PHP

When validating a password it is easy enough to make sure that the password is of a certain length, but what happens if you want to make sure that the password has at least one number, or contains a mixture of upper and lowercase letters? I recently had to validate a password like this and so I created a password validation class that allows easy validation of a password string to a set of given parameters, but also allow these parameters to be changed when needed.

Download the Password class here.

The Password class takes a set of parameters, which can be altered at runtime, and uses these to validate a password. To run the password validator with default parameters do the following:

A simple way to convert a string into a set of variables is through the use of the explode() and list() functions. list() is a language construct (not really a function) that will convert an array into a list of variables. For example, to convert a simple array into a set of variables do the following:

list($variable1, $variable2) = array(1, 2);

In this example $variable1 now contains the value 1 and $variable2 contains the value 2. This can be adapted to use the explode() function to take a string and convert it into a set of variables. An example of this in use might be when dealing with addresses, simply explode the string using the comma and you have a set of variables.

$address = '123 Fake Street, Town, City, PO3T C0D3';
list($street, $town, $city, $postcode) = explode(',', $address);

You can now print out parts of the address like this:

When Google looks at a page it takes a snapshot of that page and uses this to match against the query a user entered. To view these cached pages run a Google search and look at the Cached link next to the green URL text of the result. When you view the cached page Google will also give you a date that the page was last cached on. This can be used as a metric of your sites importance as the more often the site is cached, the more favourable Google views your page.

Taking a reading of this metric can therefore be useful, which is why I set about to create a class to retrieve this result.

Download the Google Cache class here.

Every application has a locale, even if that is just the locale of the author. Through the use of locals you can make your application aware of what sort of language, currency and even timezone that the user would like to see. In Zend Framework this is accoumplished via Zend_Locale.

There are many things to do with locale once, but first you need to determine where the user is based. To find this out you simply create a new instance of the Zend_Locale object. The following code will create the Zend_Locale object and print out the language and region of the user.

$locale = new Zend_Locale();
$language = $locale->getLanguage();
$region = $locale->getRegion();
echo $language . ' ' . $region;

What you see here depends on where you are and what language you are running on your machine. For example, a person living in Germany, who speaks German would see the following output.

There are quite a few scripts available on the Internet that allow you to dump data from a database into a format that can be used to replicate that database structure elsewhere. The following function is my take on this commonly occurring script.

A common practice when setting up a Wordpress blog might be to create a page and display posts in a certain category on that page. This causes some pages to act very much like category pages.

The first step in creating a page of posts is to create a page template that can be used by the pages. Create a file in your template directory called pageofposts.php and put the following comment in it.

<?php
/**
  * Template Name: PageOfPosts
  */

This will cause it to be displayed in the Template drop down on your Wordpress page admin. This isn't going to do a lot so lets add some other functionality. Add the following lines to include everything you need to create a blank Wordpress page.

A common issue I have come across in the past is that I have a CMS system, or an old copy of Wordpress, and I need to create a set of keywords to be used in the meta keywords field. To solve this I put together a simple function that runs through a string and picks out the most commonly used words in that list as an array. This is currently set to be 10, but you can change that quite easily.

The first thing the function defines is a list of "stop" words. This is a list of words that occur quite a bit in English text and would therefore interfere with the outcome of the function. The function also uses a variant of the slug function to remove any odd characters that might be in the text.

The is.gd URL shortening service is yet another site that converts a long URL into a small one, but is.gd differs in that it generally produces smaller URLs than others. The is.gd API doesn't require that you create an account on the site, but there are one or two limitations to using the service that you should be aware of first. You can find out these limitations by reading the is.gd terms and conditions. You can use this class to interact with is.gd, but the service doesn't have a massive amount of features the class only contains shorten() and expand() functions that work exactly as expected. You can download the class using the following link:

Download the is.gd API interaction PHP class.

The Poll module is a useful little module that comes with Drupal and allows the addition of simple polls to pages or blocks. However, there was one major issue that I wanted to correct on a certain site, but I didn't want to directly edit the core functionality of the module. The default behaviour of the module is to record one vote per IP address or user, which is fine for normal uses but in some situations it does tend to fall over. A Drupal site with one administrator that allow anonymous users to vote on your polls seems fine, but lets say that this site wants votes to come from people in the business world. The problem here is that multiple people might work for the same business, be situtated behind a firewall and therefore would have the same IP address. What this means is that if one person in that company votes on your poll it will block all other people from voting for that poll.

I recently had some trouble with a Drupal 6 site I was updating. I wanted to create a local working copy of the site to test so I downloaded the files and backed up the database, but for some reason I couldn't get the site to run. In every browser I tried I would get "page cannot be displayed" or "host unresponsive". These messages were basically telling me that something on the site was causing it to fall over before it ever got around to producing any HTML, and so the browsers were treating it as best they could. I tried clearing the Drupal cache and disabling some modules but this didn't appear to do anything, or simply broke the site. Searching the internet for this problem yielded very few results, so I eventually had to track the problem down myself.