Tuesday 14 October 2014

mSlides - A Lightweight jQuery Slideshow Plugin

mSlides (not to be confused with mSlide, another plugin) was made out of my frustration with some of the other seemingly bloated slideshow plugins out there.

mSlides Features
  • Simple left to right animation
  • Customizable navigation and pagination
  • Simple markup - easy to style
  • Support for images, custom content and linked content
  • Customizable image scaling settings
  • Callbacks support
  • Customizable delay and easing settings
  • Autoplay and Hover-pause options
  • Supports Hardware-Accelerated animations when used with jQuery Animate Enhanced


Not supported (yet)
  • Responsive features


Demo visible on Monnig Design Homepage.

Download Source Code

Monday 13 October 2014

Create an Auction with TradeMe's API Using PHP

Recently I had a client wanting a catalogue website and it got me thinking how handy it would be if their products could be automatically listed on their TradeMe account at the click of a button.

Looking into this took me to the Trade Me Developer Docs. Trade Me uses OAuth to authenticate users of it's API, so I had to brush up on my knowledge on the OAuth standard. There is actually already an OAuth extension for PHP but as my requirements were basic and wanted to have a deeper understanding of OAuth, I thought I would write my own simple implementation.

My implementation consists of a base class 'oauthRequest' which handles OAuth API requests and responses, and, extending this, our Trade Me-specific functionality in the 'trademeApiRequest' class. Keeping the Trade Me functionality in a separate class, I am hoping to reuse the base 'oauthRequest' class for other lightweight OAuth APIs.

The PHP source code for my basic Trade Me API integration is available for download from GitHub - please see the link below.

Download Source Code