Posts by chrishea

I have been using a lesser known CMS for quite a number of years now because I find it much easier to set up and use than other (better known) CMS's like Joomla, Drupal, Mambo or Wordpress. I have built sites for clients with this CMS and they have been very successful in being able to maintain the sites on their own.

In the end, it depends on your priorities. I gave a much higher priority to ease of use and flexibility. With the most popular CMS's like Joomla, you will probably get a wider range of existing templates and addons. You can build very nice sites with the templates that are available in the one that I use. If you are familiar with php you can do your own template customization and build almost anything
(see a few examples).

In case you want to look outside the Joomla / Drupal "box" click here

I don`t know if this will work but you can give it a try

http://code.google.com/p/php-excel-reader/

There are services that provide the front-end for you. This is one of them:
http://www.interfax.net/en

It has an API so you can provide your own interface. I've never used it so I can't say if it is a good service or not. You can probably do a search and find others,

I don't think that you want to try turning it into html. If you provide a link to a Word document it will pop up a panel to save it when you click on it. Under Internet Explorer it will open the file but that doesn't seem to be consistent in other browsers. Either way, you can save it and that addresses part of your need. Not sure how to force it to open the file in other browsers.

If you are bound and determined to go the other way, this utility goes part way by extracting text but you need to compile it and then call it from PHP using a Shell. You also lose most of the formatting. Too complicated and incomplete for my liking. catdoc

Google Search provides this:
Authorize and Capture

You have provided very little info so it will be difficult for anyone to help unless you provide more info:
1. You state that you have a web server but you must be running an application on the server and that is what would connect with the database. What is the application and have you run it successfully in a test system or is this your first attempt to make it work? Are you really confident that the application itself doesn't have any problems.
2. What type of database is it?
3. How did the system get configured. Did you do it yourself?
4. Was the database configured correctly?

If the database was created correctly and if you are confident that the application works (at least in other installations) , then the configuration in your system may not be defining the database correctly. You should check the installation instructions and make sure that everything was done correctly and that you are using the correct format for the config info for your server.

If you can view the files you should see folders for Apache, MySQL and PHP. If you can run a phpinfo command you'll see details of all three.

Unpack (un-gz!) the archive. The content should be a series of SQL statements to build the database. You should have phpMyAdmin on your Lamp system. You can use it to import the unpacked file or you can copy the content and pasted it into the SQL facility in phpMyAdmin.

yes, I believe that is correct.

In the form you submit to PayPal there is an amount field. You set the value in the form to a variable and you load the variable with the appropriate amount before you display the form.

In the PHP manual it suggests using the session_destroy and deleting the session cookie. Have a look at the manual and give it a try.

I don't understand the question. Coding it is straightforward PHP and HTML. There is no mystery to it.

I don't have an answer for you but you may want to look at:
http://ca.php.net/manual/en/function.header.php

The source of the file is dependent on the $file variable. You need to check that it is correct. The header statement defines the name for the output file.

Your very first sentence in the first post was
"i was looking forward to creating an excel sheet".
That's why it took a number of posts to get down to what you really need.

If all you want to do is to display (not change) then you can certainly do that with PHP. If you want to generalize it you can query MySQL for the column names and use that to determine how many columns you need and to put the names at the top of each column. Then you can successively read each row and fill in the values. What you will have is a low-end version of phpMySQL browse. As long as you aren't looking for any of the spreadsheet-like features such as colors, calculations or update then no problem.

This latest error looks as though you have an include error in the config module. Do you have an include for bootstrap.inc on line 12 of config.php?

It sounds as if you need to keep all of the other details in Session variables based on what they entered the first time. Once you have processed one registration, you can either display the whole form with all of the fields pre-filled except for name (by assigning the values based on the Session values) or just display a simplified form for the name but use the Session values to fill all the other fields in the database.

If you want changepassword to be able to check and/or change the password then you will need to make the current id and password available or at least set a flag to show that the user is properly logged in. You will want to save this as a SESSION variable so you can access it in any module that needs it.

There are many email scripts. I use one called Libmail that is simple and seems to work every time. It can handle attachments.

If you look at each of the things you want to do, none of them seem to be very difficult:

1. Send the user to a different web site
The login will have to pull in info from the (MySQL?) database for this user and probably save them as session variables. Something in the DB will identify the type of user and that is probably the determinant for where to redirect to (php header command).

2. Only display certain products
This is similar to the first point in that some information in the user's record is going to determine this. You have already re-directed to a specific web site so if that isn't specific enough, then you check the user info and decide what should be displayed. You could have this be unique to each user but I would guess that for simplicity you will probably have a limited number of categories that the user could fall into.

3. Images as links ...
I'm not really clear on what you want to do from the explanation but regardless, it doesn't sound too complex.

4. Quicklinks
In this case you need to store the history and then do some real-time analysis. To keep it managable you probably need to give every significant page an identifier and then store that into a history file under the user's id (as you hit each page). Alternately, you could store the info in a table in a …

Sorry, your problem isn't clear. If you use either of these approaches, you will get the data in the spreadsheet. If you don't want to actually create a spreadsheet and just want to display a spreadsheet-like screen display of the data, then you are probably looking at using some Ajax. In that case, have a look at jquery
http://www.flexigrid.info/

This questions seems to be asked on a regular basis. I have a little routine that can write an Excel spreadsheet (desktop_write) but if you don't even want to write a program use phpMyAdmin and export to excel.

In case it helps you, this is the freeware version that I started with:
http://scripts.ringsworld.com/user-authentication/vsignup-2.5/

With a bit of searching you can find quite a bit if comparison info. A large part is opinion - hard to know if it any "facts" quoted are accurate and reliable. The more you look the more it seems that it is a toss-up. For the factors you are looking at, they can both be used to build very large, secure systems with good performance. If you don't care about the potential benefits of the large PHP community, the flexibility / portability of PHP, lots of open source software and the fact that almost everything is free then you may decide to go with ASP for other reasons. I have never regretted the decision to go with PHP (and MySQL). I develop on a windows pc and run the production versions on a Linux server. I have had the benefit of lots of free systems that I can run as-is or get the code and modify it for my own use (and I have done a lot of both).

The bottom line is that there is no definitive answer and the choice will be a personal one (and probably based on factors that go beyond the three that you are trying to use).

http://naspinski.net/post/AspNet-vs-php--speed-comparison.aspx

http://digg.com/programming/PHP_versus_ASP_net_a_Straightforward_Comparison

There is no absolute way to protect images or text. If I need to copy a picture that is somehow blocked, I'll take a screen shot or copy it with a screen copy utility.

A couple of things that you can try:
<body oncontextmenu="return false">
to disable right-clicks (but it isn’t 100%)

and/or

<body ondragstart="return false" onselectstart="return false">

There are a bunch of other things that you can try and if you do a search, I'm sure that you will find them. Some are specific to certain browsers and some only work if Javascript is turned on.

Well if I had the problem and if it was my phpBB system, I'd:
- Convert to version 3, or
- Write a short script to convert all the user names to lowercase and advise the users that it was done, and / or
- Change the registration code to force all usernames to lower case, and / or
- Make the change directly in the database when I had to do something on a user account that had this case problem. This might be just making the username lowercase manually or it might be patching a change directly into the db (but probably the first option).

From something that I read when doing a bit of searching on this, there is a "clean" lowercase version of the username in the phpBB3 database. If the same thing is there in phpBB2, maybe the access to the user record should use that instead. Depends on your comfort in making internal changes to the code.

I don't think that it is too realistic to think that you can build a working production facility with PHP or anything else unless you have taken the time to learn the language and do some sample projects to build your knowledge.

You mention a number of different machines and it isn't clear if these are local PCs or internet servers. If we assume the simplest situation: that you want to install some code on the game server to handle registration, login and so forth then you might be able to purchase a system to do that and this would limit your challenge to getting it installed and working. Alternately, you could hire an experienced programmer to build it for you.

I recently (re)built a login system for my own use that does many of these functions. I want to add the ability to charge for usage but I don't have all of that yet. After a lot of searching, I found a freeware system that had some of the basics and I then spent a lot of time modifying it to work the way I wanted it to. I couldn't have done this (at least not in a reasonable amount of time) when I was just getting started with PHP. This particular version is proprietary so it isn't GPL and it isn't for sale (although it might be some time in the future). If you do an online search you'll find a number of these types of …

If you want to choose all of the records from the db for July of the current year you can do a select such as:
Select ... where date like '2009-07-%'

if you want all July records for any year the it would be:
Select ... where date like '%-07-%'

In your criteria, you don't mention cost but you imply that you don't want to spend the money for the latest Pro versio of Visual Studio. That would seem to be a pretty important criteria. Most things with PHP are free.

I'm using Netbeans as an IDE and I'm relatively happy with it. I don't use all the features and I haven't used Visual Studio so I can't do that comparison. I did a trial on a number of other IDE's and found Netbeans the easiest to work with. I don't use any of the frameworks.

You can see a comparison of the main PHP IDE's at
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/02/11/the-big-php-ides-test-why-use-oneand-which-to-choose/

You might have more luck searching or posting the question on the phpBB forums at http://www.phpbb.com/support/forums/. You are a major release behind but that means that someone must have already encountered the same problem on release 2.

It isn't quite clear why you are asking the question. You can select from the db on multiple fields so it doesn't matter what they are. As long as you are looking for an exact match, it should be no problem. If you wanted to do a greater or less than it would be a different story.

Another approach for the input would be to have a single date input field and then use strtotime to turn it into a time stamp. Then use date to extract the day, the month and the year. You can make it a little bit friendlier for the user.

If you are concerned about having the details on the command line, then you may want to put them into session variables (assuming that you are posting a program within the same domain).

I did a server-to-server script but I did it using ftp. This script is intended to upload from a client machine and I doubt that you could modify it to make it work for what you want. You need a totally different approach.

Chris

If you are working with a huge number of records, maybe sybase is trying to build a table in memory to hold all the results and it's running out of space. If that is a possibility, then you might want to try changing your query as an experiment to limit the number of records by something like "...and id_key < 1000" (based on looking at the keys that you have and picking one that is pretty low in the range). If that works, then you could try increasing the amount of memory (see the post ) and/or by process the input in stages by key range or alphabetically by the name or by date ranges.

If it is a virtual server (you bought hosting from someone) then you should be able to go to the web host's site and login or send them a question as to how to do it. If it is your own server, then you need to know what your doing and set everything up yourself.

You can use my desktop_write module. As you will see, the actual code to do it is pretty simple. This just packages it for you and provides the option of different output file types.

desktop_write

For the database, you will need access to PHPMyAdmin on the (server) system. This probably means getting access to the web host's control panel facility. If you have the id and password, that will probably get you logged in you just need the url to go to. For the code, you can download it using an FTP program and then upload the changes the same way.

I find that initial learning period frustrating when you aren't quite sure how things work and you are regualrly going to the manual to look up the syntax. I suppose if you were almost doing it like a research study and taking two fairly similar languages (PHP and ASP?) and then taking the time to document the comparison and differences it might be quicker in the end than taking them one at a time. That would take some patience. You'd have to be prepared to work on small examples in both languages for quite a while and not be in a rush to do a project with either one. Unless I was planning to write a book and document what I had learned, I'd find this pretty tedious. If you are more of an academic, you might be able to handle it.

I don't think you can do it through PHP. The best I could come up with was a way to display the computer name:

$hostname = gethostbyaddr($_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR']);
	echo $hostname;

When I ran your code, it tries to go to control/ which seems to be the way you coded it. Don't know why you can't get out of the initial module

You can have a look at this link for a brief overview:
http://www.plus2net.com/php_tutorial/register-globals.php

You should also become familiar with the import_request_variables command. If you have a program that is dependent on a lot of variables passed from another program (Get or Post) or from the command line, this can be a fast way to get it working again under PHP 5 (without turning register_globals back on). Please note however; if you don't use the second parameter (prefix) then you basically re-introduce the same exposures that register_globals ON has. The better way is to only import the variables you need with $_POST but that may take some re-work for existing programs.

I didn't mean to imply that I had tried all of the things that I listed. They were various suggestions / solutions that I found as I trolled the net looking for similar problems.

The only thing that really worked for me was holding down the delete key when it booted. Somehow that seemed to bypass the problem and it went to a normal boot. The first time I tried it, it took a few tries before it broke the power on / off cycle. Once I got it running again, I left it running 7/24 for about a week and then I had to restart it because a few things weren't working properly. I was surprised that it restarted normally. It has been running 7/24 for about another week since that reboot and I haven't reached the point of any more experimenting yet.

I followed this thread with a post in the hardware forum because it did seem more hardware related. There was a suggestion that a common problem with the soldering of one of the pins on the NVidia chip leads to a bad response during the POST process and that is why it won't boot properly. If that is the problem, then it may be that it is only a problem when the machine is starting cold. This is the most logical explanation that I have for the sequence of events that I encountered so far. I don't know what the Delete key does to …

If your system has register_globals turned off in php.ini (the default in R5), then it doesn't look as if your code is dealing with it (e.g. if ($form == "sent").

It may not be related but on line 14 it seems that you would want it to say:
if ($form == "sent" ...

You may have Register Globals on in your local system and off on the server. This could cause you problems. Use phpinfo to find out what the setting is on the server.

If this is not a problem, then it may be difficult to help without more detail (and even then ...). If your web host support is any good, they may be able to help.

Activating the mail function from a local system so it acts like an internet mail server isn't something that is normally done. You can test sending mail from the local system without any fancy setup. I use a mail class called libmail and it dumps the output for you. If you want to test incoming mail, the easiest way is to use a server that already has the mail function working.

If you really want to connect locally as a mail server, then this post may help. You probably need to get a package called Mercury but from the little that I read about it, it isn't for newbies.

Excellent point! I hadn't checked that but when I did I found that the value was 2 megs (larger than any of the files I was trying).

I tried running this from the server instead of from my local machine. I got that to work successfully. What confused it for a while was that my regular FTP program (BlazeFTP) was mangling some of my test files that I was uploading to the server.

So I don`t know why it wasn`t working from the local machine. Unless someone has something else that I can check, I will consider this solved and live with the limitation.

In a nutshell: I have a module that is using the php ftp commands for download and upload. The download works fine and the upload worked fine for a small text file. As I started using larger files, the upload completed without error but it only copied a small part of the file then stopped. I tried this for a 1k gif file and I was able to display the resulting file but it only had the first few lines of the original file.

In case it matters, I am running this from my local Windows machine accessing an internet server for both the download and the upload.

I have fairly large timeouts for the module and on the ftp_connect. I have tried it with and without passive mode and as ASCII and BINARY.

Any suggestions?

Here is the latest update.

I left the system running for about a week. All the power saving options were turned off so overnight, it ran with the screen saver on. This morning, the screen-saver crashed and left me with a blank screen except for the Windows bar at the bottom. Finally time to re-boot.

I shut the system down and then I pushed the power button to turn it on. It booted normally. The only mitigating factor that I can think of is that everything was still hot so if there is a connection problem on the motherboard, maybe it is only a problem when everything has cooled down.

You can generate buttons online with Cool Text. They don't look bad and might meet your needs.
http://cooltext.com/Buttons

You haven't used standard single or double quotes around the phrase (“This is a PHP line”; ) If you replace the quotes with standard ones (Vertical not angled) you won't have an error.

If you use your own button to go to the page (by address) you shouldn't have the problem. On the other hand, if you wanted to go back with values you previously entered populated into a form, then the second page will need a form with your submit button and some hidden variables to pass back the values (with the values in the original form defined with variable names that you will set).