Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with web and php

How to send phone pics to a spartan web site via Flickr?

ehamiter — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 12:16:59 -0800

What's a minimal self-hosted "blog" that hooks into Flickr's API so I can send photos from my camera directly to my web site? Ideally, I want a blog that is not a blog. I don't want tags, or articles, or categories, or spam filters, or any of that stuff. A perfect solution workflow would be this:

I take a picture with my phone
I send it to Flickr via e-mail
Flickr then posts it to my website with no interaction

The ideal layout would be a main site title, and each time I send a photo it appears as the newest one, using the title I typed. There would be maybe 10 photos on the main page. You could access earlier photos by clicking "older" or something like that which would serve as the archives.

I can do this with wordpress, movable type, typepad, etc., but they are all way too huge feature-wise and not what I want. I can also do this with blogger or tumblr, but they are not self-hosted. I tried this recently with textpattern, but the templates and general admin are much too complicated for my needs.

It should be very simple, aesthetics-wise. You could maybe change the color scheme / typography via CSS, but that's about it.

Does something like this exist? For the Flickr hook-in it needs to be a MetaWeblogAPI Enabled Blog or other Flickr-approved application.

Thanks for any suggestions.

Learning Php in New York City

chirico — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 09:20:23 -0800

I would like to learn Php & Web Development programming by taking courses in NYC. Any advice, suggestions?

Turn on, tune in, log out?

telegraph — Sun, 09 Aug 2009 12:27:55 -0800

Webdev filter: What tools can I use to avoid developing a registration/log-in feature from scratch? I'm an amateur web developer -- I took a few programming classes in college (Java), know HTML and CSS pretty well, and can get by in PHP and SQL, albeit while checking references constantly. I'm trying to build what I think should be a pretty simple web application: the nuts and bolts of it are that it should allow member registration and login/out, and while the user is logged in, s/he can input numerical data, as well as view some statistical juggling of that data.

The data entry bit I feel fairly confident that I can do using PHP/MySQL. I've written a rudimentary registration and login system (with an email confirmation message, etc), but I can tell that it needs a lot more features and even though I am mostly n00b I can think of ways it could be compromised -- if at all possible I'd prefer to just use code that is already written and known to be fairly stable.

Is there a pre-built, standard kind of thing (I don't even know what the proper word to call it is) I can use for this? I think that Ruby on Rails could be used here, but my attempts at teaching myself how to use it have been kind of futile, and I don't really need all of the version control and other features like that. I'd like to keep this really really simple, at least for now.

As you can see I'm not very experienced and don't really know the proper terms are, so let me know if I need to clarify anything. While I'd like to learn other languages in the future, my goal is to get this thing up and running so I'd prefer advice that presupposes PHP use as opposed to telling me to go learn Python (though I guess I understand if that's the only option). Thanks.

into a black hole

mwhybark — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 11:17:14 -0800

Any Cloudy Nights folks on MeFi? I am googling around in getting going with backyard astronomy and Cloudy Nights appears to be (or to have been) a decent resource, but it has been nothing but failed MySQL connections and php pathing errors since I started digging. Any info? Is it dead, Bones? I did find this older AskMe which includes a bunch of good info, btw.

http://ask.metafilter.com/13386/quality-astronomytelscope-websites

Webhost changes security settings on server and breaks Joomla

clockworkjoe — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 11:27:08 -0800

A webhost my company uses just changed the security settings and now Joomla no longer works correctly. Are these new security settings industry standard and what should I do? You can see the security settings here and the real problem seems to be that php ini.set is disabled, which Joomla needs. I don't know enough about security and coding to know what to do here. My options are to switch to a low security server, described here, try to reconfigure Joomla somehow, switch to a new CMS package or switch to a new web host.

I guess I need to understand what web hosts usually do with Joomla.

Also, my current webhost is nomonthlyfees.com which has had pretty poor tech support lately.

Which forums do the best web programmers hang out at?

jackson5 — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 16:15:45 -0800

Which forums do the best web programmers hang out at? Long story short: I've got a web site that already does over 1 million pageviews per month. I've got a great idea to take it to the next level, but I'm looking for someone who can handle the coding and technical aspects in exchange for an equity stake.

I'm wanting to bring aboard a great programmer who doesn't necessarily need the work but will be motivated by the equity.

Which forums would you recommend I post on to find this person?

Also, if there's anyone interested here, let me know.

How do I set up an e-commerce site that accepts photo uploads and takes credit card payments?

designbot — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 11:42:48 -0800

How do I set up an e-commerce site that accepts photo uploads and takes credit card payments? I've been asked to set up a website for a client who wants to custom-print an item using photos uploaded by customers. They need to accept credit card payments.

As one option, I am considering setting up a custom front-end for Shopify, but I'm not sure whether that's overkill, or whether they can accept an uploaded picture sent as part of the order information.

What's the simplest/best way to do this? My PHP/Javascript skills are rather rudimentary, but I'd like to learn more. Should I try to do something from scratch, or are there good solutions out there already?

It seems like there would be a few parts to doing this manually:

Getting the customer's order info from a form (I can handle the HTML for this)

Getting the customer's photo, making sure it's within specs, and displaying a reduced preview (I don't know the best way to do this… I assume there a image processing libraries available or something)

Processing a credit card payment (I don't know the best way to do this)

Doing something with that order data (could it be emailed to the client, or is that too insecure? would I need to set up a front end for the client to access orders stored in a database?)

Hope me, Metafilter! You're my only help.

What programming language should I use for a Digg-like web site?

jackson5 — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 11:37:41 -0800

What programming language should I use for a Digg-like web site? I'm no web developer, but I already have a high traffic picture gallery which I want to turn into a digg-like picture voting site.

I'm going to hire a developer and would like your recommendations on which programming language I should target for the site?

My site currently does about 2 million pageviews per month already, so I expect the traffic to go up. The programming language should easily handle a lot of traffic on 1 dedicated server.

I keep hearing a lot about Ruby on Rails. I'm familiar with PHP/MySQL, but not sure if that is the best programming language for this project.

I also keep hearing a lot about cloud hosting. This sounds like a good option as well.

Basically, to sum up my question: I want to post a "programmer wanted" ad for this project. What should I be looking for from a developer?

Help me be awesome in PHP/MySQL and make some user groups

isnotchicago — Fri, 01 May 2009 14:17:42 -0800

Building a comment system, and looking for good introduction to managing groups and users with PHP/MySQL, or a prerolled "user management system". Ultimately, I need to setup a system for people to register as users, join (or be assigned to) groups, make comments (that are linked to their accounts), and filter comments by criteria (e.g., only show comments by other people in the same group). But, presumably, the "user" stuff would be separate from the "comment" stuff? So...broadly speaking, I need to create users and groups, and then track what every user does.

I found PHP User Class (http://phpuserclass.com/), PHP Users (http://www.majordojo.com/php-users/), and a short Sitepoint article (http://www.sitepoint.com/article/users-php-sessions-mysql/) after some quick Google searching. Anyone have any experience with either of those scripts, or know of any others? Or, know good resources to help me brew my own?

(As for why I am not just using Wordpress or Drupal or etc.,etc.etc.:)
I am working on a site involving a huge repository of text files and the ability to comment on those files. (1) the text files already exist as individual files (versus existing in a database somewhere), and (2) comments need to be on a per-line basis (versus the file as a whole, which is how CMS's usually work). Of course, if, with this vague description, you know of something that might be useful, let me know.

Hiring a PHP programmer for a startup web design company, how much should I pay them?

dcams — Sun, 28 Dec 2008 16:30:42 -0800

Hiring a PHP programmer for a startup web design company, how much should I pay them? I'm looking to bring on one or more part-time PHP programmers who will also be doing some work with Flash and video encoding. My applicant pool is primarily college students with 2-4 years experience. As I budget for expenses and look to set prices, I have been unable to find solid numbers on the Internet for what type of wage this work merits.

Yet Another File Manager Question

larsks — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 17:07:36 -0800

Help me find an online file manager that doesn't suck! Everything I've found so far falls into two categories, either (a) sucking, a lot, or (b) requiring, for inexplicable reasons, a database backend. I just want something that will handle file uploads and basic file management (move, rename, delete, copy). The solution should not try to provide any form of authentication. This is what my web server is for! Bonus points if it has (a) actually been touched in the past few years, (b) makes good use of CSS and (c) does a good job of separating logic and presentation in the code, because this makes my life much easier if I need to change something. I am reasonably language neutral -- in no particular order, Python, Perl, and PHP are preferable, because those are already installed on the target system and I'd like to avoid introducing any additional requirements.

I am trying to avoid getting a number of non-technical people to install WinSCP, since, among other things, this means I wouldn't be able to take advantage of our web single sign-on infrastructure. I would also like to provide people access that does not first require software installation.

Make my urls purty!

drjimmy11 — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 16:01:08 -0800

What's the best way for me to create human-readable urls for a Wordpress site? So I've taken a job converting a very static site to one that will use Wordpress as a CMS. A couple of key points up front:

1) We are 100% committed to using Wordpress. Thanks for respecting this.
2) I will NOT be making use of any wordpress theme or allowing users to go to any Wordpress pages at all. We are using it as a CMS on the backend, and on the frontend I will write custom php pages and queries to display what i want to display.

The site as it stands now has 1000s of articles in totally flat html pages. We want to get away from that for obvious reasons. My inclination is to create one page to use over and over again, so where the old url would've been like:

www.thesite.net/article_name.html

the new url would look like:

www.thesite.net/article.php?id=124

two issues with this:
1) the site is quite popular, so a lot of people have probably bookmarked old articles and I dont want those links to die when we remove all the flat html pages.

2) I would prefer people to see human-readable urls rather than ugly querystrings.

My first instinct would be to create a big redirect file (301), sending every old article url to the new format. This addresses point one but not point two, since after the redirect the user would still see the ugly url, right? (if not, please enlighten me!)

My other thought is to use the "ugly" article.php as an include inside a wrapper, so create "article_name.php" which contains nothing but a variable for the article id and a copy of the include which takes in that variable. problems with this are a) we still clutter up our server with 1000s of files, and b) I have non-tech people messing with code and ftp, which i'd rather not.

So, what is the solution? How does mefi get those awesome clean urls like "http://ask.metafilter.com/107722/Batch-Adding-Text-File-Name-to-JPEG-Images"?

I'm guessing "107722" and "Batch-Adding-Text-File-Name-to-JPEG-Images" are some sort of aliases and not literal folders on the server. Is this something automated that is beyond the power of Wordpress? I hope not.

thanks!

How can I study the server load/impact impact of my PHP scripts in a shared hosting environment?

jorlando — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 09:35:39 -0800

How can I study the server load/impact of my PHP scripts in a shared hosting environment? The hosting company isn't very helpful. I want to be proactive and not wait for a call that my scripts are causing trouble. Also want a website that isn't slow and unresponsive. The server is Apache2 w/PHP5

I'd like to learn in general terms about it but the specific case I have is as follows:

I'm building a website that does a lot of thumbnailing using phpthumb(). I send an AJAX request to the server to generate thumbnails and return a list of SRC tags. This puts a certain load to the server. phpthumb() caches the thumbnail so the load happens only once

I want to also have PHP look up and return the dimensions of the original image using getImageSize. This is additional load and caching wouldn't happen. If I do the lookup 100 times/second would it overwhelm the server?

Is it something I should be concerned about? I have no idea about how my scripts might affect the server. The site gets about 15k hits per day and is growing.

Thanks

CSS, JQuery, PHP and Caching: Best practices?

odinsdream — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 09:29:50 -0800

CSS, JQuery, PHP and Caching: What are the best practices for creating dynamic CSS with JQuery and PHP? Examples inside. I'm using PHP to dynamically create links and their associated CSS. I'm doing it dynamically because the number and positioning of these links is dependent on the selected month.

PHP inserts these CSS declarations into the HEAD tag. This seems to work fine on Firefox, but IE apparently caches the HEAD tag. This is a problem when navigating to pages for other months since the number of days will change.

Since I'm also using JQuery for the first time in this project, I wonder if I wouldn't be better off setting the CSS with that, rather than with PHP. The problem with this would be that I'm now mixing math and functions between the PHP sections of the site and the javascript sections. Is there a better way?

An example can be seen here. Source code for the same is available here.

The hover links over each day in each graph are created with a PHP loop based on the number of days in the month. The CSS to position them properly above each day is also created with a PHP loop.

The problem arises if a user selects an old month with a different number of days. Since IE caches the head tag the user only sees 20 day hover links, rather than 30 or 31.

Online documentation, tutorials or book references are very much welcome. Also, if I'm just completely going in the wrong direction please let me know.

Live AIS data is a web browser

kaozity — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 10:55:58 -0800

Hi, Another oddball question... I have a live data stream of AIS data and I would like to take the data and ultimately display it on a world map through a web browser. The problem is that I have no clue as to how I would display live updated information on a map. I would like the map to update as the stream of data is coming in. This might be an ambitious project for someone who is weak on web programming, but i figured it would be worth looking into.

Drupal: How to automatically group users?

l33tpolicywonk — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 15:36:20 -0800

Drupal: How do I automatically assign users into groups when they register? Is this something I can do with Organic Groups? Profile tags? A different module? Background: I'm using Drupal to build an online course in which each student is assigned an instructor. I want to assign each student an instructor automatically and I want it done so that each instructor has roughly the same number of students (that is, not randomly). The instructor needs an easy way to read comments made only by his students. Is this something I can do with the Organic Groups module? Something I can do with Views? Something I can do with profile tags?

Google-fu for modules has failed me and nothing's happening in my question on Drupal's forums. Come to the rescue, AskMe!

Spiffy PHP file upload script?

kryptondog — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 11:21:19 -0800

I'm in need of a spiffy PHP file upload script. For great justice. The print shop I work at is in the process of moving away from our current (dinky, suffocatingly restrictive) web host. I was charged with the task of finding a new host, creating a new site design, getting everything transferred, etc. I'm still in media res but things are moving pretty smoothly.

One of the most important parts of our old site was our file transfer system that allowed customers to upload their art to us. The old script was garbage and I'd very much like to offer our customers something nicer. I could probably call upon my fading PHP-fu to cobble something together, but before I resort to that I thought I'd ask the Hive Mind if it knew of (or better yet) had any experience with a PHP-based file upload script that would satisfy me needs. Here's what I had in mind:

- It's gotta be account-based, not just a pool of files. I'd prefer it if people could sign up for an account themselves, but it's fine if it can only be done by an administrator.
- On that subject, a decent user and administration control panel.
- It'd be nice if it used AJAX to refresh the FTP connection to the site while the file uploads. Our old file uploader had a nasty habit of timing out in the middle of customers sending huge files, which is (needless to say) pretty bad. Also, some kind of progress bar (possibly with "time remaining") would be a huge plus for our more impatient customers.
- Multiple file upload inputs on one page would be awesome.
- Email notifications of some kind would also be awesome.
- Our ultimate goal is to make the file uploader part of a group of services that we offer our customers online, so it would be highly beneficial if the script was made in such a way that it could easily (and legally) be extended upon.
- Free would be nice, but we'd have no problem paying for a quality product.

I know that it's easy to just sit on my butt and make a wish list of features that I want for this thing, but maybe you've come across something that comes close to matching what I need. I'm aware that there's a lot of services similar to what I need that host the data on their servers, but I really need this to be self-contained on my companies website (however, if you've had positive experiences with one of the aforementioned services please share that too). Thanks in advance.

CodeFilter:

kjl291 — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 15:09:41 -0800

CodeFilter: I am looking for online classes mainly in the area of web programming (PHP, MySQL, AJAX, etc.). I need to brush up on my self taught skills. I am looking for something on the level of an actual coures, with assignments, deadlines, etc. (I don't necessarily like those things, but find I learn much better that way than self-paced from a book). Free or paid service is fine - I am mainly concerned with quality. I sort of like the courses and organization offered by eclasses.org, but I have no idea if they are good and credible? Any recommendations would be very much appreciated

Run multiple php websites from a single server?

zingzangzung — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 11:04:41 -0800

How practical is it to run multiple php websites on multiple servers from a single script on one central server? I wrote a script which is now being used on a few websites, and it has been suggested that to make updates simpler we run it from a central server ie each website will use the script from one source to actually run. While on the surface this seems like A Very Good Ideas, I am sure there are issues which might make it a very bad idea. Can you convince me one way or the other.

Apache2, mod_php, suexec security confusion.

odinsdream — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 06:58:46 -0800

Apache2 security theory; mod_php versus CGI php and the use of suExec: What is the non-theoretical problem with running Apache2 with mod_php and thus without using suexec on a dedicated system? I'm setting up a typical LAMP environment. I've used phpsecinfo to evaluate my current environment and implemented all of the recommended changes except for two, Group ID and User ID.

The distribution is the most recent Ubuntu Server with the mostly-default Apache2 configuration, and the mostly-default PHP installation, with the exception of the changes recommended by phpsecinfo.

These warnings indicate that my group and user ID numbers are below 100 (33 to be specific), and therefore may be a problem. I am not sure how to interpret this.

I followed the documentation links and was about to implement SuExec when I realized that this meant doing a lot of other reconfiguration, like not using mod_php, and that meant changing a lot of other things, etc.

This is not a shared system. It will only be used to host one company's applications through several virtual hosts. The applications will be PHP-based, and most frequently will use the Symfony framework. Apache currently runs as www-data, whose shell is /bin/false. SSH access to the system is by public-key authentication only and is further restricted at the daemon level to only specific real users.

What do I need to do to run this securely? Resources, guides and real-world examples would be greatly appreciated.

wordpress template is screwed up

clockworkjoe — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 11:47:28 -0800

Wordpress/web design problem-my custom template is screwed up and I can't figure out how to fix it. Please help. I just started a wordpress site for my blog. I created a custom template for the page. However, while the code is right, the design is screwed up. The sidebar is at the bottom instead of being at the side. You can see it at raillery.tv/blog

What am I doing wrong?

You can see the code here http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=2718078&pagenumber=26#post344233403

A little bigger than a thumbnail

tmcw — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 13:36:38 -0800

Resizing & storing many images on a webserver: limits, options, etc? I'm working on a web app that currently follows the following method for image uploads:

1. upload via PHP
2. generate new unique name for the file & its thumbnails
3. generate thumbnails via GD2
4. save image files all in one directory.

My concerns are basically that this might need to be scalable and flat directories, GD2, and 128MB of VPS memory just don't sound convincing in that respect. I'm wondering if there's a smarter option that I'm missing. I was earlier considering storage in S3 and doing thumbnails in EC2 - anyone have experience doing this? I'm really wondering about how difficult it is to use EC2, since it appears to be optimized for big, big scenarios.

Will A3 essentially serve these static files? Also, does anyone have knowledge about GD2 vs. Imagemagick vs. any other library that might optimize for memory?

Thanks for any help!

phpList: seriously, wtf?

drjimmy11 — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 19:27:59 -0800

phpList: seriously, wtf? I develop a website for a non-profit, and they requested I set up phpList on the server so they can send out newsletters.

Everything went ok (eventually), I can now send emails and recipients will get them. Eventually.

I sent a bunch of emails as tests on Sat., copying them to both my gmail and yahoo accounts. phpList's queue shows that it sends them within a second.

However, I don't receive them to my email accounts until, at a minimum, a few hours later. Some of them were still showing up this morning, 2 days later!

I am a pro. web developer, but don't know that much about email servers and such. Have other people had this experience with phpList? Do yahoo and gmail give delivering these emails a low priority or what? And where exactly are they for the two days between phpList "sending" them and them showing up in my inbox?

I am a bit worried that my client might want to send newsletters with time-sensitive info. A few hours is ok, but two days is ridiculous.

Any ideas or alternatives?
thanks!

Retaining form data when going back and still using PHP sessions.

odinsdream — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 05:36:34 -0800

When I altered a PHP web form to take advantage of PHP Sessions, I lost the ability to go back a page while retaining data in the form. Is this the expected behaviour, or is it caused by something else? There are two pages, newentry.php and processentry.php. The first page contains an HTML form whose action is the second page.

The second page does some error checking and alerts the user to go back if something is not correct. I have attempted both javascript:history.back, history.go(-1), and direct links to newentry.php. Before I added Session support, going back to the form returned you to a page with the data still filled in.

Since I added sessions, going back takes you to a blank copy of the form. Is this normal? Is there some other cause I should investigate?

What is the best way to handle this sort of thing? Should I not rely on the first behaviour at all?

Help me AJAXify a portion of my project without overwhelming me.

odinsdream — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 08:41:58 -0800

Help me AJAX-ify a very simple web process in PHP. Links to very simple AJAX tutorials much appreciated. I've been reading up on AJAX technologies for a couple weeks. I've tried out a few, but I am still stuck with taking existing tutorials and modifying them slightly without really understanding behind-the-scenes. That is, I understand conceptually what the tutorials are showing me, but not very much programmatically. I'm fairly capable with PHP and HTML. I can read and write basic Javascript, but it seems like the AJAX technologies require a deeper level of understanding.

Having said that, all I'm really looking to do is rewrite a very simple portion of my project. Hopefully taking this small step will help me better understand what AJAX can really help me do long-term.

I have one PHP script, delete.php, which does an UPDATE SQL statement setting Deleted = True for a given ID, passed via HTML GET from other pages.

This seems like the perfect thing to AJAXify, but all of the tutorials I can find jump straight into Google Mashups, SOAP, JSON, XML, etc. I don't need these yet. What are some very basic tutorials that would help me replace my delete.php script with something more efficient?