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A widget is a little program that fits into the side menu of your site. These widgets can be moved around using the admin section of your Wordpress blog and there are quite a few to chose from with a default install.

To create a theme that supports widgets you can follow the instructions in the post creating a widget proof Wordpress theme.

You can create a widget in one of two places, either within your functions.php file of your template, or in a plugin. To get a widget to display you need to call a function called register_sidebar_widget(). This function takes two parameters, the name of the widget in the admin section, and a callback function that controls what the widget contains.

I have talked previously about getting an IP address of a visitor with PHP. The failing in using the value of $_SERVER["REMOTE_ADDR"] is that if the visitor is using a proxy then you will get the proxy IP address and not the visitors real IP address.

This function works by going through any variables in the $_SERVER array that might exist that would contain information to do with IP addresses. If they are all empty then the function finally looks at $_SERVER["REMOTE_ADDR"] value and returns this as a default.

If you want to directly edit any page that you are looking at then copy and paste the following JavaScript into your address bar.

javascript:document.body.contentEditable='true' document.designMode='on' void 0

I have created a handy little bookmarklet that you can use to do the same thing.

Edit

This code has been tested in IE7, Firefox and Chrome and works well in all three.

Of course, it goes without saying that you don't actually edit the site, just the content that you see on the screen. Hitting refresh will remove any editing that you have done. This little tool is ideal if you want to see what different content would look like on the page without having to edit HTML. It can also be used to create spoof pages with false content.

I have been asked a couple of times recently if PHP has a function that will move a file, so I thought I would put the solution here.

PHP has a function called rename() which can be used to rename a file, but because of the way it works it can be used to move files. Let's say that you wanted to rename a file called test.txt to test_back.txt, this can be accomplished by doing the following.

rename("test.txt", "test_back.txt");

However, if you want to move the file from one directory to another you can do the following.

rename("test.txt", "backups/test_back.txt");

The return value of rename() is boolean that tells you if the rename was successful or not, this can be used to error check like this.

If you have a web site then the chances are that there will be a form of some kind on there somewhere. This might be a search box, or a contact form or even a tool. There is one thing that should be followed no matter what sort of form you create and this is the rule of Simple Input Detailed Output, or SIDO for short.

The idea behind SIDO is that you get the user to enter the absolute minimum amount of information when filling out a form, but once complete give them as much information as you can in return. The perfect form should have a single input box, and return at least a page of information from this single starting point.

File permissions are important, especially if you want to let a user agent view a file. If the file doesn't have the correct permissions then it will not be accessed and could cause your script to fail. To get around this you might want to use the following function. It uses the PHP function chmod(), which sets permissions, but it does this recursively from wherever you set it off from.

To round a number in MS SQL use the ROUND() function. This function takes two parameters, the first is the number to be rounded and the second is the number of decimal places to round the number to. Here is an example of rounding the numbers in a column to the nearest whole integer.

If you want to concatenate the output of three different columns in MS SQL just use the + symbol.

A TileList is part of a group of elements that allow you to add components in a specific order and orientation. The TileList controls the displaying of a number of items set out as tiles and so it best suited to displaying images as thumbnails.

There are many ways to do this, but none of the examples on the Flex site seemed to be very useful, or very well explained. What I wanted to do was to create a TileList that displayed the tiles in a certain way and used an XML file to fill up the list of items with images, each image having a label associated with it.

The first thing to do is to create the TileList element.

<mx:TileList id="imageTileList"
itemRenderer="CustomItemRenderer"
dataProvider="{theImages}"
width="200"
height="400"
columnCount="2"
creationComplete="initList();"/>

This contains three important attributes, which I have described here.

Yesterday I talked about using the Flex Script element to run code within the mxml file, you can also use the source attribute of the Script element to reference external files. To create an external script file FlashDevelop go to the File->New and select Blank Document. You can also do this by pressing Ctrl+N. This will create a blank document that you must save into your src folder of your project with the extension as. Note that if you call this file "sourcefile.as" then you must reference this in your script tag like this.