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Creating an Instance of a PHP Class

May 15, 2011 by Webhead

Problem:

This works in PHP 5.3+:

$CLASS_NAME = 'TheName';

$class_instance = new $CLASS_NAME;

This doesn’t

define('CLASS_NAME', 'TheName');

$class_instance = new CLASS_NAME;

 

Workaround:

Use the way that works.  There are other limitations with using a variable to create a class.  Another way to create a class from a variable is by using:

$test = call_user_func(array($className, 'getInstance'));

 

Filed Under: Coding Tagged With: php

Which CMS to Use?

May 14, 2011 by Webhead

I recently was asked the age old question “what CMS is the best?”.  So I asked back “What will the CMS be used for?”, and of course that wasn’t specifically known.  This post is not a complete post.  It is here to jot down findings and notes about CMS’s.  Wordpress and Exponent CMS are the only two CMS’ I have tried for more than 5 minutes.  I tried Exponent and WordPress in 2007 and have not given Exponent another chance.  Since then Joomla and Drupal have become the clear competition (in terms of popularity) for WordPress.  So these three will be reviewed.  At the time of this post creation, WordPress is beating both in terms of Google Searches.

In the following lists, “Users” are people who use the CMS to put out content.  “Developers” are people who set up and/or customize the CMS for someone else to use.   And if you haven’t noticed, these are only comparing PHP open source CMS’.

WordPress

Pros

  • Very easy to pick up and learn for new users.

Cons

  • Forums have many complaints from developers.

Drupal

Pros

  • Easy for developers to pick up and learn

Cons

  • Not user friendly.  Difficult for new users to pick up and learn.
  • No WYSIWYG editor.

Joomla

Pros

  • Easy to use for Developers, Designers, and Users

Cons

  • Not as User-Friendly as WordPress.
  • Not as powerful as Drupal.

Conclusion

In conclusion from the web, it seems that WordPress is best for clients you want to impress, Drupal is best if you have a website with many features, Joomla is best if … you need something easier to use than Drupal, but more customizable than WordPress? In my own narrow opinion, WordPress has a large community creating plugins to keep you from straying to Drupal.   These plugins offer calendars, embedded video, columns, galleries, etc.  One thing that I think I’ve seen in Drupal that WordPress does not natively support (and did not find a plugin yet) is to edit different parts of a page.  For example if you wanted to have a template where you needed to edit some text on the left sidebar, the top section, and the main content, you would have trouble doing this in WordPress. I’m still doing research on how easy it would be in Drupal or Joomla.  The problem for me is that the user interface of Joomla and Drupal looks like it’s meant for IT personnel.  However, the people I’m creating a CMS for are business and secretarial personnel.  Decide for yourself and try a demo of each one and more at opensourcecms.com.

Update

Below are the up-to-date trends… Joomla and Drupal?  what’s that?

Filed Under: Off the Shelf Tagged With: cms, drupal, joomla, wordpress

Firebug

May 14, 2011 by Webhead

I don’t know how I used to develop web pages before Firebug.  It is the single best tool you can have when debugging a webpage.  If something doesn’t look right I open Firebug and find out what styles are being inherited.  If some javascript functionality is not working I open Firebug and enter debug statements.   If some ajax call is messing up and the page isn’t showing the response correctly, I open Firebug.

Installation

The best thing about Firebug is how much time it saves you on debugging.  Even better than it being free.  That’s a lot considering how I watch my money.   I only use Firebug with Firefox.  It can be downloaded at https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/firebug/.  What’s good is that it’s available on both Mac and PC.   Just click on the Add to Firefox button and it’s mostly done for you.  That easy.  A firebug was also developed for IE but I haven’t tried it recently.  I tried it a couple years ago and it didn’t help me very much so I stuck with just using the Firefox one.

CSS

When you need to see why an item on a webpage is not showing as its supposed to you can right click on it and select “Inspect Element”.  Doing this opens up the firebug window and it will tell you exactly what styles are being applied to it and what styles have been overwritten.  You can even change the values of anything you want to see the outcome in real-time.

Javascript

Browsers can tell you the last error code that happened, but firebug can let you watch expressions, look at the stack, insert breakpoints, and print out statements in the console.

Request / Response

Any and all requests to the server can be inspected on the Net tab.  You can see each javascript include file, each image, each ajax request.  This means that if an ajax call goes wrong, you can inspect the parameters that were sent and the response the page got back from that request.  It makes debugging a breeze.

Firebug can be downloaded here: http://getfirebug.com/

Filed Under: Tools Tagged With: css, debug, firebug, html, javascript

No table-cell or table-row in IE CSS

May 13, 2011 by Webhead

Internet Explorer, How do I loathe thee?
Let me count the ways.

As stated on the w3schools website,

[quote]The values “inline-table”, “run-in”, “table”, “table-caption”, “table-cell”, “table-column”, “table-column-group”, “table-row”, “table-row-group”, and “inherit” is not supported in IE7 and earlier. IE8 requires a !DOCTYPE. IE9 supports the values.[/quote]

I had a project where I needed to create a photo gallery.  The goal was to get the gallery to look like iStockPhoto with the images all bottom-aligned, evenly spaced, etc, etc.  Well in creating the gallery I had a hard time aligning the photos on the bottom, so I took a look at how istock did it.  They use “table-cell” display option and vertically align the image to the bottom.  So I tried it, but soon found that Internet Explorer does not support that option.  And then I found that istock was no exception.

iStock with Chrome

 

iStock with IE

 

Solution:

I did not personally do this solution as this was not too important.  However someone on Stack Overflow seems to have solved it with jQuery:

$(document).ready(function(){
  if ($.browser.msie && $.browser.version == 7)
  {
    $(".tablecell").wrap("<td />");
    $(".tablerow").wrap("<tr />");
    $(".table").wrapInner("<table />");
  }
});

the above script assumes you have divs using style such as:

<style>
.table     { display: table; }
.tablerow  { display: table-row; }
.tablecell { display: table-cell; }
</style>

 

Filed Under: Coding Tagged With: css, IE crap

Get All rows into One String

May 13, 2011 by Webhead

This is an easy way to get all rows from a SQL table into a string:

select stuff((
                  select ', ' + a_column
                      from [name_of_table]
                      order by table_id
                      for xml path('')
                  ), 1, 1, '')

Filed Under: Coding Tagged With: ms sql

Converting Google Maps v2 to v3

May 12, 2011 by Webhead

Problem:

I was given a project where the client switched from using http to https.  Everything worked fine except for their Google Maps page.  The page  had a warning in IE about unsecure mixed content.  This was because Google Maps was pulling from an http (unsecured) address.  It turns out that the Map was using version 2 of Google Maps API which does not support https.  Only version 3 does.

Solution:

Don’t be fooled into thinking this is a straight forward, simple upgrade.  It is not.  This solution is just a log of what I did to get the site from v2 up to v3.  It is in no way  a complete guide.  The site used EWindow instead of the infoWindow because of its customized look.  So I guess the following could be a rough step-by-step guide to converting the Ewindow script to v3.


In general you’ll need to replace all “G” prefixes like “GSize” with “google.maps” like “google.maps.Size”.

Replace GSize with google.maps.Size
Replace GLatLng with google.maps.LatLng
Replace GPoint with google.maps.Point
Replace GOverlay with google.maps.Overlay

Replace “new google.maps.Overlay” with “new google.maps.OverlayView()”

Take out or replace GBrowserIsCompatible. There is no equivalent function in v3.

Replace

map = new GMap2(document.getElementById("map_canvas"))

with something like:

    var myOptions = {
      zoom: 4,
      center: myLatlng,
      mapTypeId: google.maps.MapTypeId.ROADMAP
    }
    map = new google.maps.Map(document.getElementById("map_canvas"), myOptions);

Replace a custom icon marker using the icon-complex example:
http://code.google.com/apis/maps/documentation/javascript/examples/icon-complex.html

Before the change:

var tinyIcon = new GIcon();
tinyIcon.image = "images/gmap/marker.gif";
tinyIcon.iconSize = new google.maps.Size(22, 22);
tinyIcon.iconAnchor = new google.maps.Point(11, 11);
tinyIcon.infoWindowAnchor = new google.maps.Point(0, 0);
var myLatLng = new google.maps.LatLng(loc['lat'], loc['lng']);
var marker = new GMarker(myLatLng, { icon:tinyIcon });
GEvent.addListener(marker, showWindow, mouseover);
map.addOverlay(marker);

After:

var image = new google.maps.MarkerImage('images/gmap/marker.gif',
  // This marker is 20 pixels wide by 32 pixels tall.
  new google.maps.Size(22, 22),
  // The origin for this image is 0,0.
  new google.maps.Point(0,0),
  // The anchor for this image is the base of the flagpole at 0,32.
  new google.maps.Point(11, 11));

var myLatLng = new google.maps.LatLng(loc['lat'], loc['lng']);
var marker = new google.maps.Marker({
    position: myLatLng,
    map: map,
    shadow: shadow,
    icon: image
});
google.maps.event.addDomListener(marker,'mouseover', showWindow);

Replace getPoint to getPosition

var vx = marker.getIcon().iconAnchor.x - marker.getIcon().infoWindowAnchor.x;
var vy = marker.getIcon().iconAnchor.y - marker.getIcon().infoWindowAnchor.y;
this.openOnMap(marker.getPoint(), html, new google.maps.Point(vx,vy));

For infoWindowAnchor I could not find an equivalent so I scratched the whole calculation and just put in a hard coded value.

var vx = 10;
var vy = 10;
this.openOnMap(marker.getPosition(), html, new google.maps.Point(vx,vy));

Replace initialize:

EWindow.prototype.initialize = function(map) {

With onAdd:

EWindow.prototype.onAdd = function() {

Replace map.addOverlay(object) by moving a similar call to within the object.

map.addOverlay(ewindow)

To this within the object:

this.setMap(map)

Replace map.getPane()

map.getPane(G_MAP_FLOAT_SHADOW_PANE)

With this:

this.getPanes().mapPane

Replace this.redraw

this.redraw

with this.draw

this.draw

Replace Overlay.getZindex

var z = google.maps.Overlay.getZIndex(this.point.lat());

I could not find an equivalent to getZIndex so, again, it’s somewhat hard coded.

// you may need to work on this "hack" to replace V2 getZindex
// GOverlay.getZIndex(this.point.lat());
var z = 1000*(90-this.point.lat());
this.div_.style.zIndex = parseInt(z);

Replace this.map.fromLatLngToDivPixel

var p = this.map.fromLatLngToDivPixel(this.point);

With this:

var proj = this.getProjection();
var p = proj.fromLatLngToDivPixel(this.point);

Replace map.panBy(Size) to map.panBy(x:number, y:number)

map.panBy(new google.maps.Size(pan_right, pan_up));

With this:

map.panBy(-pan_right, -pan_up);

A very helpful site was one that made google maps compatible for both versions:
http://notebook.kulchenko.com/maps/google-maps-using-multiple-api-versions

And of course the Google Maps v3 Examples and API docs helped a great deal.  It may also help to look at version 2 of the API so that you can try and find something equivalent.

I uploaded a converted EWindow.js for whoever needs a google maps v3 version of EWindow.

Filed Under: Coding Tagged With: google maps, javascript

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