Tag Archives: World Wide Web

HTML Tags: <base>

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Overview

base

Somehow the <base> tag remains unknown to most of the web developers, but that’s quite normal. However let see what it can do. By adding the <base> tag in the head of the page you tell every link into that page how to open and a default href value. Thus if you have:

<base href="http://www.stoimen.com/blog/">

every link without a href attribute will open this link. That’s really useful in some cases. However the most interesting part of the base tag is the target attribute.

target=”_blank”

Everybody knows what will result from this attribute attached to a anchor tag.

<a href="http://www.stoimen.com" target="_blank">Click Here</a>

But with only adding this base tag:

<base target="_blank">

into the head … all the links will open in a new tab/window, depending on the browser preferences.

Watch out!

If you add the line above somewhere into the <body> tag the browser, will put it into the <head> which will make it difficult to track. A good practice is to place it directly into the <head>!

Zend_Mail with GMail

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

Zend_Mail and GMail
You know how to setup Zend_Mail with SMTP, but you don’t know how to set it up with GMail! Here’s how to do it. Just follow the instructions 😉

$mailTransport = new Zend_Mail_Transport_Smtp('smtp.gmail.com', array(
    'auth'     => 'login',
    'username' => 'xxxxxx@gmail.com',
    'password' => 'passxxxxx',
    'port'     => '587',
    'ssl'      => 'tls',
));
Zend_Mail::setDefaultTransport($mailTransport);

Send Html Mails with Zend_Mail

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

Zend_Mail
Typically you’d never like to send a non-html formatted mail from your web system. It’s ugly and it’s difficult to read. Instead of sending pure text, you’d like to add some images and styles. The way you can do it with Zend_Mail is simple enough. Replace the setBody method with setBodyHtml. Isn’t that natural?

// before
$mail = new Zend_Mail('utf-8');
$mail->setFrom('sender@example.com', 'Sender Name');
$mail->setBody('message in Html');
$mail->addTo('recipient@example.com', 'Recepient Name');
$mail->setSubject('Subject');
$mail->send();
// after
$mail = new Zend_Mail('utf-8');
$mail->setFrom('sender@example.com', 'Sender Name');
$mail->setBodyHtml('message in Html');
$mail->addTo('recipient@example.com', 'Recepient Name');
$mail->setSubject('Subject');
$mail->send();

Zend Framework and Media RSS

PHP, zend framework, , , , , , , , , , ,

The Problem

Since native RSS format is not designed to deliver media content, there is a need for newer format supporting video and audio. There is such format – Media RSS introduced by Yahoo! in 2004. Actually now RSS supports some king of pseudo audio and video with the enclosure tag.

Inserting Media In RSS with Media RSS

Although there is a standardized format, there is not a Zend Framework native module. There is however a proposal, but that’s far not enough.

Possible Solutions

For me there are two possible solutions. The first is writing Zend_Feed_Mrss and extend the Zend_Feed_Rss functionality, but that appears to be a non-trivial task. The second solution is to write custom view returning XML, which I’m choosing for now. I hope I can paste some code soon!

document.forms[‘myform’].submit() is not a function?

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.submit()

You want to submit the form by clicking on a link or some other element on the page and this is a simple task. You know that by simply adding something like document.forms[‘the-form-name’].submit() this will work.

<form method="post" name="myform">
    <input type="text" name="user" />
    <a href="#" onclick="document.forms['myform'].submit();return false">Submit</a>
</form>

However you’d like to submit the form not only by clicking on that particular element, but also by clicking on the Enter while the focus is on a input field, and this wont work! That’s because you don’t have a input type=”submit”.

OK, first thing is to add a hidden input type=”submit” – than by clicking both on the Enter keyboard button and on the link with the onclick=”document.blah.blah.blah” will submit the form.

<form method="post" name="myform">
    <input type="text" name="user" />
    <input type="submit" name="submit" value="submit" style="display:hidden" />
    <a href="#" onclick="document.forms['myform'].submit();return false">Submit</a>
</form>

But this is not true!

Than you’ll receive the following message:

document.forms['myform'].submit() is not a function

Why? This isn’t working, but ever line seems to be OK. The answer is – don’t name the input type=”submit” with the trivial – “submit”. Just give it another name:

<form method="post" name="myform">
    <input type="text" name="user" />
    <input type="submit" name="something" value="something" style="display:hidden" />
    <a href="#" onclick="document.forms['myform'].submit();return false">Submit</a>
</form>