Tag Archives: Technology/Internet

Joomla! – Old Code or Bad Code?

web development, , , , , , ,

Recently I started managing a small system based on Joomla 1.0.15. I know there is a most recent version of the popular CMS, but this one wasn’t based on it. Actually once upon a time I was working with Joomla as basic CMS for my web projects, but now after two+ years with Zend Framework and MVC I was amazed to see how bad the Joomla 1.0.15 was written.

Indeed it is really strange to see all SQL, HTML and PHP all in one file?! This is like end of ’90s! That’s for sure a bad approach.

I’ll download the 1.5 version with the hope the code there will be better!

Setting Up a Specific Layout for a Zend Action

micro tutorial, PHP, zend framework, , ,

Now that’s really simple! In your action method simply add this line:

$this->view->layout()->setLayout('embed');

Thus the code will look like so:

<?php
 
class IndexController extends Zend_Controller_Action
{
	public function indexAction()
	{
		$this->view->layout()->setLayout('embed');
		// ...	
	}	
}

One Form – Multiple DB Records

PHP, web development, , , , , , , , ,

I’ve the impression that even it’s a simple technique it remains quite misunderstood!

What’s the Goal?

You’ve a simple HTML form with several groups of form elements. Imagine the situation with title and link groups. You can have 1, 2 or more title/link pairs which you’d like to save in a database table, where perhaps there are only three columns – id, title, link.

What is the Shortest Path to the Solution?

In fact the task can be done by many ways, but there’s one really elegant solution. As it appears in many occasions PHP and HTML are born to work together!

1. First Step

Create your web form by simply modifying a bit the element names. Usually when you have an input you simply name it after the database column or something similar.

<form method="POST">
	<input type="text" name="db_column_name" />
</form>

In reality PHP and HTML allows the name to be an array element, just like so:

<form method="POST">
	<input type="text" name="link[0][title]" />
	<input type="text" name="link[0][url]" />
 
	<input type="text" name="link[1][title]" />
	<input type="text" name="link[1][url]" />
</form>

2. Second Step

Than all this comes in the _POST array in PHP, but formatted in an array manner, so you can simply foreach it!

<?php
 
foreach ($_POST['link'] as $link) {
	insert_into_db($link['title'], $link['url']);
}
 
?>

That is simply enough!

Download Files with Zend Framework

micro tutorial, PHP, zend framework, , , , , , , , ,

Download a File

The title may sound unclear enough, but the task is simple. You’ve to make a file download process within a Zend Framework’s controller. Let’s assume we’ve the DownloadController setup:

<?php
 
class DownloadController extends Zend_Controller_Action
{
	public function indexAction()
	{}	
}

In PHP there are at least three simple lines of code that will do the job of downloading a file.

header('Content-Type: image/jpeg');
header('Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="logo.jpg"');
readfile('images/logo.jpg');

Note that here there is a content-type header, which is important cause the browsers understands what kind of file is supposed to be downloaded. The second line suggests a name of the downloaded file and the third one returns the file to the client.

Download a File … within Zend Framework

Those three lines wont work alone in a ZF application, because there’s no view, but even if you create a .phtml (view) file for this action it won’t work, because the header of the returned file is modified.

The question is how to possibly return the file for download, perhaps write some statistics to the database and if there’s a problem (some permission issues for instance) return a message to the user.

The Basic Solution

The solution is simple. First make it work by disabling the view and possibly the layout for this action:

public function indexAction()
{
	header('Content-Type: image/jpeg');
	header('Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="logo.jpg"');
	readfile('images/logo.jpg');
 
	// disable the view ... and perhaps the layout
	$this->view->layout()->disableLayout();
        $this->_helper->viewRenderer->setNoRender(true);
}

Than add some code where you can check the permissions. Just because there’s no view for this action you can redirect to another – errorAction():

public function indexAction()
{
    if (userHasNoPermissions) {
        $this->view->msg = 'This file cannot be downloaded!';
        $this->_forward('error', 'download');
    }
 
    header('Content-Type: image/jpeg');
    header('Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="logo.jpg"');
    readfile('images/logo.jpg');
 
    // disable layout and view
    $this->view->layout()->disableLayout();
    $this->_helper->viewRenderer->setNoRender(true);
}

But that still will prompt you a file to download, so there should be a return statement that will return false:

public function indexAction()
{
    if (userHasNoPermissions) {
        $this->view->msg = 'This file cannot be downloaded!';
        $this->_forward('error', 'download');
        return FALSE;
    }
 
    header('Content-Type: image/jpeg');
    header('Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="logo.jpg"');
    readfile('images/logo.jpg');
 
    // disable layout and view
    $this->view->layout()->disableLayout();
    $this->_helper->viewRenderer->setNoRender(true);
}

So here’s the complete source of DownloadController.php:

<?php
 
class DownloadController extends Zend_Controller_Action
{
	public function indexAction()
	{
	    if (userHasNoPermissions) {
	        $this->view->msg = 'This file cannot be downloaded!';
	        $this->_forward('error', 'download');
	        return FALSE;
	    }
 
	    header('Content-Type: image/jpeg');
	    header('Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="logo.jpg"');
	    readfile('images/logo.jpg');
 
	    // disable layout and view
	    $this->view->layout()->disableLayout();
	    $this->_helper->viewRenderer->setNoRender(true);
	}	
 
	public function errorAction()
	{}
}

and the error.phtml:

<?php echo $this->msg ?>

The Difference Between .live() and .delegate and Which One Should be Used

javascript, web development, , , , ,

There are so many posts about that topic out there, but I’d like to be rather breve! The delegate() method comes with the last major version of the jQuery – 1.4 and it gives a context to the event. So please use delegate() instead of live(), just because not everything’s attached to the document element, but to the selected object.