Implicit Evaluation with PHP Archives: HTML
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13 March 2007
The least useful of all the HTML Controls
Don’t use the reset input control
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20 November 2006
Dynamic Image Generation in PHP
Through use of the GD libraries, it’s long been possible to write images in code with PHP. They’re unlikely to be photographic quality, but for captcha’s, counters, charts, etc, it’s unlikely that it needs to be. But this particular feature seems to be generally overlooked. PHP: Dynamic Image Generation is a nice tutorial for using […]
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30 October 2006
Fortitude Forms II: The Form Comes Around
I got an interesting bit of code started in Fortitude this weekend. To understand it, let’s start first with the usual dev-cycle of a Fortitude app:
Create a Model class
Create a Form class
Create a form handling action
Create a View/FormView file
What’s annoying while doing this is that so many fields are seemingly replicated on each step. I […]
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24 October 2006
Session Management in PHP
Session management is one of the features that sets PHP apart from other languages which happen to be used on the web. It is easy enough to understand how to use $_SESSION, but many programmers seem to learn how to use it and nothing more.
$_SESSION serves a single, useful purpose. It makes variables available across […]
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20 October 2006
An Online WYSIWYG Form Editor
Today, I was reading a highly dugg article in Smashing Magazine called List of CSS Tools. It was an interesting collection of links for design and building web applications. But one link in particular stood out: JotForm. This is the kind of designer Fortitude needs. In one of Fortitude’s predeccesors, I had built a designer […]
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20 September 2006
Difference between a post and a submission
ASP.net features, by default, a wonderful thing called a viewstate which I wrote about on Monday. However, viewstate is just one technology ASP.net uses to make development on that platform easy. Another is the postback. Postbacks aren’t really a technology at all, just a re-factoring of the general submission patter that’s been around since CGI […]
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18 September 2006
A Viewstate for PHP
One of ASP.net’s most attractive features is the viewstate. It is a convienent way to store arbitrary data in a persistent mechanism. In fact, it’s rather like PHP’s $_SESSION array.
There is, however, one difference. $_SESSION is unique to a user but is reused across pages. With only one window to your website, the two preform […]
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18 September 2006
Writing files at run time or by cron
For numerous reasons, not all content on the Internet can be dynamic. While I would personally love to see the Internet (and various Intranets) part of one gigantic library, all coded in PHP, that’s not feasible. Particularly in cases where content must be reviewed and approved before distributing it, static content leaves a nice trail […]
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29 August 2006
PHP Parsing HTML
One of the higher level items I seem to deal with frequently is HTML parsing. The primary reason that HTML gets elected as a data format over something like CSV is that it’s easy to style. CSV lacks any formatting at all. XLS is beautiful, but essentially impossible to parse without a COM friendly language, […]
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17 August 2006
Using HTML as a Template
There are roughly three ways I can think of offhand to do templating in PHP.
HTML Tags with PHP to populate values
PHP Functions to generate tags including values
Special markup to do one or more of the above
There are relatively concrete examples of each. Any new programer, and even some experienced programmers use method 1. Indications of […]