Shadow in website design is something that can be achieved by using CSS and images, to achieve shadow in CSS2 you would use images and positioning, it can be achieved but it usually means that you have to create multiple divs. See my tutorial of creating shadow in CSS2 but one of the exciting new attributes in CSS3 is box-shadow which allows someone to get a nice shadow effect with just using one attribute applied to a div.
Your Localhost is very nearly complete, we’ve installed Apache, PHP 5 and MySQL 5. I breifly talked about the ability to modify and change MySQL databases. Well phpMyAdmin can do just that, this tool allows you to do this, it helps you manage your MySQL database in a nicely presented admin panel which you can easily change tables, prefixes and much more. This tool is a must if you plan on creating databases on your localhost
In part two, we installed almightly PHP language onto our localhost, with that you can now run php scripts and code offline on your localhost, but for example what if you want to test a script that needs a database your basically stuck aren’t you? Well to handle databases there’s something called MySQL, this is simple a relation database management system and is present on most web-servers avaliable today. MySQL allows you to create and modify (To a certain extent) databases on a server, and lucky you, it can be installed on a localhost! We will be installing the MySQL service and getting it to run with your localhost.
In part one we setup a Apache server and configured the localhost ready for you to use, we also set up the directory where you are going to save your local files. But so far in part one we only essentially setup the localhost, so all of the goodness of being able to view server side documents/scripts etc won’t work yet as you will need to install them, one of the most popular if not the popular server side code is PHP. It is used mostly to create dynamic webpages. Lets install PHP!
strong>Since it’s been snowing in Nottingham today and I’ve come down with a cold, I’ve been staying indoors, Although during College, all of us have been playing in the snow (Don’t judge, we’re all still young at heart!) but I’ve been playing around with the rounded corners effect in CSS3, now in my article Getting ready for CSS3 I listed a few major additions that CSS3 will bring to the web, I mentioned Shadows, multiple backgrounds and some more, but another great addition in CSS3 will be rounded corners.