that was simple, new and innovative.

We use bright colors, large images and typography and we focus on keeping the message as simple as possible. The donation option should allways be present as a button or a link.

We use different free Google fonts to help create an online identity, something that you could recognize and link with the organisation without looking at the logo.

In order to create awareness we made a round donation button wich is present on every page. We also made a more discrete option, where you can write numbers (bullet points) and change the text.

In order to help the viewer to stay focused on the organisational goals, we made a number of “badges” in blue and yellow, where you can write different messages.

We have nice looking icons to make it easier to searh through categories and find exactly what you are looking for.

Here is the list of articles written in April 2012 we found interesting and useful. Get the most of them. Enjoy!

Web Design

Content Modelling: A Master Skill

“The content model both influences and is influenced by the work of several other disciplines. A content model helps clarify requirements and encourages collaboration between the designers, the developers creating the CMS, and the content creators…”
check it out

5 Ways to Learn Web Design: Which Is Right for You?

“The web design education industry has exploded from a small niche to a powerful, continually expanding force. Countless people all over the planet are interested in learning about how to build and design websites, and tons of companies are cropping up promising the ultimate solution…”
check it out

9 Tricks To Design The Perfect HTML Newsletter

“An e-mail newsletter is the perfect way to stay in touch with your clients or followers. Often your company or website will have numerous product updates, or possibly upcoming events you’d like to share. It’s always possible to post new information to your blog or social media streams, but your audience can only go so far to reach you. In this case, e-mail is certainly not dead technology, merely untapped potential…”
check it out

Designing type systems

“I remember a conversation from back in my student days where my typophile friends and I debated what the ultimate typeface of the twentieth century was, a typeface that summed up all of the era’s advancements and knowledge into a coherent whole, one that would be a reference for years to come. Helvetica was one of the candidates for its sheer ubiquity, proof of its overall acceptance. Another, more subtle proposal was Jan van Krimpen’s Romulus, one of the first typefaces to have related Sans and Serif versions. And another, my personal pick, was Univers by Adrian Frutiger…”
check it out

Free Calligraphy Fonts for Designers

“Calligraphy is a form of visual art. It’s frequently known as the skill of fancy lettering. A modern day meaning of calligraphic practice is “the art of giving form to signs in an expressive, harmonious and skillful manner”. Today i have collected the best collection of calligraphy fonts. These fonts are ideal for classy web and graphic design…”
check it out

How Companies can Save Time and Money Using UI Kits

“Here we’ll see how they can be great for companies, designers, developers. It’s not just about saving time (I know, nice title, huh?) but also how to work smarter, common uses, best practices, how to get the most out of them…”
check it out

Retro Web Design Inspiration For Designers

“I really like the vintage/retro design of design within regardless of what design it takes, from posters not to mention adverts to web designs. The actual classic typographic ingredients and then the attention to be able to detail provided to many of these truly stand out in order to me, the actual subtle employ of background textures in many of these Web designs also appeals to be able to me then I am already thinking how I could certainly incorporate them throughout inside several future projects…”
check it out

Five responsive web design pitfalls to avoid

“Creating great responsive experiences requires a hell of a lot more than media queries. If you think creating squishy layouts is all this responsive thing is about, you’re missing the point. The fact is we need to deliver a solid user experience to a growing number of web-enabled devices, and creating entirely separate device experiences simply isn’t scalable in the long run. Creating adaptive experiences is a smarter way forward, but that doesn’t mean this approach isn’t without its challenges…”
check it out

Time management for web designers

“As a web designer working mostly on your computer, distractions are only a click away. Who has not spent his afternoon browsing stupid Youtube videos instead of creating those wireframes your client is waiting on? In this article, we will take a look at how to get away from distractions, but also how to make better use of your working time…”
check it out

The Future of Web Typography

“When a computer displays text, it uses fonts to display different styles of typeface. There are standard fonts such as Arial and Verdana, however, there are huge lists of fonts available to web developers and designers which don’t come pre-installed onto your computer, these are non-standard fonts…
check it out

Web Development

What’s New in HTML6

“Even though everyone is getting around to supporting all of the standards being set forth in the HTML5 specification, the WHATWG has been hard at work with HTML6. If you haven’t been keeping up with the forums, IRC channel, and meetings, this post will fill you in on what’s been happening and what you should start to expect out of HTML6…”
check it out

Super useful WordPress action hooks and filters

“Action hooks and filters are very useful in WordPress. They allow you to “hook” a custom function to an existing function, which allows you to modify WordPress functionality without editing core files. Today, here are 10 super usefull action hooks and filters to supercharge your WordPress install…”
check it out

20 Awesome Resources for Twitter Bootstrap Lovers

“Twitter Bootstrap has simply exploded in the web development community. There will always be skeptics and haters but on the whole the project has been a smashing success and can constantly be seen at the top of the Forked and Watched charts at GitHub…”
check it out

LESS CSS Tutorial: Designing A Slick Menu Navigation Bar

“In this tutorial we will try to design a slick menu navigation bar that is inspired from the one inApple.com. As it is only ‘inspired’ by the original product, take note that our final tutorial product will not be precisely the same as the original…”
check it out

The Essentials of Zepto.js

“Modern JavaScript libraries are quite the behemoths — just take a look at jQuery. When you’re creating a mobile app, or even just targeting modern browsers, a library that’s much more svelte and nimble becomes a tastier proposition…”
check it out

Advanced CodeIgniter Profiling With XHProf

“There are a number of ways to profile and monitor the performance of PHP code in a development environment, but once it’s been let loose on a production server its extremely difficult to know what’s going on when your app is getting accessed by your users…”
check it out

How To Optimize Images And Boost Traffic

“To get more traffic from search engines you have to optimize the content of your site accordingly. Other than text optimization you should go for image optimization to get traffic from Google Image Search. The basic things you should consider in optimizing images are “alt” attribute and image names…”
check it out

Useful Firefox Addon Extensions for Web Development

“Firefox is one of the famous browsers in web development industry mainly because of its wide array of web development tools such as Firebug. Before Chrome, Firefox has gained most of the attention and considered as the best alternative against its rival – Internet Explorer because it renders DOM and layout quite consistently despite of different releases. Personally, I’m toggling between Firefox and Chrome because I way too used to Firebug’s interface…”
check it out

Essential CSS Frameworks For Web Developer

“The CSS framework we choose to use shouldn’t ideally be based only on a private preference, because a lot of web developers tend to do.But Ideally you need to choose a framework that match up on your own present internet projects aspects such as complexity then functionality requirements.
In this informative article you see the ideal CSS frameworks such as a few of generators that you may consider for your individual next venture…”
check it out

Parse URL Querystring Into Array In PHP

“Using query strings in PHP is a good way of transferring data from one file to another.
This is done by using the $_GET variable. This variable is a global variable that is used to get the content of the query string and allow you to get at this data as an array. Getting at data in a query string can be used in other places in your application for example using Ajax requests you may need to get the contents of a query string…”
check it out

This post is a compilation of twenty useful application for web developers and web designers, built for Android devices. This list is a sequel of the first article we made on this topic. Enjoy!

Web Design

Color Dictionary

“10+ dictionaries and 2300+ colors included! Still updating! Color Dictionary makes it very easy for you to reference any traditional colors all over the world. Provides RGB/HEX/CMYK/Lab values and detailed color analysis.”
grab the app

SketchBook Mobile

“A professional-grade paint and drawing application offering a set of sketching tools and a streamlined and intuitive user interface. Requires a multi-touch device running Android 2.1 or above. ”
grab the app

HTML Color

“A Quick Reference of HTML Color for the Web Designer including HTML Color Name, RGB and Hex color codes. HTML Color can work offline so that you can check your favorite color at any time any where. ”
grab the app

SilverEdit

“SilverEdit is the ultimate web designer tool for Android devices. With SilverEdit you can Create, Edit, Preview your pages offline or online. Manage, upload and download files through the FTP as well as managing your local files and folders.”
grab the app

WhatTheFont

“Ever seen a great font in a magazine ad, poster, or on the web and wondered what the font used is? Whip out your phone and snap a photo, and WhatTheFont will identify that font in seconds!”
grab the app

OI Color Picker

“This is an extension for OI Flashlight and other compatible applications that lets you pick a color.”
grab the app

Woo Sketch

“Layered picture editing comes to android. An application to bridge the gap between photos on your phone and the graphics editor on your desktop.”
grab the app

Magic Canvas

“Magic Canvas allows you to create beautiful images by changing color into selected areas. Features includes: use photo gallery or camera images; use zoom two fingers or alternative zoom for devices that not support multitouch; scalable brush size, etc.”
grab the app

HS Image Cut

“HS image cut create images that makes your phone more unique. You can easily cut, slice a image and you can make a widget like DVR(Desktop Visualizer).”
grab the app

Color Snap

“Capture real world colors for free. With ColorSnap®, it’s easy to take color inspiration from a photo in your library or one you just snapped. “
grab the app

Web Development

Drupal Editor

“An editor for Drupal powered websites. Allows you to post and edit articles on sites that use Drupal. You (or your Admin) have to enable the Blog API for this to work. This is very unofficial, my only ties to Drupal is me using it for my webpage.”
grab the app

ConnectBot

“ConnectBot is a powerful open-source Secure Shell (SSH) client. It can manage simultaneous SSH sessions, create secure tunnels, and copy/paste between other applications.”
grab the app

View Web Source

“With this application you will be able to view the source of any website. You will also be able to select text, search for text as well as copy and paste the HTML. To get the source from the page you are currently viewing in the browser, you can now use the share feature from the menu and select View Web Source.”
grab the app

Wordpress for Android

“Write new posts, edit content, and manage comments on your WordPress blog. WordPress for Android is an Open Source app that empowers you to write new posts, edit content, view stats, and manage comments with built-in notifications.”
grab the app

Google Drive

“With Google Drive, you can store all your files in one place, so you can access them from anywhere and share them with others.”
grab the app

Google Analytics for Andorid

“Mobile GA for Android is a secure, fast and lightweight application for accessing your Google Analytics data. The app is intended to help you keep an eye on your key summary statistics while you’re on the move. Please visit the Android Marketplace from your Android mobile phone to purchase Mobile GA.”
grab the app

Dropbox for Android

“Dropbox lets you bring all your photos, docs, and videos anywhere. Dropbox is a free service that lets you bring all your photos, docs, and videos anywhere. After you install Dropbox on your computer, any file you save to your Dropbox will automatically save to all your computers, your Android device, and even the Dropbox website!”
grab the app

PHP reference

“You will find complete references of all PHP functions and constants. At PHP Reference you will find complete references of all PHP functions and constants.”
grab the app

HTML5 Reference

“This HTML5 reference lists all tags supported in the HTML5 specification. Tags, tag attributes and a listing of tags removed in HTML5 (valid in HTML4) are listed in a convenient cheatsheet format. This is the most complete, and up-to-date, HTML5 cheatsheet (reference) around.”
grab the app

W3C Cheasheet

“The W3C Cheatsheet provides quick access to useful information from specifications (incl HTML5, CSS, SVG, XPath) published by W3C, the leading international Web standards community.”
grab the app

Designing a texture whether it is about background, menus or different buttons and design elements might be difficult for people that are not in good terms with their imagination or are having a harsh time in finding it.

There is no need to reinvent the wheel in some cases, because the wheel is right there before you and in this case we mean all kinds of textures that are easily reachable on the Internet. Whether you want premium textures that you are ready to pay for, or more common ones that can be found for free, the Big Web can offer anything for any taste available.

“Starry Night” Texture

This Set includes 7 Textures at 3888×2592 , all were made from photographs and then processed in CS5.

Type: Freebie
Credit to: 22pixels.com

Monoprint Texture Brushes

* 23 textures made using monoprint techniques.
* Varying patterns and paint coverage.
* All brushes are in 72 ppi quality (A3).

Type: Freebie
Source: brusheezy.com

The Thriller Cinematic Background

“Thriller Background textures” is a pack of 8 images edited to give a cinematic look and ready to use. High res jpg 3872×2592 px.
Perfect for book covers, motion graphics & web backgrounds.

Type: Paid
Source: graphicriver.net

Bokeh Textures

This set comes with seven colorful and quality bokeh textures.

Type: Paid
Source: graphicrivier.net

Paper and Canvas

A set of 14 high resolution paper and canvas textures – a highly versatile set! Grab them while they’re hot.

Type: Freebie
Source: premiumpixels.com

Rusty Metal

A set of high resolution rusty metal textures. Each texture is 2500px x 1600px giving you plenty of working space.

Type: Freebie
Source: premiumpixels.com

Wood

Everybody loves wood textures and that’s handy as today’s free resource is a pack of 10! If you’re looking to make something especially ‘woody’ then this is for you.

Type: Freebie
Source: premiumpixels.com

Paper

Type: Freebie & Paid
Source: grungetextures.com

Seamless Backgrounds

The zip file includes each texture in both 1200px and 500px sizes as well as a Photoshop .PAT file for easy integration.

Type: Freebie
Source: lostandtaken.com

Vintage Book Textures

These textures can be used in nearly every type of design and are perfect for adding just a hint of texture to your work.

Type: Freebie
Source: lostandtaken.com

These are just some of the thousands of textures you can find on the net, as we presented some categories you might be interested in using. Research is important when putting something artsy together so all you have to do is search and be patient until you find something suitable for your design.

We have also find some inspirational websites that might serve as examples of good texture use.

Sample Practices

This is a website that is minimalist in using colors and graphics, but the great combination of using 2 types of textures has inspired me to post it.

I really liked the colors used on this website. The textures reminded me of vintage notebooks or some kind of old papers that perfectly match all the website and the way that content is presented on it.

The website dedicated to a successful South Australian aviator is a really good choice of textures and graphics, concentrating on vintage elements that simply blend greatly together.

The sandy textured background is a good choice for the color palette used on the Kez website.

We came up with a list of tutorials, tools and other brilliant resources that you may find useful in order to find out more about Twitter Bootstrap and how to use it for your own applications and websites. Enjoy!

Articles & Tutorials

Building Twitter Bootstrap

“The decision to create Bootstrap as a style guide came naturally out of our design and development process. Bootstrap helps us document components with live examples as we build them, while serving as a living document powered by itself, the very components and templates it prescribes. It gave us a single point of reference to share guidance from designers and created a set of documentation for each living component…”
check it out

Twitter Bootstrap 101: Introduction

“Twitter’s Bootstrap is an excellent set of carefully crafted user interface elements, layouts, and javascript tools, freely available to use in your next web design project. This video series aims to introduce you to Bootstrap; taking you all the way from downloading the resources, to building a complete Bootstrap-based website…”
check it out

Bootstrap from Twitter

“At its core, Bootstrap is just CSS, but it’s built with Less, a flexible pre-processor that offers much more power and flexibility than regular CSS. With Less, we gain a range of features like nested declarations, variables, mixins, operations, and color functions. Additionally, since Bootstrap is purely CSS when compiled via Less, we gain two important benefits…”
check it out

Sample App with Backbone.js and Twitter Bootstrap

“To give this combination a try, I put together a new sample application that uses Backbone.js to organize the code, and Twitter Bootstrap to organize the UI. The application is an Employee Directory that allows you to look for employees by name, view the details of an employee, and navigate up and down the Org Chart by clicking the employee’s manager or any of his/her direct reports…”
check it out

Twitter Bootstrap tutorial

“In this and consequent pages, w3resource covers Twitter Bootstrap tool in detail, which will equip you to build web apps and sites using the tool. Twitter Bootstrap is created with modern browsers in mind. So, you will find it working perfectly with all the modern versions of Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Opera and Internet Explorer. In “Twitter Bootstrap Tutorial” you will learn the following…”
check it out

Adding Twitter’s Bootstrap CSS to your Rails app

“Twitter’s new CSS toolkit, Bootstrap, is all the rage these days. I explain how to get the CSS, and optionally the mixins and the JavaScript, into your Rails app…”
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Why We Love Twitter’s Bootstrap

“One of the reasons we landed with Bootstrap is that it was most simply a great place to start. With things like a intuitive grid system, responsive layout design, and CSS3/HTML5 readiness we knew that it would be the best foundation for us as a development team and for the end-user at large…”
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Bootstrap From Twitter Is A New Web Designer’s Dream

“Especially as a newbie without the necessary skills to write it first hand, it’s very tempting to use different snippets of code for different tasks, but Bootstrap merges these all together into one, easy-to-use library. As a bonus, it’s written by developers of one of the world’s most popular websites, offering some security into making sure your site works with these elements…”
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Using Twitter Bootstrap with Jekyll

“While you’re getting your feet wet, use the Twitter Bootstrap Customize and download page to build and customize a Bootstrap package. From there, you can generate a zip file containing the Bootstrap images, compiled CSS files, and bundled Javascript (including minified and unminified versions).
To make it easy to update, unpack the resulting zip file in a bootstrap directory, underneath your Jekyll source directory. Then, drop it into your HTML layout(s). For instance…”
check it out

Develop quickly with Twitter Bootstrap

“Bootstrap provides various elements for developers to use, ranging from scaffolding to jQuery components. The scaffolding gives developers an easy way to build complex layouts based on a 12-grid system. This is all based on a system of various div tags with classes that associate the width of said div. For example, if you want a 3-column layout in a 12-column grid system, you could use three div tags with the class span4…”
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Bootstrap Tools

jQuery UI Bootstrap

“With this theme, not only do you get the ability to use Bootstrap-themed widgets, but you can now also use (most) of Twitter Bootstrap side-by-wide with it without components breaking visually.”
check it out

Twitter Bootstrap jQuery Mobile Theme

“This theme overrides the existing jQuery Mobile A – E swatches (and adds an F swatch as well) with colors and styles found in Twitter Bootstrap. It’s meant to be used with A as the primary swatch for the page, and B – F as accents as needed.”
check it out

Colorpicker and Datepicker for Twitter Bootstrap

“Add color picker to field or to any other element. Can be used as a component, alpha picker and multiple formats: hex, rgb, rgba, hsl, hsla. Also includes a datepicker picker to field or to any other element. Can be used as a component, formats: dd, d, mm, m, yyyy, yy; separators: -, /, . ”
check it out

Bootswatch

“Bootswatch includes a comprehensive list of free themes for Twitter Bootstrap and they can be used by simply downloading and replacing the CSS file.”
check it out

Django Toolkit for integration with Twitter’s Bootstrap

“The title says it all. A great toolkit meant to integrate django with twitter Bootstrap.”
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Twitter bootstrap UI (drupal module)

“This is an enhancement module for the Twitter Bootstrap theme. Currently it provides the following functionality: Libraries API support for the Twitter Bootstrap library.”
check it out

Twitter Bootstrap Generator Tool

“Bootstrap Generator is twitter bootstrap generator tool created by martinbean for use in kick-starting your app/projects that use Twitter Bootstrap CSS framework. Simply configure the options, click “Generate” and receive your own, compiled Bootstrap CSS file ready to work with!”
check it out

Fbootstrapp

“Fbootstrapp is a facebook gui toolkit, designed to kickstart development of facebook iframe apps in both relevant sizes. It’s created by Clemens Krack, based on Twitter’s Bootstrap.”
check it out

Videos

How to use Twitter Bootstrap

Twitter Bootstrap 101: Introducing 2.0

Setting up Twitter Bootstrap Tutorial

Twitter Bootstrap 101: Tabs and Pills

Twitter Bootstrap 101: Navbar Markup

Because of Drupal becoming more complicated since its beginnings, it has become a little bit of a challenge for people that just started using it. Complexity is often feared by big software projects, as well as by developers that use it.

image: webserviceguide.com

There is too much custom code that can be found in the core of Drupal, and due to the fact that standardized patterns and components are rarely used, it is often hard for both experienced PHP developers and novices in the subject to understand it at its full. Dries Buytaert – the inventor of Drupal states that one good approach is by using standardized patterns and components.

The Internet is mostly heading towards web services lately, going mobile. This sets new rules and expectations for Drupal and all the other content management systems, bringing out the need for more flexible page and layout capabilities. Luckily the Drupal community of developers has thought about this, coming up with ideas on how to improve it. One of them is by collaborating with fellow developers, in this case we are talking about Symfony 2.

Symfony 2.0 is a company that provides web services which is MIT licensed and GPL compatible. It offers a reusable set of standalone PHP components that solve big web development issues when it comes to coding. Drupal 8 is adapting some of Symfony 2’s components that will definitely help the Drupal community build a more powerful and flexible system that would be less complicated to master.

image: freecodesource

You can find the full list of components provided by Symfony 2 in Drupal 8 in the presentations at Drupalcon events, but here is just some of them:

• drupal_set_message() could be replaced by Symfony 2 “flash message” which is a feature that passes messages to the very next request. This is done quicker than the older version in Drupal. Although this component is not yet fully compatible with Drupal 8, they are seriously working on it on order to make it happen until its launch.
• The ClassLoader Component is another potential component to be found in Drupal 8. It loads your project classes automatically if they follow some standard PHP conventions which will be adopted by Drupal soon.
  Whenever you use an undefined class, PHP uses the auto loading mechanism to delegate the loading of a file defining the class. Symfony2 provides a “universal” autoloader, which is able to load classes from files that implement a set of conventions. You can find more information about this component on Symfony 2 website.
• HTTP Foundation is another very important Symfony 2 component to be interated with Drupal 8. The HttpFoundation Component defines an object-oriented layer for the HTTP specification. In PHP, the request is represented by some global variables ($_GET, $_POST, $_FILE, $_COOKIE, $_SESSION…) and the response is generated by some functions (echo, header, setcookie, …). The Symfony2 HttpFoundation component replaces these default PHP global variables and functions by an Object-Oriented layer.
• Routes will be a component used by Drupal 8, but with several modifications for it to be compatible.
• Event Dispacher
• HTTP Caching
• and more to come

There is still much place for discussions about this collaboration and many others to come, so that you are more then welcome to join the discussion. We will keep you posted with other fresh news as we find out about them.