In my experience with this technique I have come across numerous problems, mainly that the form POST method will not work. After research it appears this is because the data is being redirected to a 404 error, so the information is lost. For most people this isn’t a problem, as they can use separate pages which exist to analyse the form data, however this defeats the object of keeping the single point of entry for the website.

A solution to this problem is using the RewriteEngine, we can rewrite every requested URL to the entry script.

This will effectively rewrite every request to “index.php” no matter what file it is, which obviously isn’t good if we want to be able to load images and css files into the page. A simple way to achieve this, is with some RewriteConditions.

As you can see this will check if the words images, css or js exist within the requested URI. This is great, however everytime we want to exclude a page or directory from our script we will have to add an exception to the htaccess file. Luckily apache gives us a wonderful feature to check if the file actually exists on the local filesystem.

The -f means the filename, so by checking if it exists within the requested script filename we can decide whether or not to include our base handler script. The “!” simply means “not” so if the file doesnt exist continue with the conditions, where as if it does exist, load that file instead. The next line (”-d”) means check if the directory path exists and if so, load that rather than calling the handling script.

Thats all there is to it, and now form data can be posted backwards and forwards without any issues!

One of the more common tasks in PHP is printing an array item or variable out within a string of html. There are many ways of doing this, to see a full listing, visit php.net/string. I’m going to be focusing on a few shortcuts which don’t get mentioned very much and are often taken for granted.

The first method is using curly braces:

Alternatives to this would be to use string concatenation such as below:

However, this method does involve a whole extra 2 characters to type! but it provides memory benefits over parsing the variables directly in the string.

A quick way for just printing a variable in an HTML segment is to use the = operator after the php open tags followed by the variable and then close the tags again. For example:

Another alternative is using echo’s multiple parameters which is slightly faster than string concatenation. When passing parameters to echo a ‘,’ can be used to separate the variables and strings, and the echo function will display it as if it had been created any other way.

As PHP has such a vast library of built in functions, you can never know if something exists for what you want, or if you have to make it yourself. I stumbled across a few which I never would have though existed.

1. get_meta_tags($file)

This function basically retrieves an array of all of the meta tags within the included file. I came across this when looking into how to extract some custom meta data from a template system.

2. file_exists($file)

File_exists is a more common function, however its still valuable and can be overlooked if your creating a system demanding a lot of external resources.

3. get_defined_vars()

If you have ever written such a large script that you cant remember what is declared where, a useful function is get_defined_vars. It will output all of the currently defined and accessible variables in a multi-dimensional array.

That’s it for Part 1, hopefully you have found something useful out of that, I’m hoping Part 2 might cover some more complex PHP ideas, if you have any requests please feel free to leave a comment!

The problem I later found out was hiding in plain site, I had completely over looked a table which was left in the select from part of the query which wasn’t called anywhere.

I was amazed afterwards that leaving a table in there by accident would cause such a massive slow down, the execution time went from 2.02s to 0.06s. However on reflection I assume MySQL is pulling all the info from the specified table and as it contained a lot of rows I imagine added a fairly large overhead on the database. My original query looked similar to:

As can be seen from this, table4 is not called anywhere in the statement, causing all sorts of havoc. So if your getting slow queries and it doesn’t make sense, be sure to check that you haven’t accidentally included an extra table!

First off, my friend over at Office Days introduced me to Windows Live Writer. I was some what skeptical at first, especially with Microsoft’s recent history of trying to force themselves into the social networking scene, however it came highly recommended, so I thought I would give it a try. The first time I tried to install it, I was prompted with a “lovely” windows live installer, giving me the options to install all sorts of crap wonderful live products. However I was only interested in blogging from an application rather than having to use a web based admin panel, so I let the installation commence. It told me it was installing the Live Writer, so I went off to get a coffee and let it get on with doing its business. To my somewhat not surprise I came back to see that it had failed to install Live Writer, a nice big red X was placed next to the item, and a link to click for more help. The link was about as useful as most Microsoft Live help, telling me to make sure I’m connected to the Internet and that I don’t have Windows Firewall blocking the application.

Being the idiot that I am, I thought why not just try to install it again? So I did, this time, I got a wonderful message during install saying “Sorry this is taking longer than expected, please bear with us“. I have to give them an A+ for courtesy, but it just makes me wonder why can’t they just provide an installer that works? Like the message said it did take a long time to do anything with the bar going backwards and forwards and eventually coming to some sort of conclusion. My idiocy had paid off, it appears to have installed fine! Thus proving at first if you don’t succeed, just try again.

Closing the installation wizard (reminds me more of Rincewind) Windows Live Writer booted up, and I was presented with another “Getting Started Wizard”, so with intrepid fingers, I clicked on through the options of providing my existing blog information, URL, username, password, the usual bits. It once again tried to do something, however this time it was much faster, and to my amazement, it had found all of my blog information (WordPress) and was all setup ready to go! A wonderful white page was shown to me, with the standard Windows Live style bars and helpers around the edge. It feels very much like Word, with spell checking, the ability to save drafts, all of the standard blogging and html buttons and shortcuts are also available. So far after writing this post, it seems to work nicely with WordPress, and hopefully I will continue to use it as a worthy alternative to blogging via the WordPress back end.