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NETTUTS.com: 5 Amazing New WordPress 2.7 Features

Mon, 08 Dec 2008 12:01:22 -0600

The NETTUTS.com site has pointed out five new features of the latest WordPress release (2.7) that come bundled in by default.

Wordpress 2.7 is to be publically released in the next week, and a whole bunch of features have been packed in, looking past the obvious such as the new redesign. The new dashboard, Screen options, Plugins, Themes and Core upgrades and the media library!

Here's the list of five:

New Commenting system
New Dashboard Features
Screen Options
Plugin Interface
Media Library
Posts Management

They detail each with subheadings and screenshots of the new improvements in action.

Developer Tutorials Blog: Easy Screen Scraping in PHP with the Simple HTML DOM Library

Wed, 06 Aug 2008 08:40:15 -0500

On the Developer Tutorials blog today Akash Mehta looks at screen scraping using a simple DOM library to help make it easy.

In PHP, regular expressions tend to get rather messy, DOM calls can be confusing and verbose, and often the string functions just aren't enough. In this tutorial, I'll show you how to use the middle ground - the open source PHP Simple HTML DOM Parser library, which provides jQuery-grade awesomeness for easy screen scraping without messy regular expressions.

In his examples he shows how to grab the contents of a page (google.com), find and replace information in the HTML and perform a query on the data (like finding each of the news stories out of the front page of slashdot.org).

Zend Developer Zone: PHP Abstract Episode 22: Screen Scraping

Thu, 18 Oct 2007 18:49:36 -0500

The Zend Developer Zone has posted the latest episode of their PHP Abstract podcast series with a focus this time on screen scraping (as recorded by Matthew Turland).

Matt has been building PHP applications since 2002. He joined the ranks of PHP-Oracle developers in 2006 when he became a programmer for METHODS Technology Solutions. He contributes to open source projects such as the Zend and Forkr frameworks. [...] We are going to veer off the beaten path today as Matthew talks to us about Screen Scraping.

You can download the mp3 directly or you can to get this and the most recent episodes.

DevShed: Working with CSS Styles and the Stage Pattern in PHP 5

Wed, 25 Apr 2007 13:03:00 -0500

In the second part of their look at the Stage design pattern today, DevShed moves up from the previous article to implement a more "real world" example of the Stage pattern in action.

Essentially, what I plan to demonstrate here is how this pattern can be used to build different versions of a given web document on the fly, either for display on a typical computer monitor, or for printing.

This involves the creation of a class to define the styles for both sides - print and screen - and a class that will figure out which of these needs to be applied.

Pierre-Alain Joye's Blog: Screen capture with PHP and GD

Wed, 18 Apr 2007 07:53:00 -0500

In a new blog post today, Pierre-Alain Joye shows a method for doing a screen capture with just PHP and the GD functionality (an updated library, a DLL).

To get a snapshot of a HTML page, a window or a complete screen was always something tricky to do in PHP. For one of my current projects, I had to check that our changes did not affect visually any page. An easy way to achieve this goal is to compare the rendered pages in the browsers itself, easy and time consuming (for a human being :D).

That's why I finally sit down and implemented imagegrabscreen and imagegrabwindow . They capture respectively the whole screen or a window (using its handle).

He includes a few examples including grabbing a default screenshot, grabbing just the contents of a certain application (like Internet Explorer), and grabbing a fullscreened IE window too.

Zend Developer Zone: AJAX Chat Tutorial Pt 5: Javascript, Sending Chat Messages, Screen Name Changes

Wed, 27 Dec 2006 08:10:00 -0600

The Zend Developer Zone has posted the fifth part of their Ajax chat tutorial series from maugrim today, picking up from the previous parts before.

One aspect of writing AJAX enabled applications is that one can no longer pass off Javascript as an afterthought. If you're intent on creating dynamic web applications using AJAX, visual effects, and funky new age interfaces then you'll just have to start recognising that Javascript is going to be a primary development language.

They show how to create and use the XMLHttpRequest object to grab the information from the backend script using a saveMessage call from a form button. When the message comes back, their handleRefresh function takes care of updating the textarea with the results.

They also include the code to allow user's to change their name on the server via the same interface (and the same controller).

SitePoint PHP Blog: Pimpin Harry's pretty bluescreen

Fri, 11 Aug 2006 14:13:20 -0500

On the SitePoint PHP blog today, Maarten Manders talks about some updates he made to the "pretty blue screen" created originally by Harry Fuecks to handle more error types.

I modified it to handle errors as well and added some features which make it useful in productive systems as well: Error logging, Error Mailing, and Configuration.

The script logs or mails unique errors only once to prevent your log file or mailbox to be spammed with the same error again and again. It also takes care of the error level including shutup operator. It's a little bit hacky but did well on our dev servers (where errors tend to happen) in the past few weeks.

The link to grab this latest version of a handy bit of functionality is here - two different files, one for the error handler and one for the exception handler. He also includes a sample code snippet of how to use it.