PHP

Donate buttons now live.

My idea of putting a donate button on web pages that users arrive at after coming from Google or other search engines is now online. The process wasn’t simple as there doesn’t seem to be a plugin for Movabletype to include this sort of information. The steps I took are in the extended entry.

Coppermine 1.4.2

Coppermine 1.4.2 is out now so I spent most of Thanksgiving Morning playing with it. There was a bug in the keyword search facility which I worked around and coded a method of sizing keywords depending on how many times they occur in the database ala flickr. I posted about my new search page in the forums and have posted the code for someone else to tidy up and improve as I’m not a good mysql php coppermine programmer. I’m pleased with the results though.

Mac troubles.

I went round a friends house on Tuesday night to teach them how to manage the church’s website which runs under Mambo (which I’m starting to regret installing!). Unfortunately this person only has mac’s in the house and doesn’t really know much about the technical side of a mac apart from using word, email and graphical/music packages. He wanted to install a copy of mambo onto his own mac so he could play without distrupting the live server. However mambo needs mysql, php and apache installed. Thankfully apache was already configured but php wasn’t working – it was just displaying the files as text files. However when I searched for httpd.conf it didn’t come back with any details – instead I had to open terminal, change to a directory in /etc and then vi the file – only to find it was readonly, owned by root and when I asked for the root password I was met with a blank stare. I then used netinfo (i think) to remove the asterix in the passwd file for root, changed the password, logged in, edited the httpd.conf and hey presto – php was working. Undo the root passwd setups and then onto mambo installation.
This worked ok until we got to the sql installation as although mysql was installed, we couldn’t find a frontend to configure the databases and couldn’t find anything in google…I thought Mac interfaces were meant to be really helpful and friendly? This one certainly wasn’t.

Anyway, we carried on with testing on the “live” site and discovered that we needed a way of uploading files, specifically mp3 files, to the mambo server but you can only seem to do this if you are the administrator of the server. Not much use for giving users the ability to upload certain files and pictures.
The next solution was to use ftp, so does anyone know a good, easy to use (gui), free, mac ftp client?
Alternatively anyone got any alternatives to running a cms website that allows registered users to upload files (like a blog). I might just start again with an installation of WordPress – might be easier.

Learning MT and RSS

I’m trying to work out how to include a RSS feed into an index page of one of my blogs and came across Learning Movable Type: Simple RSS Customizations. Although it has not yet provided me with an answer, it has provided me with some more reading to do on other rss matters.
rssparsers might be handy for doing work outside of MT but the best source I found so far was mt-rssfeed plugin but I have not got that working yet. But it’s late and I need to go to bed so I will try again another night.

Custom 404 page edited.

Its taken me all weekend, but I have now edited my 404 page. I’m not that slow a coder – the time has included a very slow download and reinstallation of Foxserv after I broke my apache’s httpd.conf file when fiddling with it to get a custom 404 page on the laptop installation that I am testing with.
Now my 404 page does not send me a notification email if someone is using a hacking script to scan for formmail and ends up at my 404 page. Its been quite a good exercise in coding as I’ve used server variables to obtain the requested web page and the refererring page, Regular expressions to check that its not some variant of formmail and a couple of if statements to do the logic. This is the best way to learn php with a (small) project to do something useful on the website.