Gabriel de Kadt » php

PHP 101. Basic stuff: get value from URL querystring with PHP

admin — Mon, 11 Jul 2011 09:14:50 +0000

As I’m still an idiot when it comes to media queries and mobile devices and can pass this stuff on to other folks – but needed to give myself and the interested parties a visual representation of how different sized graphics will be delivered to different mobile devices… I was after a simple ‘switch’ that would allow a single wedge of HTML to render according to a variable.

The example here goes along the lines of http://example.com?width=340 where the width has a few values it accepts or will default to a preset size…

This variable can then get passed around in the PHP file to set image dimaensions CSS etc…

Getting a page ID in WordPress

admin — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 19:39:31 +0000

Q. Want to get something in your theme to work with data from a particular page or post – but don’t know for sure what that post’s ID is?

A. Try this in your functions.php file:

$my_id = $wpdb->get_var("SELECT ID FROM $wpdb->posts WHERE post_name = 'myPost'");

…then you can then pass a variable about in your theme’s templates.

Passing a variable about in a WordPress theme

admin — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 17:58:16 +0000

I’m used to using php variables set in included file being used in another included file if all are included in the same document. This doesn’t work in WordPress theme parts. It’s easy to overcome though… you just need to recall the variable first…

somewhere in functions.php

 $my_var = "xyz"

Now i can do this somewhere in header.php

Multiple WordPress excerpt lengths

admin — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 17:51:00 +0000

Q. Got a theme that needs two different excerpt lengths?

A. Found here: set the standard, longer excerpt as normal in the functions.php file and the override locally using this code:

Turn a text list into an HTML Select Option list with PHP

admin — Thu, 03 Feb 2011 17:53:15 +0000

Easy solution to this basic HTML coding need posted over at Stack Overflow by a random clever bloke. Thanks RCB.

';
  foreach($lines as $line)
     $html .= '';

  $html .= '';
  echo $html;
?>

My only issue was with UTF-8 characters coming through garbled. Bodged a workaround using this encode entities plug-in for Dreamweaver.

CSS in PHP

admin — Wed, 02 Feb 2011 11:43:14 +0000

The last time I tried to render CSS through PHP was many, many moons ago. I didn’t work and I couldn’t figure it out. Yesterday I tried again and found out why… the MIME type must be set as text/css. D’oh. Set MIME type like this:

< ?php
header("Content-Type: text/css");
?>

PHP web forms

admin — Fri, 24 Sep 2010 16:15:41 +0000

Websites are a point of contact – and a contact form that sends an email is the way to normally handle enquiries. (Of course phone numbers/addresses must first be easy to find!) A contact form requires a web server to actually do something – ie send you an email – it’s not just displaying HTML code anymore. There’s options to get by without a script on your server – the excellent WuFoo online form builder is a great option here – but if you want a form as part of your page that you can style yourself it ain’t the ticket. So, knowing a little PHP, a PHP script is sought that:

makes sure all input is cleaned and sanitized to avoid nasty things being done on/to your server
checks for errors in the data without discarding the well formed data
uses some form of CAPTCHA to keep those spam bots at bay
sends email through an authorised SMTP email account (Gmail, for example, will either mark as spam or simply not accept mail that isn’t)

Other nice things to consider would be nice, cross-browser (HTML5) placeholder text (that doesn’t get submitted).

Finding a PHP web form framework

Last time I set up a form was a while ago – I’ve been doing mostly WordPress sites (or other CMS work) recently and have found the premium Gravity forms plugin for WordPress to work a treat. Anyway, cut to the chase already… the old script I had used failed on points 3 & 4 above I’d like to say I can lean on PEAR PHP (which is already on my webserver) but I’m really not a programmer. I found a solution in the excellent PHP form “library” from Dagon Design. I’d never heard off it but it’s the first serious result for “PHP form script” in Google at the moment – so it must at least be popular. More importantly it ticks all the boxes above (plus much more) and is well documented. Go get it. The only thing it doesn’t do is verify numerical input.

There’s no need for me to go into the setup at all – it is very well documented – just spend a half hour or so to read through it.

Adding placeholder text to the form framework

All I have to add is that I’ve edited the script a bit to set default text as HTML5 placeholder text (and remove default text from text inputs). The form is run in conjunction with Daniel Stocks’ HTML5 Placeholder Plugin for jQuery to make sure that the placeholder text works with IE etc.

To get the placeholder text working I changed the last few lines of the below (from 754):

function ddfm_gen_text($item) {

	// type=text|class=|label=|fieldname=|max=|req=(TRUEFALSE)|[ver=]|[default=]

	global $form_submitted, $form_input, $show_required;

	$req_text = (($show_required) && ($item['req'] == 'true')) ? '' . DDFM_REQUIREDTAG . ' ' : '';

	$gen = "";
	$gen .= '' . $req_text . $item['label'] . '';
	$gen .= '' . "\n\n";

	return $gen;
}

to:

	if ($form_submitted) {
		$gen .= ddfm_bsafe($form_input[$item['fieldname']]);
	}

	$gen .= '" placeholder="' . ddfm_bsafe($item['default']) . '" />' . "\n\n";

	return $gen;

So what’s all the fuss about – well you can see the version I worked on, in action, as part of a website for this fancy (in the good sense) hair salon in Fuengirola…

Rotating Twitter Tweet feed in WordPress

admin — Sat, 12 Jun 2010 17:04:48 +0000

Again, this is for one my current projects: my mate Phil’s digital DJ tips site…

OK – so there’s loads of plugin’s out there that do this kind of thing but I’m not after anything fancy (or bloated), I’m happy to code this into the theme files with a bit of PHP and well – it’s something slightly new to learn …

Primary requirements:

We want this thing to use the SimplePie feed parser and cacheing system, as already included with a standard WordPress install. This will copy the latest tweets into WordPress and avoid running-off to bother Twitter every time our WP site gets a visit. This will also make the thing more robust as Twitter does occasionally… fail.
A raw Twitter feed will include your user name at the beginning of each tweet. This unnecessary when the blog and tweets are from the same person/identity/brand so we’ll need to remove that.
We need the SimplePie cache to expire fairly regularly – not enough to bust Twitter’s balls with extra requests – but enough to keep the tweets fresh
We may want to trim the tweets (yes even less than 140 characters!) so they fit on one line without having the set an explicit width or css “overflow:hidden;”. [This is a graphic design call here as I like backgrounds fills to match the variable length of text (inline) rather than be fixed-width with trailing whitespace of block level element - makes each tweet look like the unique thing it is.]
Once this is done it goes into a simple carousel to rotate through the last x tweets.

The code comes in a couple of pieces:

The main engine: get the twitter feed – pack it up and process it.

I put the following into an include file to keep it all wrapped together for easy access. This code mostly based on the excellent WordPress codex article “Function Reference/fetch feed“. The String replace reference came from the classic tizag PHP guide and the shorten to the nearest whole word came from somewhere else

	get_item_quantity(5);

	    // Build an array of all the items, starting with element 0 (first element).
	    $rss_items = $rss->get_items(0, $maxitems);
	endif;

	// shorten string function
	function short_str( $str, $len, $cut = true ) {
	    if ( strlen( $str ) <= $len ) return $str;

	    return ( $cut ? substr( $str, 0, $len ) : substr( $str, 0, strrpos( substr( $str, 0, $len ), ' ' ) ) ) . '...';
	}
	?>


	
	    No tweets!';
	    else
	    // Loop through each feed item and display each item as a hyperlink.
	    foreach ( $rss_items as $item ) : ?>
	    
	        get_date('j F Y | g:i a'); ?>'>
	        get_title();
	        	$djt_twitter_tweet = str_replace("YourTwitterUsername: ", "", $djt_twitter_tweet) ;
	        	echo short_str( $djt_twitter_tweet , 140, false) //OK - not actually doing any shortening with this line now ;
	        ?>

Set the cache expiry in functions.php

// Alter expiry lenght on feeds (set in seconds)
add_filter( 'wp_feed_cache_transient_lifetime', create_function('$a', 'return 480;') );

Finally make it pretty with jCarousel

The idea was to have one tweet visible at a time – scrolling/rotating through the list. Grab your copy of jCarousel (it’s much bigger than jCarousel lite but by the time I’d figured out the trouble with my wp_head() it was time to leave well enough alone. To be revisited when there’s some time to optimize.) I’ll not go into the CSS – that’s there online.

Long/short headings (or title tags) using WordPress Custom Fields

admin — Wed, 19 May 2010 11:24:30 +0000

[ This post is now largely if not entirely redundant now thanks to WordPress 3 menu options ]

Problem: WP titles are too long to fit in your navigation.

Solution:

Make the title short enough to fit in the navigation and then add a Custom Field into your post (in the example bellow it is set as “heading”) then edit your template file to render the longer version (“heading”) on the page.

Example:

In the Loop of your template swap out

for:

Hat-tip: Smashing Magazine

Include an HTML file in a PHP variable

admin — Wed, 12 May 2010 09:38:08 +0000

I couldn’t get PHP to accept an HTML file include as the definition of a variable without throwing my templated page into disarray. An answer came from the venerable desilva then checked with the php folk; use output buffering (see example six in that last link):

Also worth a look: file_get_contents

Why? Because Coda, my favourite Macintosh text editor+, doesn’t do syntax highlighting of HTML for a PHP string. The site I’ve just finished for a high-end luxury villa in Marbella I had a big block of HTML to include (and work on) for the images page…