CodingCereal

WordPress 3 Template Tags Cheat Sheet

Jhoy Imperial — Tue, 01 May 2012 16:01:44 +0000

Quick list of wordpress template tags grouped according to functionalities

Pdf file: wodpress3-cheat-sheet.pdf

File from www.hpvorlagen24.de

Happy Labor Day in CSS3 Animation

Jhoy Imperial — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 18:07:37 +0000

Happy Labor Day Guys!

A basic CSS3 animated greetings for everyone. Just refresh the page to view the animation again.

*Please take note that this works on latest Firefox, Chrome and Safari ONLY

HTML Script

CSS Script

Reference reading: CSS3 Animations

Enjoy!

Happy coding

WordPress Theme Anatomy Model

Jhoy Imperial — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 09:34:41 +0000

The image shows the basic files and native functions needed in order to create a basic wordpress theme.

Reference : wptuts+ WordPress Cheat Sheets: Theme Anatomy Model

HTML5 and CSS3 Cheat Sheets

Jhoy Imperial — Sun, 29 Apr 2012 09:22:07 +0000

HTML 5 Cheat Sheet

The pdf file contains a summary and short description of html tags for HTML5 technology. If the tags is not in the list, they are either deprecated or is not available for HTML5.

Pdf file: html5-cheat-sheet.pdf

CSS3 Cheat Sheet

The pdf file contains css attributes and properties available for CSS3.

Pdf file: css3-cheat-sheet.pdf

Files from www.veign.com

Happy coding!

Tips on Using PHP/MySQL for Creating Blog

Kelly Marsh — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 10:32:05 +0000

A blog provides us a platform to express and share our thoughts with the rest of the world. Blogging has become easier and there are hundreds of ways to create a blog. But, behind the scenes it is the right blogging platform and technology that makes things look easier and simpler.

Before you start to create a blog, it is highly essential to chart out your expectations and compare them against the capabilities of the technology you choose to create your blog. One of the popular scripting languages that we keep hearing among bloggers is PHP/MySQL. Once you start to develop your blog, you will find the need to go beyond the basic functionalities and customize it as per your needs. Before that, here are some tips to create a PHP/MySQL powered blog.

1. Create your database:

Initially, when you start your blog, all you will need is a table that holds unique id to represent each blog post, blog title, content, date, and the IP address of the person who added the entry. As you develop your blog, you might want to change the basic table structure and add additional tables. For instance, if you want to allow people to register in your blog and post comments, then you might want to add few more tables and normalize all your database tables accordingly. For now, to have basic functionality, you just need a simple table that holds details of each of your blog entry.

To create a table, you can refer to the following code.

CREATE TABLE my_blog_tbl(‘post_id’ INTEGER PRIMARY KEY NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT, blog_title VARCHAR(500) NOT NULL, blog_content TEXT NOT NULL, datetime DATETIME NOT NULL);

2. Write your PHP code:

In this layer, you will create objects to process data fetched from the database. A typical PHP code will contain as many variables as the fields in the database table and queries to fetch the data.

A basic MySQL query to fetch the data from the database is as follows:

$blogquery = mysql_query("SELECT f_name, l_name FROM BLOG_POSTS WHERE id = " . $authorId);
$row = mysql_fetch_assoc($blogquery);
$this->author = $row["f_name"] . " " . $row["l_name"];

The next step is to get your includes.php file ready. This is the place where you actually setup your database connection and invoke your PHP code to process the data. You can establish a connection to a MySQL database as follows:

$conn = mysql_connect("hostname", "username", "password") or die("Connection to the database cannot be established.");
$db = "my_blogdb";
mysql_select_db($db, $conn) or die ("Connection to the database cannot be established.");

Next, you can retrieve data from the database as follows:

$query = my_query("SELECT * FROM blog_posts WHERE id = " . $postId . " ORDER BY postId DESC");

So finally, your includes.php will look something similar to this:

3. Display data

Now, you can move on to displaying the data fetched from the database. The first step is to include your includes.php in your index.php, so that you can invoke the functions to retrieve data from the database. If your function returns an array of rows from the database, you can display them as follows.

foreach ($blogPosts as $blogpost)
{
echo $blogpost->title . "
";
}

4. Add test data

Next, insert some test data into your database and open the index.php in your browser to see your blog posts. As the page would just display the data in a simple table format, you can customize it using CSS style sheet.

As your blog gets bigger, you will certainly experience the power of PHP/MySQL to customize your blog with ease. You still need to add styling to make your page look better, but PHP/MySQL allows you to include some of the essential functionalities like adding spam protection, comment notification emails, and display an excerpt of a post, emoticons and many more.

Key ways to use web app with PHP + MySQL

Kelly Marsh — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 20:31:47 +0000

Almost 70% of websites are built on PHP and MySQL on the Internet. While creating a web application for PHP and MySQL sites, one needs to be well prepared in advance to accommodate higher traffic and scale their website. For this, scalability codes and effective handling of traffic are the first things to be looked into while developing a website in PHP.

Some of the key ways to use web apps with PHP and MySQL are listed below:

Take stock of the performance and scalability

Performance levels on websites are judges by the speed with which the data is served to its end users by a website. Scalability refers to the quality of your web pages which is capable of handling any amount of traffic thrown in its direction. To use your web apps well, you need to look at both these aspects on a PHP and MySQL site.

Tune up your PHP site

PHP is a scripting code and recompile the code on each request. To tune up your PHP web page, you can install an opcode cache. This will simplify your work since an opcode cache will circumvent this limitation by pulling the already compiled version, thereby saving time and effort.

The popular opcode caches available are ZendServer and WinCache for the Windows platform and APC cache for the open source. Installing these opcode caches will ease your PHP tuning and increase the performance of your web pages.

Remove dynamic content from your web pages

More often than not, web applications come with pages that are generated by PHP but do not undergo any change. For instance, an FAQ page or a press release statement can be cached to reduce the number of CPU cycles for this task. To achieve this, an easy way is to pre-generate HTML pages from your PHP and then allow the HTML pages to be served directly to the end users. Another way is to make use of template forming systems such as Smarty, which can automatically capture the content into a buffer or a database and then served as a cached copy to the end user. Alternatively, you can write the code yourself.

Look into the load balancing aspect

Load balancing in PHP is a concept that uses a central point for the arrival of all requests and then distributing these request in a balanced way to various web servers. This is an important aspect to be kept in mind while creating web applications that require multiple servers. The load balancing comes in three different operational categories. These are software balancers, hardware balancers and cloud based solutions. All these have the ability to cache the data and load balance the data by random selection or through perception from health meters. There are many applications available to help you in load balancing of data on the PHP platform.

Use Master-Slave Replication of MySQL

Once the Web server set up is adequately scaled, the next thing to expect in most Web applications is the huge database present on MySQL. This creates a traffic jam of data and it is better to be prepared for such a scenario. This bottle neck can be prevented by using a built-in solution on MySQL known as master-slave replication. You can then set up one more MySQL server that obeys all the orders from the master server and simplifies the handling of large amounts of data. All changes should be made on the master server for the changes to be accepted.

These are some of the ways to make use of web applications in a proper way on the PHP and MySQL platforms. There are many more such tips and tricks as every application requires a different treatment in PHP and MySQL. Following these simple rules will definitely ease your working and allow a smooth work flow of your innovative Web apps on the PHP web pages.

Facebook to Implement Timeline Layout on Pages

Jhoy Imperial — Fri, 02 Mar 2012 21:56:14 +0000

On March 30, 2012, all Facebook Pages will get a new design. Preview your page now to see what it looks like and try out the new features.

It’ll be fun.

Site Update: CDN Setup for CodingCereal & MorningCodes

Jhoy Imperial — Fri, 02 Mar 2012 21:10:04 +0000

Just finished setting-up cdn resources for uploaded and theme files for this site and morningcodes.com. Will check logs later if there is any improvement in the loading performance of the sites.

Also deactivated syntax highlighter plugin as it loads tons of js and css files.

2012 Merry Christmas

Jhoy Imperial — Mon, 26 Dec 2011 07:58:26 +0000

May you have the merriest christmas ever!