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”;

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---";
 
?>

I have been a loyal fan of the kick-ass php framework, codeIgniter, for some time now. A while back I made a post on how to improve the view handling of codeIgniter. I would like to retract that post. Through the comments on that post I found out about an undocumented parameter (as of version 1.7, it has been documented) that allows view to be rendered into a variable. This changes everything, and totally negates any of the complaint I had about how CI handles layouts and views.

Below is an example of live code I have running at loudsongs.com. It shows how I have been able to take advantage of of this powerful third parameter that stops CI from rendering a view to the screen when loading it.

Inside of my controller

function index()
 {
 $base_url = base_url();
 
//what the nav needs
 $navigation_data['navTab'] = "home";
 
//basic info for the header
 $layout_data['pageTitle'] = "LoudSon.gs";
 $layout_data['meta_description'] = "Under Ground Lyrics, hardcore, metal, emo, rock";
 $layout_data['meta_keywords'] = "lyrics,song,songs,words,hardore,metal,emo,rock";
 $layout_data['meta_url'] = "$base_url";
 $layout_data['meta_classification'] = "home";
 $layout_data['searchInput'] = "";
 $layout_data['searchOptions'] = "";
 
$this->load->model('search');
 $lastest_albums = $this->search->last_n_albumsAdded(10);
 $popular_songs = $this->search->popular_n_songs(10);
 
//get the featured Albums
 $featuredAlbums = $this->search->getFeaturedAlbums();
 
$body_data['featured'] = $featuredAlbums;
 $body_data['newest'] = $lastest_albums;
 $body_data['popular'] = $popular_songs;
 
//load the content variables
 $layout_data['content_navigation'] = $this->load->view('navigation', $navigation_data, true);
 $layout_data['content_body'] = $this->load->view('home/homePage', $body_data, true);
 
$this->load->view('layouts/main', $layout_data);
 }

/views/navigation.php

<div id="header">
 <h1 title="Loud Songs Logo">LoudSongs search - hard to find obscure lyrics</h1>
 
<ul title="navigation">
 <li <? if($navTab == "about"){echo " id=\"active\"";}?>><a href="<?= base_url(); ?>about" title="About Page">About</a></li>
 <li <? if($navTab == "add"){echo " id=\"active\"";}?>><a href="<?= base_url(); ?>add" title="Add Lyrics">Add Lyrics</a></li>
 <li <? if($navTab == "home"){echo " id=\"active\"";}?>><a href="<?= base_url(); ?>" title="Home Page">Home</a></li>
 </ul>
 </div>

/views/home/homePage.php

<div>
 Thanks for visiting LoudSongs
 <br/>
 We are trying to build a maintain a collection of punk rock, hardcore, emo, metal and other lyrics.
 This website is free and open to all.
 Please help us by <a href="http://www.LoudSon.gs/add">contributing to the collection</a>.
 </div>
 
<div>
 <? $this->load->view('home/featuredAlbums'); ?>
 </div>
 
<div class="middle_col_split">
 <? $this->load->view('home/recentlyAdded'); ?>
 </div>
 
<div class="middle_col_split">
 <? $this->load->view('home/mostPopularSongs'); ?>
 </div>

/views/layouts/main.php

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
 <html>
 <head>
 <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=us-ascii">
 <meta name="description" content="<?= $meta_description ?>">
 <meta name="keywords" content="<?= $meta_keywords ?>">
 <meta http-equiv="expires" content="0" />
 <meta name="classification" content="<?= $meta_classification ?>" />
 <meta name="Robots" content="index,follow">
 <meta name="revisit-after" content="2 Days">
 <meta name="language" content="en-us">
 
<link href="<?= base_url() ?>includes/styles/lyrics.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="screen" title="default">
 
<script language="javascript" type="text/javascript" src="<?= base_url() ?>includes/scripts/jquery-1.2.6.min.js"></script>
 
<title><?= $pageTitle ?></title>
 </head>
 
<body id="home">
 <div id="nav">
 <?= $content_navigation; ?>
 </div>
 
<div id="middle_column">
 
<?= $content_body ?>
 
</div>
 </body>
 
</html>

wow, ok, so that might be a lot to digest. The bottom line is this, CI doesnt have “layouts” like other frameworks, so you have to become creative and use a view AS a layout by using the mythical 3rd parameter when loading a view. We load data into the navigation view and store all of that into the $layout_data array, then we load a view named homePage and pass data into it, and stor it into the $layout_data array. When we are done loading all of the views into the array, we pass that array into another view. This view acts as our layout. easy as that! check it out below:

//load the content variables
 $layout_data['content_navigation'] = $this->load->view('navigation', $navigation_data, true);
 $layout_data['content_body'] = $this->load->view('home/homePage', $body_data, true);
 
$this->load->view('layouts/main', $layout_data);

I hope this helps someone understand how codeigniter does have layout and view functionality, you just have to structure it that way in your code.

post some comments if you need more clarification.

Please be aware that I no longer use this method. Please follow this link to see how I handle layout with Codeigniter

If you have ever worked with an MVC framework for web developent, you know that the “V” stands for “view”.

At work, I program in coldfusion, and use the coldbox framework, and I love it. At home, I write PHP code, with the codeigniter framework.

I love codeigniter, but I think that its biggest weakness is the view handeling, all thought codeigniter had taken strides to improve it. At the time of writing this, codeigniter is at version 1.6.1, and allows multiple views to be loaded at one time.

example:

<?php
 
class Page extends Controller {
 
function index()
 {
 $data['page_title'] = 'Your title';
 $this->load->view('header');
 $this->load->view('menu');
 $this->load->view('content', $data);
 $this->load->view('footer');
 }
 
}
 ?>

This is great with one exception, codeigniter simple builds a stack of the view results, appending them to each other.

This means that in header.php, loaded at the start of the view sequence, we would have to opening tags, such as <body>, and then in the last view, footer, we have to close the tags we opened in header.php, in this case, </body>

I don’t know about you, but opening tags in open file, and depending on another file to close them is not a good practice. Using a MVC setup and then doing something like this is very counter intuitive.

To fix this, codeigniter needs to support layouts, as well as views.

A layout is a file that contains the framework for a page, and the views are included and rendered inside the layout. basically filling out the content of the page. This also leaves your code the ability to be more flexible. Your views are pluggable components that don’t care about the layout at all.

One of the reasons I love open source software is the fact that the community will fix weaknesses is the software. Looking at the codeigniter wiki, I came across the “view object” (http://codeigniter.com/wiki/View_Object/)

The view object is a great solution for adding layouts to the codeigniter framework.
Here is a code sample of how to use the view object in a controller:

$this->load->library('view');         // or autoload
 
$this->view->layout = 'admin/layout';
 
$this->view->data(array(              // set the view data
 'privileges' => $privileges,
 'catcode'    => -1,
 'page'       => $page,
 ));
 
$this->view->load(array(             // load the page partials
 'header'     => 'header',
 'menu'       => 'menu',
 'content'    => 'admin/'.$page,
 'footer'     => 'footer',
 ));
 
$this->view->render();               // create the view or

inside the layout file (admin/layout.php)

<? $header->render(); ?>
 
<body>
 <? $menu->render(); ?>
 <div id="mainContent">
 <? $content->render(); ?>
 </div>
 </body>
 
<? $footer->render(); ?>

You can see that the layout file contains the framework of the page, freeing up the views to be individual pluggable items that can be used across your codeigniter application.

I hope that the codeigniter team takes note of the view object and adds it to the core for codeignier 1.7 or maybe even sooner!