PHP Online

Smarty caching

Amaga — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 06:20:37 +0000

Smarty3 introduced a concept of template and data objects which can have a parent child relationship.
For this an additional parameter ‘parent’ was introduced which did change the parameter order of fetch and display to
($template, $parent = null, $cache_id = null, $compile_id = null)

So
$oSmarty->fetch ( $sTemplateName . ‘.tpl’, null, $iTemplateId )
should work.

NOCACHE attribute in include {include nocache}

The “nocache” in the {include} does tell Smarty that the content of the subtemplate shall not be merged into the cache file of main.tpl. The subtemplate creates it’s own cache file (which can have nocached sections). The cached content and rendered content of the nocache sections of the subtemplate is inserted into the output of the cached main.tpl each time the page is called.

A flexible array_split function

michael — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 06:47:38 +0000

Split the given array into n number of pieces



function array_split($array, $pieces=2) {

	if ($pieces &lt; 2)

		return array($array);

	$newCount = ceil(count($array)/$pieces);

	$a = array_slice($array, 0, $newCount);

	$b = array_split(array_slice($array, $newCount), $pieces-1);

	return array_merge(array($a),$b);

}

Examples



$a = array(1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10);

array_split($a, 2);    // array(array(1,2,3,4,5), array(6,7,8,9,10))

array_split($a, 3);    // array(array(1,2,3,4), array(5,6,7), array(8,9,10))

array_split($a, 4);    // array(array(1,2,3), array(4,5,6), array(7,8), array(9,10))

PHP Paypal IPN Integration Class v1.0.0

Amaga — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 02:15:49 +0000



<?php

/*******************************************************************************

*                      PHP Paypal IPN Integration Class

*******************************************************************************

*      Author:     Micah Carrick

*      Email:      email@micahcarrick.com

*      Website:    http://www.micahcarrick.com

*

*      File:       paypal.class.php

*      Version:    1.0.0

*      Copyright:  (c) 2005 – Micah Carrick

*                  You are free to use, distribute, and modify this software

*                  under the terms of the GNU General Public License.  See the

*                  included license.txt file.

*

*******************************************************************************

*  VERION HISTORY:

*

*      v1.0.0 [04.16.2005] – Initial Version

*

*******************************************************************************

*  DESCRIPTION:

*

*      This file provides a neat and simple method to interface with paypal and

*      The paypal Instant Payment Notification (IPN) interface.  This file is

*      NOT intended to make the paypal integration “plug ‘n’ play”. It still

*      requires the developer (that should be you) to understand the paypal

*      process and know the variables you want/need to pass to paypal to

*      achieve what you want.

*

*      This class handles the submission of an order to paypal aswell as the

*      processing an Instant Payment Notification.

*

*      This code is based on that of the php-toolkit from paypal.  I’ve taken

*      the basic principals and put it in to a class so that it is a little

*      easier–at least for me–to use.  The php-toolkit can be downloaded from

*      http://sourceforge.net/projects/paypal.

*

*      To submit an order to paypal, have your order form POST to a file with:

*

*          $p = new paypal_class;

*          $p->add_field(‘business’, ‘somebody@domain.com’);

*          $p->add_field(‘first_name’, $_POST['first_name']);

*          … (add all your fields in the same manor)

*          $p->submit_paypal_post();

*

*      To process an IPN, have your IPN processing file contain:

*

*          $p = new paypal_class;

*          if ($p->validate_ipn()) {

*          … (IPN is verified.  Details are in the ipn_data() array)

*          }

*

*

*      In case you are new to paypal, here is some information to help you:

*

*      1. Download and read the Merchant User Manual and Integration Guide from

*         http://www.paypal.com/en_US/pdf/integration_guide.pdf.  This gives

*         you all the information you need including the fields you can pass to

*         paypal (using add_field() with this class) aswell as all the fields

*         that are returned in an IPN post (stored in the ipn_data() array in

*         this class).  It also diagrams the entire transaction process.

*

*      2. Create a “sandbox” account for a buyer and a seller.  This is just

*         a test account(s) that allow you to test your site from both the

*         seller and buyer perspective.  The instructions for this is available

*         at https://developer.paypal.com/ as well as a great forum where you

*         can ask all your paypal integration questions.  Make sure you follow

*         all the directions in setting up a sandbox test environment, including

*         the addition of fake bank accounts and credit cards.

*

*******************************************************************************

*/
class paypal_class {
var $last_error;                 // holds the last error encountered
var $ipn_log;                    // bool: log IPN results to text file?

var $ipn_log_file;               // filename of the IPN log

var $ipn_response;               // holds the IPN response from paypal

var $ipn_data = array();         // array contains the POST values for IPN
var $fields = array();           // array holds the fields to submit to paypal
function paypal_class() {
// initialization constructor.  Called when class is created.
$this->paypal_url = ‘https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr’;
$this->last_error = ”;
$this->ipn_log_file = ‘ipn_log.txt’;

$this->ipn_log = true;

$this->ipn_response = ”;
// populate $fields array with a few default values.  See the paypal

// documentation for a list of fields and their data types. These defaul

// values can be overwritten by the calling script.
$this->add_field(‘rm’,’2′);           // Return method = POST

$this->add_field(‘cmd’,'_xclick’);
}
function add_field($field, $value) {
// adds a key=>value pair to the fields array, which is what will be

// sent to paypal as POST variables.  If the value is already in the

// array, it will be overwritten.
$this->fields["$field"] = $value;

}
function submit_paypal_post() {
// this function actually generates an entire HTML page consisting of

// a form with hidden elements which is submitted to paypal via the

// BODY element’s onLoad attribute.  We do this so that you can validate

// any POST vars from you custom form before submitting to paypal.  So

// basically, you’ll have your own form which is submitted to your script

// to validate the data, which in turn calls this function to create

// another hidden form and submit to paypal.
// The user will briefly see a message on the screen that reads:

// “Please wait, your order is being processed…” and then immediately

// is redirected to paypal.
echo “<html>\n”;

echo “<head><title>Processing Payment…</title></head>\n”;

echo “<body onLoad=\”document.form.submit();\”>\n”;

echo “<center><h3>Please wait, your order is being processed…</h3></center>\n”;

echo “<form method=\”post\” name=\”form\” action=\”".$this->paypal_url.”\”>\n”;
foreach ($this->fields as $name => $value) {

echo “<input type=\”hidden\” name=\”$name\” value=\”$value\”>”;

}
echo “</form>\n”;

echo “</body></html>\n”;
}
function validate_ipn() {
// parse the paypal URL

$url_parsed=parse_url($this->paypal_url);
// generate the post string from the _POST vars aswell as load the

// _POST vars into an arry so we can play with them from the calling

// script.

$post_string = ”;

foreach ($_POST as $field=>$value) {

$this->ipn_data["$field"] = $value;

$post_string .= $field.’=’.urlencode($value).’&’;

}

$post_string.=”cmd=_notify-validate”; // append ipn command
// open the connection to paypal

$fp = fsockopen($url_parsed[host],”80″,$err_num,$err_str,30);

if(!$fp) {
// could not open the connection.  If loggin is on, the error message

// will be in the log.

$this->last_error = “fsockopen error no. $errnum: $errstr”;

$this->log_ipn_results(false);

return false;
} else {
// Post the data back to paypal

fputs($fp, “POST $url_parsed[path] HTTP/1.1\r\n”);

fputs($fp, “Host: $url_parsed[host]\r\n”);

fputs($fp, “Content-type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded\r\n”);

fputs($fp, “Content-length: “.strlen($post_string).”\r\n”);

fputs($fp, “Connection: close\r\n\r\n”);

fputs($fp, $post_string . “\r\n\r\n”);
// loop through the response from the server and append to variable

while(!feof($fp)) {

$this->ipn_response .= fgets($fp, 1024);

}
fclose($fp); // close connection
}
if (eregi(“VERIFIED”,$this->ipn_response)) {
// Valid IPN transaction.

$this->log_ipn_results(true);

return true;
} else {
// Invalid IPN transaction.  Check the log for details.

$this->last_error = ‘IPN Validation Failed.’;

$this->log_ipn_results(false);

return false;
}
}
function log_ipn_results($success) {
if (!$this->ipn_log) return;  // is logging turned off?
// Timestamp

$text = ‘['.date('m/d/Y g:i A').'] – ‘;
// Success or failure being logged?

if ($success) $text .= “SUCCESS!\n”;

else $text .= ‘FAIL: ‘.$this->last_error.”\n”;
// Log the POST variables

$text .= “IPN POST Vars from Paypal:\n”;

foreach ($this->ipn_data as $key=>$value) {

$text .= “$key=$value, “;

}
// Log the response from the paypal server

$text .= “\nIPN Response from Paypal Server:\n “.$this->ipn_response;
// Write to log

$fp=fopen($this->ipn_log_file,’a');

fwrite($fp, $text . “\n\n”);
fclose($fp);  // close file

}
function dump_fields() {
// Used for debugging, this function will output all the field/value pairs

// that are currently defined in the instance of the class using the

// add_field() function.
echo “<h3>paypal_class->dump_fields() Output:</h3>”;

echo “<table width=\”95%\” border=\”1\” cellpadding=\”2\” cellspacing=\”0\”>

<tr>

<td bgcolor=\”black\”><b><font color=\”white\”>Field Name</font></b></td>

<td bgcolor=\”black\”><b><font color=\”white\”>Value</font></b></td>

</tr>”;
ksort($this->fields);

foreach ($this->fields as $key => $value) {

echo “<tr><td>$key</td><td>”.urldecode($value).” </td></tr>”;

}
echo “</table><br>”;

}

}

?>

JQuery – Simplified database queries

Amaga — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 08:46:59 +0000

A function to perform database queries on MySQL servers. Takes one argument; The SQL statement.

Web development common fonts to Windows & Mac

Amaga — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 05:22:38 +0000

[style] p { margin: 10px 0; } table { width: 100%; margin: 0 0 10px; border: 2px solid Black; } caption { padding: 20px 0 5px; margin: 0; font: normal bold 1.35em Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-align: left; color: Black; } th { padding: 2px 0; border: 1px solid Black; border-bottom-width: 3px; font: normal bold 1.15em Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; } td { padding: 5px 20px; border: 1px solid Silver; font-size: 1.2em; } .bold { font-weight: bold; } td+td { font-weight: bold; } /* Mozilla only supports W3C defined properties for */ em { color: Gray; font-style: italic; } .symbol { font-size: 0.8em; } .mac { color: SteelBlue; } .mac a { color: MidnightBlue; } .notes { font-style: italic; margin-bottom: 30px; } [/style] Here you can find the list with the standard set of fonts common to all versions of Windows and their Mac substitutes, referred sometimes as "browser safe fonts". This is the reference I use when making web pages and I expect you will find it useful too.

First, a few introductory notes:

The names in grey are the generic family of each font.

In some cases the Mac equivalent is the same font, since Mac OS X also includes some of the fonts shipped with Windows.

The notes at the bottom contains specific information about some of the fonts.

¹ Georgia and Trebuchet MS are bundled with Windows 2000/XP and they are also included in the IE font pack (and bundled with other MS applications), so they are quite common in Windows 98 systems.

² Symbolic fonts are only displayed in Internet Explorer, in other browsers a font substitute is used instead (although the Symbol font does work in Opera and the Webdings works in Safari).

³ Book Antiqua is almost exactly the same font that Palatino Linotype, Palatino Linotype is included in Windows 2000/XP while Book Antiqua was bundled with Windows 98.

⁴ These fonts are not TrueType fonts but bitmap fonts, so they won't look well when using some font sizes (they are designed for 8, 10, 12, 14, 18 and 24 point sizes at 96 DPI).

⁵ These fonts work in Safari but only when using the normal font style, and not with bold or italic styles. Comic Sans MS works in bold but not in italic. Other Mac browsers seems to emulate properly the styles not provided by the font (thanks to Christian Fecteau for the tip).

⁶ These fonts are present in Mac OS X only if Classic is installed.

30 Tips to optimizing php code

Amaga — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 05:34:16 +0000

PHP is a very fast programming language, but there is more to optimizing PHP than just speed of code execution. Here is the list of 30 short tips you can use for writing an optimized and more efficient PHP code. I considered myself a bit of a PHP pro until I started researching some of this stuff and realized that there is a whole realm of information out there about optimizing php that I didn’t know about. I hope you will be as surprised as I was about some of the things you might learn from this article.

If a method can be static, declare it static. Speed improvement is by a factor of 4.
echo is faster than print.
Unset your large variables to free memory.
require_once() is expensive
Use full paths in includes and requires, less time spent on resolving the OS paths.
If you need to find out the time when the script started executing, $_SERVER[’REQUEST_TIME’] is preferred to time()
See if you can use strncasecmp, strpbrk and stripos instead of regex
str_replace is faster than preg_replace, but strtr is faster than str_replace by a factor of 4
If the function, such as string replacement function, accepts both arrays and single characters as arguments, and if your argument list is not too long, consider writing a few redundant replacement statements, passing one character at a time, instead of one line of code that accepts arrays as search and replace arguments.
It's better to use switch statements than multi if, else if, statements.
Error suppression with @ is very slow.
Turn on apache's mod_deflate
$row[’id’] is 7 times faster than $row[id]
Do not use functions inside of for loop, such as for ($x=0; $x < count($array); $x) The count() function gets called each time.
Incrementing a local variable in a method is the fastest. Nearly the same as calling a local variable in a function.
Incrementing a global variable is 2 times slow than a local var.
Incrementing an object property (eg. $this->prop++) is 3 times slower than a local variable.
Incrementing an undefined local variable is 9-10 times slower than a pre-initialized one.
Just declaring a global variable without using it in a function also slows things down (by about the same amount as incrementing a local var). PHP probably does a check to see if the global exists.
Method invocation appears to be independent of the number of methods defined in the class because I added 10 more methods to the test class (before and after the test method) with no change in performance.
Methods in derived classes run faster than ones defined in the base class.
A function call with one parameter and an empty function body takes about the same time as doing 7-8 $localvar++ operations. A similar method call is of course about 15 $localvar++ operations.
Surrounding your string by ' instead of " will make things interpret a little faster since php looks for variables inside "..." but not inside '...'. Of course you can only do this when you don't need to have variables in the string.
A PHP script will be served at least 2-10 times slower than a static HTML page by Apache. Try to use more static HTML pages and fewer scripts.
Your PHP scripts are recompiled every time unless the scripts are cached. Install a PHP caching product to typically increase performance by 25-100% by removing compile times. Cache as much as possible. Use memcached - memcached is a high-performance memory object caching system intended to speed up dynamic web applications by alleviating database load. OP code caches are useful so that your script does not have to be compiled on every request.
When incrementing or decrementing the value of the variable $i++ happens to be a tad slower then ++$i. This is something PHP specific and does not apply to other languages, so don't go modifying your C or Java code thinking it'll suddenly become faster, it won't. ++$i happens to be faster in PHP because instead of 4 opcodes used for $i++ you only need 3. Post incrementation actually causes in the creation of a temporary var that is then incremented. While pre-incrementation increases the original value directly. This is one of the optimization that opcode optimized like Zend's PHP optimizer. It is a still a good idea to keep in mind since not all opcode optimizers perform this optimization and there are plenty of ISPs and servers running without an opcode optimizer.
Not everything has to be OOP, often it is too much overhead, each method and object call consumes a lot of memory.
Do not implement every data structure as a class, arrays are useful, too
Don't split methods too much, think, which code you will really re-use
Make use of the countless predefined functions

Sessions

Amaga — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 07:55:48 +0000

PHP Sessions - Why Use Them?

A session is a way to store information (in the form of variables) to be used across multiple pages. Unlike a cookie, specific variable information is not stored on the users computer. It is also unlike other variables in the sense that we are not passing them individually to each new page, but instead retrieving them from the session we open at beginning of each page. Start a PHP Session Before you can begin storing user information in your PHP session, you must first start the session. When you start a session, it must be at the very beginning of your code, before any HTML or text is sent. Below is a simple script that you should place at the beginning of your PHP code to start up a PHP session.

session_start(); // start up your PHP session!

This tiny piece of code will register the user's session with the server, allow you to start saving user information and assign a UID (unique identification number) for that user's session.

Storing a Session Variable

When you want to store user data in a session use the $_SESSION associative array. This is where you both store and retrieve session data. In previous versions of PHP there were other ways to perform this store operation, but it has been updated and this is the correct way to do it.

session_start();
$_SESSION['views'] = 1; // store session data
echo "Pageviews = ". $_SESSION['views']; //retrieve data

Display

Pageviews = 1

In this example we learned how to store a variable to the session associative array $_SESSION and also how to retrieve data from that same array.

PHP Sessions: Using PHP's isset Function

Now that you are able to store and retrieve data from the $_SESSION array, we can explore some of the real functionality of sessions. When you create a variable and store it in a session, you probably want to use it in the future. However, before you use a session variable it is necessary that you check to see if it exists already! This is where PHP's isset function comes in handy. isset is a function that takes any variable you want to use and checks to see if it has been set. That is, it has already been assigned a value. With our previous example, we can create a very simple pageview counter by using isset to check if the pageview variable has already been created. If it has we can increment our counter. If it doesn't exist we can create a pageview counter and set it to one. Here is the code to get this job done:

session_start();
if(isset($_SESSION['views']))
$_SESSION['views'] = $_SESSION['views']+ 1;
else
$_SESSION['views'] = 1;

echo "views = ". $_SESSION['views'];

The first time you run this script on a freshly opened browser the if statement will fail because no session variable views would have been stored yet. However, if you were to refresh the page the if statement would be true and the counter would increment by one. Each time you reran this script you would see an increase in view by one.

Cleaning and Destroying your Session

Although a session's data is temporary and does not require that you explicitly clean after yourself, you may wish to delete some data for your various tasks. Imagine that you were running an online business and a user used your website to buy your goods. The user has just completed a transaction on your website and you now want to remove everything from their shopping cart.

session_start();
if(isset($_SESSION['cart']))
unset($_SESSION['cart']);

You can also completely destroy the session entirely by calling the session_destroy function.

session_start();
session_destroy();

Destroy will reset your session, so don't call that function unless you are entirely comfortable losing all your stored session data!

Normal style	Bold style
Arial, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif	Arial, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif
Arial Black, Arial Black, Gadget, sans-serif	Arial Black, Arial Black, Gadget, sans-serif
Comic Sans MS, Comic Sans MS⁵, cursive	Comic Sans MS, Comic Sans MS⁵, cursive
Courier New, Courier New, Courier⁶, monospace	Courier New, Courier New, Courier⁶, monospace
Georgia¹, Georgia, serif	Georgia¹, Georgia, serif
Impact, Impact⁵, Charcoal⁶, sans-serif	Impact, Impact⁵, Charcoal⁶, sans-serif
Lucida Console, Monaco⁵, monospace	Lucida Console, Monaco⁵, monospace
Lucida Sans Unicode, Lucida Grande, sans-serif	Lucida Sans Unicode, Lucida Grande, sans-serif
Palatino Linotype, Book Antiqua³, Palatino⁶, serif	Palatino Linotype, Book Antiqua³, Palatino⁶, serif
Tahoma, Geneva, sans-serif	Tahoma, Geneva, sans-serif
Times New Roman, Times, serif	Times New Roman, Times, serif
Trebuchet MS¹, Helvetica, sans-serif	Trebuchet MS¹, Helvetica, sans-serif
Verdana, Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif	Verdana, Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif
Symbol, Symbol (Symbol², Symbol²)	Symbol, Symbol (Symbol², Symbol²)
Webdings, Webdings (Webdings², Webdings²)	Webdings, Webdings (Webdings², Webdings²)
Wingdings, Zapf Dingbats (Wingdings², Zapf Dingbats²)	Wingdings, Zapf Dingbats (Wingdings², Zapf Dingbats²)
MS Sans Serif⁴, Geneva, sans-serif	MS Sans Serif⁴, Geneva, sans-serif
MS Serif⁴, New York⁶, serif	MS Serif⁴, New York⁶, serif