I recently received a request to update the grid960 bookmarklet to support 24 columns. I hadn’t realised that 960.gs had been updated.
So, here it is!
To install the bookmarklet simply drag the link below to your bookmarks toolbar. In Internet Explorer, right click, select ‘Add to favourites’ and then select ‘Links’.
For further information on this bookmarklet, see my previous post
I’ve finally got round to releasing kosearch – a Kohana search module. It’s an implementation of Zend (Lucene) Search, a file-based search/index solution. kosearch provides a simple way to index and search Models. It’s perfect for a web site that might contain news, products etc. kosearch also exposes the underlying Zend libraries so that other things can be indexed – PDFs, web pages, Word docs etc.
The module comes complete with a demo and details of how to use the module.
The module is available for download on github.
The kosearch module has been written for, and tested against Kohana 2.3.4.
All comments and feedback appreciated
Hi,
what is the diferente between kosearch and cache?
thanks
kosearch is made from chalk and cache is from cheese
um.. kosearch is a search index. Nothing to do with caching
anthony commented on October 12th, 2010 at 9:34 pmHi, Thanks for putting this together. I have it working perfectly, but I’m wondering if you have tried paginating the results with Kohana’s pagination library or perhaps something else? If so, do you have an example?
Thanks again!
Hi Anthony. glad you find the library useful. To be honest, I’ve not much Kohana dev for a while= and I’ve not looked into pagination. However, I’ve just completed a large Zend project and we used Lucene extensively. Zend PAgination comes with an adapter for Lucene.
I took a quick look at the Kohana pagination library. Shouldn’t be too difficult to extend for Lucene, or even easier to write your own Pagination class. The key difference is that whereas SQL queries use LIMIT and OFFSET, with Lucene, you always return the full number of hits
JayGreentree commented on December 1st, 2010 at 5:15 amthanks for your Kohana Search project but I seem to be having issues getting it to work I’ve followed all the directions but keep getting errors about the Zend files not existing even though they are uploaded as you had mentioned.
Hey, i am really need your help ! I want to know how to integrate kosearch with the latest version of kohana its rather different with your previous tuts
Hi. I’ve not had a chance to upgrade to v3, but I did recently notice that someone has re-implemented it. Shame they never bothered to let me know.
Take a look here: https://github.com/evopix/kohana-search
This site continues to receive a large amount of traffic from people searching for a solution to achieving rounded corners in IE8. Clearly, it’s a hot topic, and my previous post about using DD_Roundies has hopefully helped developers along their way.
I recently had an issue with DD_Roundies where the border width was 1 pixel out. Not sure why, but it prompted me to look for another solution. A simple plea for help on twitter resulted in the discovery of another library, and this time one built as a jQuery plugin.
Check out cornerz. It’s easy to use and so far, works like a charm.
Finally a solution for IE8, but for me it doesn’t respect the background colors of parent containers so I am seeing rounded corners with the cut out parts being white instead of transparent or the parent’s background-color :( This makes the plugin useless for me. I am just about to give up on IE8.
@1008. Have you tried setting the background colour as one of the options?
e.g. $(‘.myclass’).cornerz( {
‘radius’ : 12,
‘corners’ : ‘bl’,
‘background’ : ‘#000′
} )
I had the same problem as 1001 Fonts.
It won’t work well with a background..
Setting the color doesn’t work because the background is an image not just a color.
Guess I’ll have to wait. There’s not good solution for rounded corners on IE8 today.
Empiror commented on January 19th, 2011 at 1:42 amI was able to get DD_Roundies working in IE8 without the 1 pixel issue occurring by commenting out lines 226 to 232 – the if statement starting with):
if (DD_roundies.IE8) {
I’ve recently been asked to look at integrating some complex forms into a WordPress powered site. None of the current plugins satisfied our (multi-lingual) needs, so the next simplest approach appeared to be integrating PHP code with WordPress. (I had considered integrating Kohana, my favoured PHP framework, as there is a module that allows easy integration, but this seemed overkill for a few forms).
Running PHP code from within WordPress is nothing new. There are numerous plugins. I opted for Exec-PHP, partly because it gets high user ratings and the developer has provided feedback on his site, and partly because it worked for me first time.
Having installed the plugin, it was simple to create a Page, add some PHP code using the traditional PHP tags . However, once I started writing code in anger, I began to understand that to run the code efficiently, and to give the end-user a good experience, simply placing code in the page (blog entry) is too simplistic.
The key issues, is that the PHP code is evaluated at run-time, using the PHP eval() function. This function is highly inefficient. So, the first improvement was to move the bulk of the code to a separate PHP file and include it. This way, the only code evaluated is the include statement.
I chose to put my included code in a folder called custom-php within the WordPress wp-content folder. The best way to reference the file is using the ABSPATH constant provided by WordPress, as follows:
<? require_once(ABSPATH. '/wp-content/custom-php/contact-form.php'); ?>
Now I can simply place my PHP code in the external file for inclusion. So far, so good. But it wasn’t long until I hit my next hurdle. I need to send an email when the form is submitted. Nothing too taxing there. In fact, this is super simple thanks to the @wp_mail WordPress tag.
Now, normally when writing a PHP form script, the form is POSTed to the server, the server sends the email using some SMTP library, and then the script renders an HTML page ( or View if using an MVC framework). And if you’re a good developer, you’ll actually perform an HTTP redirect instead, to prevent double form submission (see this article on Wikipedia).
However when PHP code is executed within a WordPress page, some of the response has already been sent. This has two side effects:
So, we need a way to run the script before the response is sent. Here’s my solution:
Firstly, the PHP page included in the WordPress page, contains an HTML form. I add to the form a hidden field so that it can easily identified when POSTed e.g.:
<form method="POST" action="<?php echo $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']; ?>"> <input type="hidden" name="form-name" value="contact" /> <div style="text-align:left; border: 1px solid #bbb; padding:10px;"> <div> <label for="name">name</label> <input type="text" name="name" id="name" /> </div> <div> <label for="email">email</label> <input type="text" name="email" id="email" /> </div> <div> <label for="message">message</label> <textarea name="message" id="message" style="width:250px; height:100px"></textarea> </div> <input type="submit" value="go" /> </div> </form>
Now, when the form is submitted, I am able to detect it, and therefore process the form submission prior to rendering the page. I do this by adding some code to the WordPress page template. I opted to add some more include code to the first line of the header.php file within my theme, like so:
<?php require_once(ABSPATH. '/wp-content/custom-php/contact-form-test.php'); ?>
There may be a better place to put this code (wp-config, wp-settings ?). I’m no WordPress guru, and I’m happy to be educated.
The contact-form-test.php code is as follows:
<?
session_start();
if($_POST['form-name'] AND "contact" === $_POST['form-name']) {
require_once(ABSPATH. '/wp-content/custom-php/contact-form-functions.php');
send_message();
}
?>
This is fairly simple code. We test to see if our form was posted, and if so include the code to send the email. No point including it unless we need to. The key is, the code is now included before any other WordPress code executes.
For completeness, the contact-form-functions.php is as follows:
<?
function send_message()
{
$subject = "Test email form WordPress";
$body = $_POST['message'];
$recipient = "rocky-racoon@abbeyroad.co.uk";
$success = @wp_mail($recipient, $subject, $body);
if($success) {
session_start();
$_SESSION["mail_message"] = "Thank you. your message has been sent.";
header( 'Location: '.$_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'] ) ;
}
else {
$GLOBALS["mail_message"] = "Euston, we have a problem.";
}
}
?>
We use WordPress’ mail functionality to send the email. If it sends OK, we perform an HTTP redirect. First we also set a flashvar using the PHP $_SESSION as, due to the redirect, we cannot use a $GLOBAL as it obviously goes out of scope.
One final change is required to contact-form.php to retrieve the success (or error) message. The following code is placed before the HTML form:
<?php
if(isset($GLOBALS["mail_message"])) {
echo "<p>".$GLOBALS["mail_message"]."</p>";
}
if(isset($_SESSION["mail_message"])) {
echo "<p>".$_SESSION["mail_message"]."</p>";
unset($_SESSION["mail_message"]);
}
?>
This solution is useful for an custom PHP code that is server-intensive, be it database queries, web service calls or sending email.
Hope you found this useful
Excellent tip to Include the php code rather than just drop it in the page/post!
Thanks for sharing
carlitos commented on November 17th, 2009 at 9:24 amI’ve got a problem, I got this page done topxxname.php and uploaded it to wpcontent/themes/mytheme/ and when i try to open on browser that file my wp send me to the 404 page!
How i can add custom php pages to the themes folder and run them?
If i do ur tutorial it will work ?
Thanks
@carlitos – you can’t just upload a file and access it using WP. Everything goes through the controller, index.php. You need to create a PAge within WP, and run your code within this.
carlitos commented on November 19th, 2009 at 6:09 amyeah thank you i finally figure it out
Thanks for taking the time to post this. It has saved me hours and at my age…that is important :)
Joe commented on December 1st, 2009 at 8:01 pmThanks for this article. Makes sense but I cannot get it to work.
When I first display the form page it begins with this error:
Warning: session_start() [function.session-start]: Cannot send session cache limiter – headers already sent (output started at /home/myacctname/public_html/mywpsitename/wp-content/themes/formtheme/header.php:8) in /home/myacctname/public_html/mywpsitename/wp-content/custom-php/contact-form.php on line 2
In my themes header.php the first line reads:
…and in “contact-form-test.php” the entire module is
…and in “contact-form-functions.php” the entire module is
The error message appears, followed by the contact form itself. If I fill out the contact form and click GO then I get the “Thank you. your message has been sent” message, but I never get the email.
As a test I tried commenting out the session-start command at the beginning of “contact-form.php”. and that did eliminate the error message, but now when I fill out the form and click GO I no longer get the ‘thank you’ message.
I researched the error message and read that it might be caused by stray nonblank characters either before the but it looks like my Notepad++ is set to Unix/ANSI so I don’t think that is the problem.
Any suggestions on 1) why the error message, and 2) why I got the “…your message has been sent” and yet received no email?
TIA
Hi Joe. You’re on the right track with the stray characters. To start a session the headers need modifying in the HTTP response. This cannot happen once the response has started being written. This is a classic gotcha with PHP when you are mixing server-side code with client-side HTML. If you have so much as a space or carriage return outside of the PHP tags, prior to the session_start call, then you are actually sending a response. You have to work through ALL the files that might be loaded before the session_start call. This includes those loaded by WordPress such as index.php, wp-config.php. If there’s a new line after the closing PHP tag, this cvould ber the culprit. Often, you’ll find there is no closing tag, to avoid this error. Quite likely it’s header.php, contact-form-test.php, contact-form-functions.php or contact-form.php.
If sessions aren’t working, then you will not see the message. It needs to be set in session so it can subsequently be pulled out after the redirect.
As to why you’re not receiving email, the code I posted is using Worpress’ underlying mail function. This means that whatever WP uses, the function uses. Can you send mail outside of this script? If not, you might need to configure WP with an SMTP plugin, rather than using the native sendmail() function.
god luck
Joe commented on December 2nd, 2009 at 3:54 amThanks for the encouragement, but I looked at the header.php and the other files you mentioned but no luck: I’m still getting the “headers already sent” message whenever I display the contact form page (all other site pages are fine).
I also tried relocating the “require_once(ABSPATH. ‘/wp-content/custom-php/contact-form-test.php” to the wp-configure.php, and also deactivating all plugins but still I get the same “headers already sent” error message.
If you have any other ideas – or perhaps know of some diagnostic tool to perhaps capture the outgoing stream and that would reveal the culprit (i.e., the code that is possibly sending the stray character(s) after the php closing bracket) then I’m all ears.
I think the problem Joe is having is the same one I am having. When you try to use session_start() in contact-form.php where contact_form.php isn’t the only thing included on the page, PHP complains that headers are already sent.
My form sends just fine, but I can’t extract the error message to display it. Here’s my set up:
contact-form-test.php is the first line in header.php
contact-form-functions.php does its job and sends the mail through WordPress
contact-form.php is included from index.php since I want the form to appear on my home page, toward the bottom. So when contact-form.php loads, the session_start() in line 2 of contact-form.php that should resume the session to pull out the error message makes PHP complain that headers have already been sent out (since it’s almost done rendering the entire page). I can’t see how any of this would actually work.
Maybe you can shed some light on how you got this going? Perhaps showing the code for the page that calls contact-form.php would be helpful.
TO ANYONE HAVING PROBLEMS WITH THIS
I finally fixed this after nearly a day of debugging. Here’s the strategy:
in the header.php of my template, I have:
if (!session_id()) {
session_start();
}
require_once(ABSPATH. ‘…/contact-form-test.php’);
contact-form-test.php:
if($_POST['form-name'] AND “contact” === $_POST['form-name']) {
session_register(‘mail_message’);
require_once(ABSPATH. ‘…/contact-form-functions.php’);
send_message();
}
contact-form-functions.php
function send_message()
{
$subject = ‘Test email form WordPress’;
$body = $_POST['message'];
$recipient = ‘shaun@tarves.net’;
$success = @wp_mail($recipient, $subject, $body);
if($success) {
$_SESSION['mail_message'] = ‘Thank you. your message has been sent.’;
session_write_close();
header( ‘Location: ‘.$_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'].’#contact’);
}
else {
$GLOBALS['mail_message'] = ‘Euston, we have a problem.’;
}
}
Doing it this way allows you to only have to include session_start() one time, and the key here is session_write_close(). For some reason, upon page redirection, PHP often loses session data. Ensuring the write is closed makes everything work.
Thanks so much for this great tutorial!
Shaun, Joe
I just took a look at my code, and I had modified it since the orignal post. I moved the session_start() call to the contact-form-test.php include. Looking at your fix, this might be the reason. (I’ve modified this post to show the update).
and yes, PHP will lose all session data unless you tell it otherwise. Check out the wp_unregister_GLOBALS() function in wp-settings.php
hi,
the only way I got this to work was to put the session_start() in the index.php of my theme ? http://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=14636
Neil commented on March 29th, 2010 at 11:57 amHi
Thanks for this.
I also found a plugin which inserts a shortcode for php includes.
http://www.amberpanther.com/contributions/wp-include-file/
It would be good to hear your thoughts on this. Goo didea or not?
thanks
Neil
Plugin looks good. Only thing to watch is *when* it executes your code. If it calls the include part way through the page, you could have session issues
Thanks for the tips! I will try this script in my WP blog
Let me try ;) I am switching from blogspot to wordpress
I’m also giving it a try. Great article by the way.
Just tried. I like http://www.amberpanther.com/contributions/wp-include-file/ much more.
Great article!
Definitely not the way I would have done it, but I learned a lot. I really do appreciate your humility in admitting wordpress isn’t your trade, although Php obviously is. I’m sure your method is still better, but I would have developed a seperate page template. I guess I’m just more comfortable with my approach. It wouldn’t require any Php getting inserted into backend, where making content, instead it would all stay in the Php template files. Customize the template appropriately to the form, then when making a post, choose that template instead. (kinda like page v post, or custom post type).
I didn’t know about the WP email function, and the suggestions you gave on that were great. It’s helpful not to resort to regular php functions when WP already has them integrated. Thanks!
~David
Hi – really great post. Thanks so much.
I’m in the process of trying to run a few PHP files to handle an HTML form I have on one of my pages: https://globalcitizenyear.org/donate/donation-form-2 – - the handler sends an API call to PayPal.
I can get this to work quite well in simple PHP (outside of wordpress – where I can actually use the .php file in the “action” and also rely on an error page etc), but I have been unable to get it to work in WordPress. Do you have any thoughts?
Also, given that you are taking care of this all on one page – how could you force the form to hide after submission?
My organization really needs to get this issue taken care of
Hi David
I wrote this post a while back and have since used templates much more. I ave a love/hate relationship with WordPress and PHP (I was a Java dev, and have noe moed onto Django/Python).
A standalone template is an easier option. Not even sure these were available when I wrote this article? The key point about Response Headers is still a potential gotcha.
Wilson, like the previous commenter said, a standalone template might be easier. Couldn’t begin to guess what issue you’re having re: PayPal API. First thing I’d check is that your standalone script executes fine form your webserver – i.e. it’s not an connectivity issue
Good Luck
Cool – thanks!
So, my question is pretty easy then –
If I use a require_once function for my PHP form handler (in the header.php file) as part of a condition that says: If form submitted, require this .php file.
And, this form handler php file starts a session, will it work. That may not be enough info, but might you have any suggestions that could help me detect the errors? Right now I’m not getting anything other than something that tells me the API did not work.
All of this is working at: http://www.wilsonkeenan.com/learningphp/DoDirectPayment.php – - it’s just when I try to move everything into PHP = not working…
Mate, you’re BRILLIANT. You just saved me about 2 hours of Googling and swearing.
Thank you!
great finally I found the correct way to include my file :-)
You are very right about eval being ineffective. But I am not sure how just moving the code to a separate file will solve the issue? From the manual, the include statement also evaluates the content of file.
Great job! I have been seraching for this, thanks.
I guess this is a question for everyone in this comment thread, but how does this method of including php via ABSPATH in the main template file compare to making custom templates for pages with php functions? I’m just wondering if one method will result in better end-user experience compared to other.
badlyDrawnToy is the blog of Howie Weiner, a freelance web developer, based in Manchester.
Howie specialises in Django, PHP and Java web application development.
This site is no longer updated. You can now follow Howie at howieweiner.co.uk
Many thanks for this great tool! :-)
Great tool, Howie, and thanks for sharing. However, I noticed that when you have a layout with absolutely positioned elements the grids never show up. I’m going to try playing around with the script a bit and I’ll post back here what I find out. :)
The jQuery detection logic you use now checks for a version of jQuery that is no longer the most recent version. So even if I’ve already loaded the latest version of jQuery the bookmarklet still loads v1.4.2.
Perhaps instead of explicitly checking for v1.4.2 you should use feature detection to check for whatever critical feature it is that you need in v1.4.2 and then load jQuery only if that feature doesn’t exist. Since that feature will still exist in later versions it won’t overwrite newer versions of jQuery.
Good point Richard. Gosh, I hardly use this tool as I don’t do much front-end development these days, but clearly others like it. Now that jQuery 1.5 is out I’ll have a rethink.
The tool is only used for development, so loading the extra library on the fly isn’t a biggest crime. The important thing is that it does not conflict with an in place library. Most people developing a site will be using the latest jQuery release. Perhaps I should just use the latest.
Shame that none of the CDN versions are labelled ‘latest’ :-/
Actually, the Google CDN does have a ‘latest’ version. Just use https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1/jquery.min.js and it will always serve the latest 1.x version. (They haven’t upgraded to 1.5 yet as it was just released the other day…)
How does one extending the grid past the initial page fold? I am on Firefox 4.0.1 (Mac-Intel)
Is it possible to play with the alignment of the grid overlay? For example, shift it x number of pixels to the left or right? It might just be the site I am looking at, but nothing lines up with the grid, including the main content area. If I can shift the grid to align with the content area, then I can at least determine if the elements are out of whack or the whole page is out of whack…
This tool is wonderful.Many thanks for sharing.