With the benefit of hindsight I want to go over some of the reasons why moving to a framework (or perhaps a better framework) is a great choice for any programmer once they have a grasp on the fundamentals of PHP.

Proper MVC gives method to mayhem

I used to think I got MVC architecture, but it wasn’t until I delved into CI that I started to really understand how its supposed to look and feel, and why the correct structure is so beneficial to an application.

The way that CI is predictably structured means that debugging is almost fun. There is such a distinct pattern of organisation that finding a gremlin is as easy as looking at the URL and going directly to the responsible controller and method. This carries across projects and across developers.

Gone are the days of following breadcrumbs off to some other obscure part of the application (they don’t really exist anymore) – at worst you would find yourself in a library or helper file which is easily tracked down to a predictable location from the controller level (and generally speaking very well documented).

[On the topic of debugging I will give a curteous nod to CI's error handling capabilities when in development mode as well.]

Reasonable code organisation is imposed on you to an extent that you probably are in the wrong industry if you manage to make a mess of things.

Not to mention models. Sure, I still have some confusion about how to deal with multiple table joins in an elegant way given the supposed “one model per table” rule, but at least … Read more

The two potential solutions I discovered were:

1. execute the “wget” command to replicate a normal browser request, which then exposes my cron functionality to the big wide world and creates some additional unnecessary overheads, or
2. Create a bespoke front controller a bit like the existing index.php but specifically for cron jobs

Neither of these options sound particularly ideal to me, and thankfully, there is a better way (and it turned out to be a case of RTFM).

Firstly, just create a normal controller. I creatively called mine Cron.

Note the call to $this->input->is_cli_request() which ensures that this controller cannot be accessed directly from a url.

Next we setup our cron job as you would any other, except that you provide the path in a special format.

php /path/to/index.php controller_name method_name ["params"]

The first part is either the command “php” or your server path to php.

The second part is the absolute path to your CI front controller, eg. /path/to/index.php.

The third part is the controller name, followed by the method name, followed by optional parameters.

The CI manual gives the example:

php /path/to/index.php cron foo

If that doesn’t work you might need to specify your path to php. I set mine as follows:

/usr/local/bin/php -f /home/clinic/public_html/index.php cron foo

You can even pass parameters in quotes, which have the same effect as parameters in regular url requests!

/usr/local/bin/php -f /home/clinic/public_html/index.php cron foo “beer”

… Read more

1. Generating your own custom styled search form
2. Fetching the search results on page load rather than the default which requires the Google provided search form to be submitted

This enables you to place your custom styled search form anywhere on your site (for example in a global site header), and when the form is submitted the search results are automatically loaded as soon as the user lands on the search page – as opposed to the default behavior which requires submission of the Google provided search box.

This is a sample global form that I use in my header file, which submits to the url “/search”. I will leave the CSS side to your imagination.

On my search page, the following code displays the Google CSE search box and pre-loads the results which are passed in from PHP’s $_GET. Don’t forget to replace myUniqueID with your Google CSE unique ID.… Read more

This is what i’ve learnt.

CI is backwards compatible with PHP4

Which, in my opinion is something they should rectify – ie. retire support in the next major release and move forward. From what I have read about CI vs Kohana (a CI fork), it seems that CI is sacrificing pretty autoloading simply because they remain backwards compatible.

Edit: This is actually incorrect, as of version 2.0.2 the minimum required version of PHP is 5.1.6. Thats to Dale for pointing this out in the comments.

The MVC structure is superb, however…

Alot of tutorials i’ve watched lean towards using helper functions within views, such as for forms. From a developer perspective thats fine, however you can imagine a designer having problems with form_open() when he wants to add a simple class or ID. The upside is that they are just helpers – if you don’t like them, don’t use them.

Speaking of functions

I was surprised to discover the folder full of procedural helper functions. This is nice in terms of using functions anywhere inside the application, although it does seem a little out of place in an OOP framework. It would be nice to see these converted into classes.

Default session security is awful

Usually a PHP session’s data is stored server side and only a small cookie is kept client side to track a user session. However in CI, the session data is stored client … Read more

For the uninitiated, the Google Charts API allows you to request an image with query string parameters and format it in various different ways to produce a pretty graph.

I wanted to display the severity of a convict’s sentence, relative to the known minimum and maximum sentence terms of other convicts I had in my database.

It took a little wrangling before I discovered that I really only needed a few parameters to achieve what I wanted – the final request HTML looked like this:

Lets break that down a little.

Range and Indicator Position

The Google-o-meter defaults to a range of 0-100, therefore the easiest way to position your indicator is if you can create a percentage value from 0-100. It does also support custom ranges but that is beyond the scope of this tutorial.

How do we determine the position of the indicator (in PHP)?

The sentence severity is the sum of the sentence term in question, divided my the maximum known sentence (in my case 47 years, multiplied by 100, and finally rounded for good measure. This gives a percentage result somewhere between 0-100%. 23 years = 50%, 47 years = 100% and so on.

Other Parameters

Now that the sentence severity is known, all that is left to do is to pass the parameters to the Google Charts API.

• chs=240×100
  The dimensions of the image length x height. *important* if you change the height value here, make sure you also change the <img> width and height attributes
• cht=gm
  The chart type – gm = google-o-meter
• chco=555555,FAFA05|FF0000
  The indicator hexadecimal colour followed by the start colour and end colour (the gradient
… Read more

Utilising just released data from the State Library of Queensland, I have put together a searchable database of the British Convict transportation register. Over 123,000 of the 160,000 convicts transported to Australia are in this database – check out your families Convict Records!

I have already found some interesting facts – Did You Know: 603 convicts carried the name John Smith – the most common name in the records?

Don’t miss the convict facts for all sorts of weird and interesting things.  Over time I will be adding information about the First Fleet, Second Fleet and Third Fleet, the lifestyle of convicts and more.

Did I mention its free?… Read more

A method within the Datepicker plugin called beforeShowDay can do the following magic:

1. disable a given day from selection
2. add a CSS class to a given day
3. add a tooltip to a given day

Whilst it is probably a bit easier to make the ajax request itself using the beforeShowDay method, that puts us in the uncomfortable position of making 30+ ajax requests, one for every day displayed. If we are showing 2 months or the page has more than one datepicker, thats 60+ requests!

The better option is to make a single request onload, and an additional request whenever the month or year is changed.

The purpose of my implementation is to highlight days which have no due items in my Studiotime time management web software. This allows me to select a due date without worrying about whether I have other items already due on that day. You can just as easily check for other parameters relevant to your application – you need only adjust the sql query.

Lets start with the freeDays array and the onload javascript on the datepicker input.

So now we have a working method of requesting a php page on every page load and again every time the month or year selectors are changed. Lets have a look at how the PHP and MySQL script looks:

The CSS rule is as follows:

Disclaimer: I am no jQuery ninja and produced this tutorial by combining various other resources that I have linked to below. If you have any suggestions or improvements let everybody benefit by contributing to the comments below!

Notes:

• I’m

Here are a couple of commands I issued on a clean Ubuntu install to get everthing I needed for Symphony CMS, including cloning the git archive.

Important notes:

• I chose to make a symbolic link from /var/www to my user directory, to skip writing a new apache site-available file, however for production purposes I would suggest to write a new proper apache2 site configuration file
• The default apache2 site-enabled file has “AllowOverride None” – this needs to be changed to “AllowOverride All” for mod_rewrite to work
• The php5-xsl package is vital for XSLT to work!


sudo apt-get install git-core apache2 php5 mysql-server php5-mysql php5-xsl
## now that mysql is installed, create a database and database user and GRANT PRIVILEGES ##
sudo a2enmod rewrite
sudo vi /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default (change AllowOverride None to AllowOverride All)
sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart
cd /home/steve
mkdir symphony-cms
cd symphony-cms
git clone git://github.com/symphonycms/symphony-2.git
cd symphony-2
git submodule update --init
git clone git://github.com/symphonycms/workspace.git
ln -s /home/steve/symphony-cms/symphony-2 /var/www/symphony
chmod -R 777 /home/steve/symphony-cms/symphony-2/workspace
chmod 777 /home/steve/symphony-cms/symphony-2
## run web configuration now at yourwebsite.com/install.php ##
chmod -R 755 workspace
rm install.php install.sql workspace/install.sql update.php


See the git documentation for further reading.

If you need any clarifications, ask away in the comments section.… Read more

1. First, open cPanel on the old server, and go to the backups tab.
2. Next, select Generate/Download a Full Backup
3. Select Remote FTP server from the dropdown menu. At this point, enter the FTP details of any account on the new server. Any standard account will do, however do not create an account for the site that is to be moved on the new server beforehand, as you will only have to delete it again to restore the backup.
4. For the port option, usually 21 is the correct value.
5. Leave the Remote Dir value blank unless you have specifically created a folder for the backup (its easy to find anyway).
6. Once you press the Generate Backup button, cPanel will begin to create an archive of the entire site contents, including mail, mysql, logs, web files. Depending on the size of the site this might take a few minutes. (But god damn servers can transfer between each other quickly!).
7. Once the email notification arrives that the backup has been transferred, login to the new server as root. If you don’t have root privileges you might wish to contact your hosting company and hopefully they can take over from here.
8. The backup file will usually be located in /home/username/backup-mm.dd.yyyy_xx-xx-xx_oldusername.tar.gz
9. From the command line, navigate to the backup location, and enter something along the lines of
   mv backup-12.18.2008_11-08-09_oldusername.tar.gz /home
10. In WHM on the new server, select Restore a Full Backup/cpmove file. At this point it should detect the archive located in /home/. If not you must have put the archive in the wrong place.  Enter the old username and press Restore – thats it!

How much better is that than moving an account database by database, db user … Read more

As far as i’m concerned, at the very least, the view/template of a web application needs to be changeable even to a web designer who has zero to minimal experience working with dynamic websites. Why – when we can create “beautiful” applications with minimal code repetition – because you are breaking the brilliance of code seperation. Its no different to seperating style and content. Lets face – usually, designers are good at design, and programmers are good at programming. Therefore the two skills need to co-exist, happily.

5 Questions to ask yourself:

1. How long would it take a pure web designer (HTML + CSS only) to change any element on any page?

2. How long would it take an average programmer to make some basic functionality changes, such as adding a new database table and running some pre-existing sanitation functions?

3. I’m looking at the website index. If I download index.php (or whatever) how many breadcrumbs do I have to follow to change, for example, the sidebar?

4. Is the folder structure sensible, and have the old files and folders been deleted?

5. Am I coding in a style that only I fully understand, on a commercial project that may rightfully be worked on by other developers that I may never speak to?… Read more