Tag Archives: PHP

Installing PHP driver for MongoDB in WAMP

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I’ve been getting more curious about MongoDB. The problem is I’ve been struggling trying to create a development environment. I’ve tried OSX, Ubuntu, and Windows. I always get stuck at a step. I think I found the right recipe.

First, I’m running Windows 7 Professional 64 bit virtually. You don’t have to run Windows virtuall. I’m mostly on my Mac and I prefer to use virtual environments for development so it’s okay if I screw around with things. Then I installed Wamp. The key here is to use the 32bit version of Wamp. I’ve tried the 64bit version of Wamp and could not get it to work. Then, you need to download the latest driver from the MongoDB website. You will get a NTS (non-thread safe) and TS (thread safe) driver. The folders are labeled as follows “mongo-[version]-php5.3vc9” and “mongo-[version]-php5.3vc9ts. Remember “ts” = “thread safe”. I used the non-thread safe DLL file. Take that DLL file and copy and paste it in the “ext” folder within the PHP installation directory of Wamp. If you installed using default settings it should be “c:\wamp\bin\php\php5.3.x\ext”. Open the php.ini file and add the php_mongo.dll extension. Restart Apache and it should show up in your phpinfo() page.

I will be using MongoHQ to try things out. I’m not sure why I couldn’t get it to work in a 64bit web server environment. Mongo looks very cool and if it can help me decrease development time, I’m going to build future web apps with it.

Still looking for fast web development techniques

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I’ve been developing web sites for almost 10 years now. I’m still in search of a way to develop faster. I find myself doing things over and over again.

I use PHP as the programming language to develop the web apps with MySQL database. I started to look for different frameworks – but most use MVC and I don’t have time to learn it.

Some have suggested to do validation using MySQL. This helps a bit so I don’t have to write more PHP code to validate whether or not the record exists, foreign key constraints, etc. Plus it really is good practice to have these in place in the database layer.

Next I looked in to template engines to help with the layout of the site. It does help quite a bit but I’m still left with a lot of PHP code. I use Dreamweaver to write code and I used to use its automated code writing but I found it too messy and inefficient. Now I only use it because the FTP client is built in, has a file checkout system and in CS5 it can read included files so I have easy access to them. The error check is nice too. It catches many syntax errors right away. It can read used variables and be a part of the autocomplete feature.

I tried using existing systems like CMS or blogs (Joomla and WordPress). I figured I can create add-ons on top of an existing system. Joomla uses the MVC framework. WordPress on the other hand is easier to figure out how to build on top of it. Plus their documentation is really easy to follow. One of the limitations I found is the lack of access levels. Another is the pre-existing environment may not fit with a project since it’s so customized – better to be built from the ground up.

I’ve been peeking into the .NET framework off and on. I don’t primarily use Windows at all. I’m mostly on a Mac or using some sort of Linux flavor. I do have Windows7 running virtually on my MBP and iMac so I can play with it. I have played with Visual Studio and it felt easy to use plus it seemed to make developing quick. The drawbacks I’ve found are Windows hosting is more expensive than Linux hosting, IDEs are expensive and run mostly on Windows OS, and I don’t like creating online applications that can potentially only work with Internet Explorer (does not support web standards and only available on Windows OS).

Rails looks promising with the DRY (don’t repeat yourself) approach. I’ve tried to look into it and even bought some books and watched some screencasts. It’s a great language but I can’t seem to understand how to authenticate/authorize different users. They have many different plugins that I can use but each one uses their own way of doing it.

I guess I’ll keep looking. Either I’ll find time to learn MVC framework, get better at Rails, or someone will develop a new platform to speed up web development.

Creating a wrapper page within WordPress 2.9

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I’ve been searching for a way to create a wrapper page within WordPress without having to install a plugin. I browsed the WordPress files and found wp-blog-header.php in the root install directory. It’s really simple.

<?php
require_once(‘wp-blog-header.php’);
get_header();

// this is the content layout based on the current theme you are using

get_sidebar();
get_footer();

?>

I’m not sure when this was implemented. All of the articles I found online mentions plugins that had to be installed or creating a new page within the WordPress admin GUI then include a file, etc. I just need to create a custom PHP file that will display the header, sidebar, and footer.

Depending on the theme you are using will determine additional code between each section (header, sidebar, footer). So check out the page.php or index.php of the theme you are using to see how it is structured.

Using PEAR Pager with PHP PDO

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This post will be addressing 2 things.

  1. How to use PEAR’s Pager class with PHP PDO
  2. Addressing PDO bug #44639 (http://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=44639)

Two queries will be used for this task. The first query, you will count the rows of the recordset. The second query is the same as the first but it will have the LIMIT – this is what will be used to display the data on each page.

Let’s say we have the following table.

CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS`blog`
(
`blog_id` int(11) not null auto_increment,
`blog_text` varchar(4000) not null default ”,
PRIMARY KEY `pk_blog_id` (`blog_id`)
) ENGINE=INNODB;

Now we’ll query the database and get the row count using PDO.

<?php

require_once(‘file-with-pdo-db-connection.php’);

$sql = “SELECT * FROM `blog`”;
$stmt = $dbh->prepare($sql);

if ($stmt->execute())
{
// begin pager
require_once(‘Pager/Pager.php’);
$params = array
(
‘totalItems’ => $stmt->rowCount,
‘perPage’ => 10,
‘delta’ => 5,
‘mode’ => ‘Sliding’
);

$pager =& Pager::factory($params);

$links = $pager->getLinks();
echo $links['all'];

// offset setup
list($from, $to) = $pager->getOffsetByPageId();
$from = $from – 1;
$perPage = $params['perPage'];

// 2nd query based on 1st with LIMIT – this will be displaying data per page
$stmt2 = $db->prepare($sql.’ LIMIT :from, :perPage’);

// address bug 44639 – forces the variables to have the property of integer instead of string so no quotes will surround it
$stmt2->bindValue(‘:from’, $from, PDO::PARAM_INT);
$stmt2->bindValue(‘:perPage’, $perPage, PDO::PARAM_INT);
$stmt2->execute();

while ($row_blog = $stmt2->fetch())
{
echo ‘<div>’.$row_blog['blog_text'].’</div>’;
}

}

$dbh = null;

?>

If you don’t use the bindValue, you will get an error in your query. Your second query would look something like this… SELECT * FROM `blog` LIMIT ’0′, ’10′ and the error would occur right after LIMIT. You cannot have quotes surrounding the numbers. It took a few hours of Googling but found the solution.

If you want to read more about PEAR Pager, visit http://pear.php.net/package/Pager/docs.

Here’s a tutorial I found that helped me out a lot – http://www.codediesel.com/php/simple-pagination-in-php/.

Updating PHP 5 with Godaddy and a Dedicated server

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Jeff called me up asking for help with his dedicated server on Godaddy. He needed to update his PHP 5.1.6 to the latest stable version. His server is running Centos 5.2 (Final). He tried to call Godaddy for assistance and of course they were no help. I’m no expert myself but have played around with different systems. I found out that you can use the yum command to manage the installed packages. The problem is that the current repositories yum looks at does not contain new versions of PHP. This is why you get an error that says something like – cannot find PHP. What you need to do is add a repository that does have a newer version of PHP. We’re going to add Jason Litka‘s repository.

  • Log in to the Simple Control Panel
  • Log in using SSH
  • Type “su – ” to log in with root privileges
  • Type “nano -w /etc/yum.repos.d/utterramblings.repo”. If you’re not comfortable with nano, use whatever editor you’re more comfortable with.
  • In the utterramblings.repo file type the following

    [utterramblings]
    name=Jason’s Utter Ramblings Repo
    baseurl=http://www.jasonlitka.com/media/EL$releasever/$basearch/
    enabled=1
    gpgcheck=1
    gpgkey=http://www.jasonlitka.com/media/RPM-GPG-KEY-jlitka

  • Save the file and close it
  • Now you can use “yum update php” and it should update it to the latest that the repositories have
  • Restart Apache

This tutorial is based on the one found at http://www.jasonlitka.com/yum-repository/. It took awhile for me to find the solution. I hope this helps out people who had the same problem as I did.