PHP « kieranbarnes

Detecting MIME types in PHP

Posted on January 22, 2010

Detecting MIME types in PHP used to be hellish.

Use the mime_content_type function I hear you say. Returns the MIME content type for a file as determined by using information from the magic.mime file. No, its garbage and thankfully now depreciated.

The PHP documentation suggests we use the Fileinfo PECL extension. I wasted ten minutes of my day trying to make that work. It even comes packaged with PHP 5.3. Still doesn't work.

Filed under: PHP Continue reading

FreeTDS installation directory is not a FreeTDS installation directory

Posted on December 3, 2009

I recently discovered an error whilst trying to (re)install an older PHP version on a client's server. My client required PHP recompiling with MS SQL support. This in turn requires FreeTDS. Installing FreeTDS is very simple, but PHP wasn't.

Filed under: Linux, MS SQL, PHP Continue reading

CubeCart Tax Classes on Product Page

Posted on November 25, 2009

A client of mine sells a mix of VAT and VAT exempt products via a CubeCart 4 store I setup.

Although CubeCart allows this and calculates the VAT right on the checkout process, it doesn't have any facility to show the customer which tax class the product falls into on the viewProd page.

Annoying.

Filed under: CubeCart, PHP Continue reading

The Beauty of Old Code

Posted on November 12, 2009

A client of mine needed a quick image upload feature to a custom administration app. We have jQuery and AJAX and all sorts of modern niceness. Screw that.

Bring back PEAR's HTTP_Upload. Its ancient, but justified, if you install the Stable version it was last updated 11-08-2004, five whole years ago.

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Convert phpBB IP Addresses

Posted on October 9, 2008

phpBB stores its IP addresses in a funky format. They're useless to the human eye!

Convert them to normal IPs with the following code

SELECT CONCAT( CONV( substring( poster_ip, 1, 2 ) , 16, 10 ) , '.', CONV( substring( poster_ip, 3, 2 ) , 16, 10 ) , '.', CONV( substring( poster_ip, 5, 2 ) , 16, 10 ) , '.', CONV( substring( poster_ip, 7, 2 ) , 16, 10 ) ) AS IP
FROM phpbb_posts
WHERE `poster_id` = USERID
LIMIT 0 , 30

This code will convert all know IPs from a selected user (In my case 51).

Filed under: MySQL, PHP 5 Comments

Using Wordpress header and footers externally

Posted on September 24, 2008

I needed to integrate a Wordpress header (header.php) and footer (footer.php) into an external application.

There are quite a few ways round this, but none are really ideal. For example, if you want to include an external page in Wordpress for whatever reason, you could use the Exec-PHP plugin. Simple, hey? No.

Filed under: CubeCart, PHP, Wordpress Continue reading

How to move Wordpress directory or server – properly

Posted on August 24, 2008

I ran into an annoying, but easily avoided problem the other day. When moving a clients Wordpress site from the development/staging area to it's live domain, I did the usual update "WordPress address" and "Blog address" in the Wordpress settings.
Thats all you need to do, right? No.

Filed under: PHP, Wordpress Continue reading

WP-O-Matic Bug Fixes Round Up

Posted on July 16, 2008

I've run into quite a few issues in the latest 1.0RC3-7 release of WP-O-Matic. Here's a round up of the bug fixes and addons you need to actually this potentially useful product useful!
Also, it includes a well known MySQL bug fix.

Tagged as: campaign id, database error, Download, Duplicate, getItemHash, hash values, mysql server, sql errors, sql syntax, WP-O-Matic Continue reading

Extra Cover Cricket

Posted on July 14, 2008

I wrote the Extra Cover Cricket site about a year ago to provide a central news hub for syndicated cricket news from around the world. Previously there has never been so much cricket news on a single web site. Seriously!

It was wrote around a single page that provided the home page, the category listing and the single article page. Really simple stuff.