Category: Web Development

By gravitationalfx.com

WordPress makes the experience of keeping plugins and the core installation an easy job and that goes a long way to making it one of the most popular Content Management Systems.

From the Admin Dashboard you can see how many updates there are and are given links to upgrade automatically.

WordPress 3.x even introduced the ability to upgrade everything all at the same time.

For most installations, this is all a seamless single-click operation.

So, why do some people get an additional form pop up asking for their ftp account details?

And more importantly, how do you make it go away – forever!

Here’s an explanation of why WordPress asks for this information and what you can do minimise or even stop typing your details in each time you perform an upgrade.

Or you can just jump to the quick fix and see if it works for you. Who cares how, right?

by buildinternet.com

A critical feature in web programming is the ability to seamlessly pass data from one page load to the next. It’s used most commonly when dealing with user logins, but also for passing error messages, shopping carts, etc.

Storing data across pages using PHP is done with two variables in the global scope, called $_SESSION and $_COOKIE, and although accomplishing the same end goal, the both go about it in very different ways. The purpose of this article is to give a brief look into the differences between cookies and sessions, when it’s better to use one versus the other, and the pros and cons of the two.

The difference is in how each store data. Cookies store data locally in the user’s browser, while sessions store data on the webserver.

by electrictoolbox.com

Dates and times can be stored as an integer value as a UNIX timestamp. This isn’t a particularly human readable format but can be converted in MySQL to a datetime value using the FROM_UNIXTIME function.

Dates and times as timestamps

Back when I first started using MySQL and PHP and created an ecommerce system that was used on a number of websites, I decided to store datetimes as a UNIX timestamp for whatever reason. This made it easy to use the PHP date function to format the dates but is not so useful when browsing data in the database or selecting date ranges in a query. I no longer do this and always store date times as a datetime field type now.

Converting integer timestamp to a datetime

In my old ecommerce system there was a table called “orders” with a column called “date_ordered” which was a UNIX timestamp stored as an integer. To convert this to a datetime as part of the SELECT query this needs to be done:

SELECT other fields here, FROM_UNIXTIME(date_ordered)
FROM orders
WHERE ...

The integer field will now be represented in the resultset as a datetime string in the format YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS.