Torkil Johnsen » PHP

Facebook API tutorial with PHP SDK

tj — Mon, 06 Dec 2010 21:37:47 +0000

Joey Rivera wrote a nice tutorial where he demonstrates how to use the Facebook PHP SDK to interact with Facebook’s Graph API. He presents a few simple examples where he starts out by creating a Facebook Application, and then goes on to both read and add photos and a status message. It’s a short and sweet tutorial, and really easy to get into.
Read more at joeyrivera.com

Installing Phing on MAMP (Mac OSX)

tj — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 09:54:38 +0000

Just bumped into Phing, and thought I’d share my experiences. Installing Phing is easy enough. Phing is a build system in the shape of a PHP Pear package, that can do many things. To quote Hans Lillelid, this could include for instance configuring, packaging, uploading and testing. Ideal for building installable Joomla zip-files, which is what I am using it for right now.

This is how I set up Phing to run on my local MAMP-based webserver. MAMP = Apache, MySQL and PHP, on a Mac, much like WAMP and LAMP for Windows and Linux respectively.

These are just very brief instructions, specifically on how I did this on my own system. A complete documentation on Phing can be found on at phing.info. You don’t actually need MAMP either, it was just what I was working with to begin with.

Open the application Terminal. You can find pear by doing a locate call: locate pear.
Currently MAMP requires you to install it into /Applications, so you should find pear (for php5) here: /Applications/MAMP/bin/php5/bin/.
Make sure MAMP is using the correct php version, by starting MAMP and checking your preferences.

1: Go to the correct folder:
cd /Applications/MAMP/bin/php5/bin/

2: Make sure pear can locate the package:
./pear channel-discover pear.phing.info

3: Install phing:
./pear install phing/phing

Phing should now be installed. Run the command “ls -al” and you should see phing in the same folder as pear.

You can now run this command:
./phing -h
This will give you an overview of the phing’s options.

From here you can for instance just run:
./phing -f /path/to/your/build.xml

MySQL connection (resource) management

tj — Fri, 18 Aug 2006 11:06:18 +0000

Just came across a good article by Jay Pipes talking about lazy loading and caching of content. A nice read with some good code examples that I thought I should share with my fellow readers.

Read Jays blog entry

Creating symlinks without shell access

tj — Wed, 09 Aug 2006 09:39:43 +0000

While testing out the WordPress plugin WP-Cache, used to cache and speed up wordpress powered websites, I came across a list of commens on the plugin creator’s website where alot of comments had questions as to how one should create a symlink that was required in the plugin installation.

Alot of us (me included) do not have shell access and are unable to execute the Unix “ln” command to make this happen. But fear not, there is an easy php-solution to this problem. The function is called … yeah you guessed it: symlink().

The function works like this:
bool symlink ( string target, string link )

HERE IS HOW you can use it to set up the required symlink in the WP-Cache installation:

1. Create a blank php-file in the root of your website. Name it createsymlink.php.

2. Paste the code below into the file and save it. Make sure you replace “/path/to/website/” with your website’s real path.

$success = symlink('/path/to/website/wp-content/plugins/wp-cache/wp-cache-phase1.php', '/path/to/website/wp-content/advanced-cache.php'); if ($success) echo "Symlink was created"; else echo "Symlink creation failed!";

3. Make sure that your wp-content folder is writeable

4. Use your webbrowser and open www.yourwebsite.com/createsymlink.php, making the code run. This should fix the symlink creation for you and the success message should be displayed on screen.

5. Delete createsymlink.php from your server.

[tags]WordPress, symlink, unix commands, php functions, caching, wp-cache[/tags]