I was working on one of my PHP based projects, and I was getting the following error:

Non-abstract method Foo::bar() must contain body in Foo.php on line 10

The problem was that I had accidentally put a semicolon at the end of the first line of the function:

WRONG WAY:

class Foo 
{ 
    function bar(); // extra semicolon! 
    { 
        // stuff 
    } 
}

RIGHT WAY:

class Foo 
{ 
    function bar()    // no semicolon, yay 
    { 
        // stuff 
    } 
}

Years ago I had the pleasure of meeting Ben Forta and listen to his thoughts on web development. One thing that stuck with me was his statement that:

“Dynamic programming languages like PHP and Coldfusion are great, but developers need to leverage the database more. Allow the database to do it’s job, the heavy lifting”

With that being said, I was recently working with a database that contained users first names. The data was not snantized at entry, and contained a mix of lower cased (ex. josh) and upper cased (ex. Josh) first characters in the firstname column. I needed to always present the users first name in a capitalized format.

The first solution that most developers would reach for is dynamically parsing the users first name, then upper-casing the first character. This works, but in my opinion isn’t the most elegant solution.

With a simple SQL statement, like the one below, we can return the users first name already in a capitalized state.

SELECT (UPPER(LEFT(firstname,1))+SUBSTRING(firstname,2,LEN(firstname))) AS firstname 
FROM users

I was recently working on a php based project for a client. I needed to pull in content from 10 different URLs, then process that data into something useful.

I have a growing love affair with cURL, so it was my natural selection for the project.

In my first approach, I looped over the list of URLs, sent the cURL request, wait for the response, stored the data. repeat until done.

That worked, but it was very slow process. The page was taking between 30 – 45 seconds to load. That doesn’t sound long, but in terms of web applications, that’s an eternity.

I tried several tricks to speed the application up, but the bottle neck was the cURL calls. Each call was done in a synchronous manner. Every call to cURL had to be completed before the next could be made.

After doing to research on how to speed this up, I came across the following php cURL functions:

curl_multi_init();
curl_multi_add_handle();
curl_multi_select();
curl_multi_exec();
curl_multi_getcontent();
curl_multi_info_read();
curl_multi_remove_handle();

Using these methods allow for cURL to send asynchronous requests, solving my pervious problem.

A little more searching, and I found an awesome wrapper library that takes the guesswork out of the using the curl_multi methods. “ParallelCurl” https://github.com/petewarden/ParallelCurl

The sample code provided with the library was very straight forward and super easy to use.

After using asynchronous cURL calls via the ParallelCurl library, I was able to reduce the page load time from 45 seconds to 15 seconds. It’s still slow, but it’s a HUGE improvement, and it makes the application usable, and reduces load on my server. It’s a win-win-win situation!

Lately I have been working on a project that requires me to use PHP to interact with a REST based service. cURL is the logical choice for making HTTP calls to the REST service.

I love cURL, I’ve blogged about it before, but I recently ran into some major issues.

The REST service I was using required me to send two files along with some meta information. easy enough. I used the following code:

$postFields = array();
 
//files
$postFields['file'] = "@$filePath";
$postFields['thumbnail'] = "@$thumbnailPath";
 
//metaData
$postFields['title'] = "$title";
$postFields['description'] = "$description";
$postFields['tags'] = "$tags";
$postFields['licenseinfo'] = "$licenseinfo";
$postFields['token'] = "$userToken";
 
$curl_handle = curl_init();
 
curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_URL, $api_url);
curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_POST, true);
curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $http_post_fields);
 
//execute the API Call
$returned_data = curl_exec($curl_handle);

The code worked great, sending an “at” sign (@) before the file path makes sure that cURL sends the file as part of a “multipart/form-data” post. Exactly what we needed.

The form post from cURL worked great, but the REST service was retuning a 400 error and saying “The specified thumbnail file is not supported.”. I was at a loss. The service documentation stated the “jpg, jpeg, gif, and png” files were supported.

I ended up contacting the developers of the service who told me that the content type for the file had to be set to “image/jpg” (for jpg).

After pouring through the cURL documentation and not finding anything about how to set the content type for a single file in a “multipart/form-data” post, I turned to Goolge. My searches with about as helpful as the cURL docs. I sent a few hours hacking my code and trying some things, I ever read some posts from 2008 saying that is was not possible to do. Then, I got a break through, a single ray of light. On a message board was a single sentence replay. “You should try this… $image;type=image/jpg”.

That was the break through I needed. Below is final updated code:

$postFields = array(); 
 
//files
 $postFields['file'] = "@$filePath";
 
//get the extension of the image file
$tumbnailExtention = preg_replace('/^.*\.([^.]+)$/D', '$1', $thumbnailPath);
$postFields['thumbnail'] = "@$thumbnailPath;type=image/$tumbnailExtention";
 
//metaData
$postFields['title'] = "$title";
$postFields['description'] = "$description";
$postFields['tags'] = "$tags";
$postFields['licenseinfo'] = "$licenseinfo";
$postFields['token'] = "$userToken"; 
 
$curl_handle = curl_init();
 
curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_URL, $api_url);
curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_POST, true);
curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $http_post_fields); 
 
//execute the API Call
$returned_data = curl_exec($curl_handle);

In summary, if you need to set the content type of a file being sent an image through cURL, via a POST, use the following format:
$postFields['file'] = “@PATHTOFILE;type=CONTENTTYPEHERE”;

timthumb is a great little php script that helps create thumbnail images (http://code.google.com/p/timthumb). I’ve used it before, but recently I purchased a wordpress theme that used it, and it wasn’t working.

I would get a 404 error when I tired to access the directly via a url like this:
theDomain.com/wp-content/themes/theTheme/scripts/timthumb.php?src=/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/moose1.jpg&h=207&w=237&zc=1&q=80

After some digging around in log files on my server I realized the error

SoftException in Application.cpp:610: Directory “/home/usernamehere/public_html/wp-content” is writable by others

My problem had to so with the directory permissions! “writable by others” means that the permission on the directory were set to “777″. I changed the permissions of the directory using chmod to 755, and everything started to work.

Lesson learned, if timthumb.php is not working at giving you 404 errors, check the permission of the directory that contains the php file.

Dealing with trailing comas in lists is common problem for developers. I found the best way to handle this situation in PHP is with the following regular expression.

$string = eregi_replace(',$', '', $string);

Before: string = “2, 6, 9,”
After: string = “2, 6, 9″

Only the trailing coma will be stripped. If no coma is found, the string simply passes through. It’s a simple and effective solution.

WordPress has the ability to allow post authors to assign custom fields to a post. This arbitrary extra information is known as meta-data. This meta-data can be used by theme authors to do some pretty cool things.

The theme I am currently using allows for a custom field named “thumb”. If you create the “thumb” custom field in a post and pass in the path to an image, for example “wp-content/uploads/2008/12/wordpress_logo.png”, a thumb nail version of the image will appear next the posts title on the home page of my blog. Awesome stuff.

When I discovered this theme and the “thumb” custom field, I already had 225 posts in my blog. I didn’t want to go back and manually create all the custom fields for the existing posts, so I wrote a PHP script to do it for me.

The PHP script cycles through your existing posts and looks for the first image in the post, and creates the thumb field based on it’s location. The script is configurable, your theme may want a different custom field name, like “thumbnail” or “image”.

This code is provided as is. If you aren’t a developer, you should be messing with stuff like this. Be sure to back up your wordpress database before running this.

Instruction:

• download this code
• configure the database connection info and custom field name
• upload this code onto your server
• point your browser to the file
• watch the script do it’s magic
• remove the file from your server
• donate $2 to my paypal account (joshhighland@gmail.com)

Note: This is a one time deal, when you create new posts you will need to add the “thumb” field and image path manually

<?
 
//your database configuration information
$username = "YOUR_USER_NAME";
$password = "YOUR_PASSWORD";
$database = "DATABASE";
$databaseLocation = "localhost";
 
//name of the Custom Field to use
$customFieldName = "thumb";
 
/******************* END CONFIGURATION *****************************/
 
//get the wordpress posts to work with
$query = "SELECT * FROM wp_posts";
 
if ($result = $mysqli->query("$query"))
{
	//loop over all the posts
	while ($row = $result->fetch_object())
	{
		//get all the info from the post that we need to work with
		$cur_post_id = $row->ID;
		$cur_post_content = $row->post_content;
 
		//the pattern to find the html image tag
		$pattern = '/]+src[\\s=\'"]';
		$pattern .= '+([^"\'>\\s]+)/is';
 
		//try to match the pattern against the post content
		if(preg_match($pattern,$cur_post_content,$match))
		{
			//break up the image path
			$pieces = explode("wp-content/", $match[1]);
 
			//make sure the file name isnt empty
			if($pieces[1] != "")
			{
				//build the file path
				$imagePath = "wp-content/" . "$pieces[1]";
 
				//insert the custom field for the post
				$insertQuery = "INSERT INTO wp_postmeta (post_id, meta_key, meta_value) VALUES ($cur_post_id, '$customFieldName', '$imagePath')";
 
				$mysqli->query("$insertQuery");
 
				//debugging stuff
 
				if ($mysqli->errno)
				{
					printf("failed: %s \n", $mysqli->error);
				}
				else
				{
					echo "..... inserting $imagePath \n";
				}
				flush();
			}
		}
	}
}
 
echo "---completed---";
 
?>

Today I ran into a situation where I had forgotten the password to my development instance of phpBB 3. I was stuck in a situation were I needed to reset the password. I had full admin access to the database, so changing it there wouldn’t be the problem. The real problem is that phpBB uses its own password hashing, not MD5.

In a work around, I created a new user and used the password “123456″ looking at the database , in the users table of the phpBB install. I saw the “user_password” field was “e10adc3949ba59abbe56e057f20f883e”.

I then changed my admin accounts user to the same string, “e10adc3949ba59abbe56e057f20f883e”.

I went to the phpBB login screen, fillled out my username, and entered the password “123456″… BINGO! it worked.

So to save you the work. You can follow what I did or just use these hashes to reset your own password:

Hash: e10adc3949ba59abbe56e057f20f883e
Password: 123456

Hash: $H$9Ae3Uk.ECdWW5ya13M4ErWhr4c.761/
Password: password

I hope this helps someone else out there.

Recently I have been doing a lot of work with WordPress. I love WordPress. one of the things I like most about WordPress is the plugins and themes.

I recently bought a copy of the MimboPro theme. Mimbo is clean and very professional. More of a CMS theme then a blogging theme, prefect for what I want to use it for.

As I dug into MimboPro and WordPress, I realized something strange, the MimboPro theme doesn’t support paging in a category view. What this means is EVERY SINGLE post you make is shown on one page. If you have a very active site, like the one I’m working on, this quickly gets out of hand. Look at this image and you will see what I mean (click for full version).

One of the reasons I like MimboPro was the support that the authors of the theme offer. I headed over to their message forums and found other people like me asking for the Additon of Paged Navigation To Category Pages. The original post was 8 months ago, and no one had resolved anything. I made a post to the MimboPro authors only to be told that there is going to be a new theme that will handle this and it will be available at a deep discount to MimboPro owner. This upset me a bit, so taking matters into my own hand, I fixed what Mimbo wont, and I am handing out my own patch to solve this issue. Below are the instructions to hack your own files, or you can just download my zip file with the pre-hacked files.

Pre-Hacked Files:
Download with pre-hacked files: JoshHighlands_MimboPro_CategoryPagingHack.zip

DIY INSTRUCTIONS (click images for full sizes):

1. Save a copy of your current categories.php and styles.css files inside of the MimboPro theme directory to a safe location
2. Open up categories.php inside of the MimboPro theme directory, and find line 17
   
3. Comment line 17 with a double back slash (//)
   
4. Go to line 87 of category.php and add the following code
   
5. Save and close category.php
6. Open up style.css inside of the MimboPro theme directory
7. Add the following CSS code to the bottom of the file (should be close to line 852)
   
8. Save styles.css
9. Upload categories.php and styles.css to the MimboPro theme directory on your server
10. Everything should be working. Here is what my wordpress running MimboPro looks like
    

That’s it! MimboPro will now have paging in all of the categories. The next and previous links will only show up when you have enough posts. The WordPress default is 10 posts. You can edit the number of posts by going to change the number of posts to show on a category page, go into to the admin and under “setting” > “reading” you will find the option, as highlighted here.

If you had any problem reading the code in the image files, download the zip files with the pre-hacked files in them.

Download with pre-hacked files: JoshHighlands_MimboPro_CategoryPagingHack.zip

If you have any further questions, please post them in the comment.

OMG OMG OMG! WordPress 2.7 is almost here. Here is a long list of the changes that are going to be in the latest release. I have been a huge wordpress fan for some years now. Its always treated me well. Its treated me so well that I have decided to move my main website, notPopular.com, to the wordpress platform for content management. I’m really nervous though, I have done a lot of custom work on the notpop install of wordpress, and it isnt released yet. I hope that my plugins and custom code doesnt break to badly. I will have a full review of wordpress 2.7 once it is released later this week.