Articles

Wordpress is a pretty neat blogging platform, but it falls over quite spectacularly when trying to write code in posts. I write a lot of code for #! code and so I have understand what needs to be encoded to make code examples work.

For code example on #! code I use the code tag and I encode the following characters.

< into <
> into >
" into "
' into '

Note: You must be in HTML mode in your Wordpress editor or everything will be double encoded.

The following script can be used if you want to simulate a typewriter in an element on screen. I have put in a lot of comments to describe what is happening but the script works by taking each array element in turn and adding it character by character to the content of the selected element.

I had a situation the other day where I had an application in Zend Framework and I wanted to redirect a user to another page. This is fine if you are inside a controller as you can use the _redirect() controller helper, but in this instance I was running the code from inside a plugin and so therefore didn't have direct access to the controller.

The solution is to use the getResponse() method, which is accessible to plugins, and which will retrieve the response object. The response object has a function called setRedirect() that is used to redirect. Any headers that have been issued will be overwritten by this function. The following code can be run inside your zend framework plugins to redirect the user to a different page.

What? Don't worry, I can't say it either. It is officially called the Scope Resolution Operator (but also just a double colon) and is used to reference static properties and functions of a class. It is also used to reference overridden functions of classes.

To reference a constant of a class you do something similar to the following.

class MyClass {
 const CONST_VALUE = 'A constant value';
}
 
echo MyClass::CONST_VALUE;

To call a static function or a parameter you need to include the word static in the function or parameter definition. You can then reference this function through the scope resolution operator.

After setting up your session management in your application using one of the Zend_Auth adapters you might want to allow users to stay logged in. What you need to do is set some configuration options in the Zend_Session object. Zend_Auth uses Zend_Session as an object orientated way of manipulating the $_SESSION variable. Any changes you make to the Zend_Session object will affect the Zend_Auth object, as long as you set these options before the sessions are started.

There are a number of configuration options available, but for the effect I was looking for I only needed to change the ones below. You might not need to set all of these, but it gave me the best cross browser behaviour.

Website usability should be an essential part of your online strategy, but it is so easily overlooked or overshadowed by pretty design. Here is a quick list of 7 things that can cause your users to get frustrated and go elsewhere.

1. Search
Search is a very important part of any site, and if it doesn't work then your users will just get frustrated and go to another company. Website search usability comes in two parts, the search box itself and the results.

When creating a search box you need to have a single text box and a button labelled "Search". That is about as complicated as you need to go, although it is okay to have a drop down box of categories, as long as the default is "All Categories". When the user has done a search, the search box should contain what they searched for, so that they can refine their query if the need to.

If you followed the tutorial on installing PHPDoc then you are probably wondering how to get started actually writing the documentation. PHPDoc will parse all the files given to it and look for comment blocks, it will then use these blocks to create the documentation for your application. A valid PHPDoc comment block must start with a '/**', have a '*' on every line and finish with '*/'. The comment must appear before the section that is being commented upon and any lines within the comment without a '*' will be ignored by the parser.

To create some sample documentation we will use the following useless class.

Some of you might be surprised that you can print directly to a printer of your choice through PHP. This uses a PECL extension but is only available on Windows. It is possible to print using UNIX systems, but you have to call the ps program using the system function.

To install the printer functions on Windows you need to download the PECL library for Windows, found at pecl4win.php.net. Unzip this file and move the file php_printer.dll to your extensions directory in your PHP directory (usually called ext).

Next, open up your php.ini file and add the following line at the end of the extensions list.

extension=php_printer.dll

Then add the following lines at the bottom of the file. This tells PHP what printer to use as a default. If the printer is locally installed then PHP only needs the name.

PHPDocumentor is a fast and convent way of creating API documentation for your PHP programs and classes. If you are familiar with the world of Java, it works in much the same way as the JavaDoc program, indeed, it is based on this program.

PHPDocumentor can be run in a number of different ways, but I have found that the easiest way is to, again, use PEAR to install everything you need. To install PHPDocumentor using PEAR use the following command.

phpdoc install phpdocumentor

To run PHPDocumentor and see a list of commands just type in the following:

phpdoc -h

To run PHPDocumentor you need to provide a couple of options, these are:

PHPUnit is a powerful unit testing framework written in and for PHP. Rather than testing everything as a whole the idea behind PHPUnit is to test that everything works as it is expected to work before it is integrated into the rest of the program. In this way problems are found earlier rather than later and this makes fixing them a lot easier. With tests written for every small component of the program it is then possible to test the whole thing by running all of the tests at once. It is also possible to automate PHPUnit so that everything about a program is tested before it is built. If any tests fail then the build is stopped.

The best way to install PHPUnit is to use the PEAR installer. To install PHPUnit you first need to add the correct channel so that PEAR can find PHPUnit easily. You do this by typing the following into the command line.