Tortoise IT

by Sean Barton, a freelance PHP website developer in Crewe, Cheshire

Archive for January, 2009

More ‘Your Brand’ Products Released/Updated

January 26th, 2009

I generally like to write how-tos and tutorials on this site but I feel the need to mention some of the WordPress work i have been doing with Tim Nash.

We have been working very hard over the last couple of months putting together a number of new plugins and updating some older ones.

Finally we got the major bugs ironed out and the products released last week. They are as follows:

Your Members 1.4.5 – Final planned release before YM 2.0
Your Minder 2.0
Your CAPTCHA Adverts – CAPTCHA but advert based

The following additions to Your Members were released:

Your Members Firesale

The following products are currently in closed Beta and will be shortly be released for all (in Beta):

Your Responder – Autoresponder Plugin
Your Classifieds – Classified Advertising Plugin

All of the products have had their interfaces ‘tweaked’ to allow for the reshuffle (complete change) in the recent release of WordPress 2.7 and we are always optimising the code to be both more maintainable and more efficient.

If you have not heard of ‘Your Brand’ or want to find out more then please visit www.newmedias.co.uk or drop by the forums where myself and Tim can usually be found answering questions and helping people out.

We have also written a few Free WordPress Plugins that are available! Click here to visit the Freebies page on Newmedias.

No comments »

Posted in PHP, Plugins, Wordpress, Your Brand

Tags: autoresponder Beta Bugs Classified Advertising Newmedias Tim Nash Wordpress Plugins Ym Your CAPTCHA Adverts Your Classifieds Your Members Your Responder

XLS Download from PHP Class!

January 21st, 2009

Following on from my last post on creating a proper XLS spreadsheet from PHP I have just written a small class which will do all the hard work for you if necessary.

It will handle rows and columns automatically aswell as being able to be passed an array and then generating a spreadsheet download for you.

Download: XLS from PHP Example Class (783 bytes)

Sample usage is as follows:

	//Require the file
	require_once (SHARED_CLASSES_DIR . 'xls.class.php');

	//Instantiate the class.
	$xls = new xls(); 

	//Just build an example array out of test data
	$array = array(
		array(1,2,3,4,'five')
		, array('five','test' ,4,3, 0)
	);

	//Triggers the download using the passed array
	$xls->download_from_array($array);

Note that when instantiating the class you can pass a string as an argument and it will set the name of the XLS download. No need to add .xls to the end because it will do that for you.

Download: XLS from PHP Example Class (783 bytes)

5 comments »

Posted in PHP, Time Savers

Tags: PHP PHP XLS Class Spreadsheet Download XLS

Creating a Downloadable Spreadsheet from PHP

January 16th, 2009

I have written several systems that show data on a page but also provide a CSV download file either through a textarea with formatted data inside to copy and paste or via a download link and creates a file on the fly.

I recently decided that this wasn’t the best way to do it seeing as the people will want to be using Microsoft Excel to view the data. It is possible to write a spreadsheet using PHP and using an example from AppServ I started to do it this way.

The original link is included above but here is my simplified version with smaller more understandable function naming:

Download the example script here: XLS from PHP Example (723 bytes)

<?php

function xls_BOF() {
	echo pack("ssssss", 0x809, 0x8, 0x0, 0x10, 0x0, 0x0);
}

function xls_EOF() {
	echo pack("ss", 0x0A, 0x00);
}

function xls_write_cell($row, $col, $value='') {
	if (is_numeric($value)) {
		echo pack("sssss", 0x203, 14, $row, $col, 0x0);
		$value = pack("d", $value);
	} else {
		$l = strlen($value);
		echo pack("ssssss", 0x204, 8 + $l, $row, $col, 0x0, $l);
	}

	echo $value;
}

// Send Headers to set the Filename and force a download of the contents of the script
header("Pragma: public");
header("Expires: 0");
header("Cache-Control: must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0");
header("Content-Type: application/force-download");
header("Content-Type: application/octet-stream");
header("Content-Type: application/download");

 // Put the filename in \"'s if you want it to include spaces
header("Content-Disposition: attachment;filename=" . $filename . ".xls");
header("Content-Transfer-Encoding: binary ");

xlsBOF(); //Start the Spreadsheet

xls_write_cell(0, 1, 'Column 1');
xls_write_cell(0, 2, 'Column 2');
xls_write_cell(0, 3, 'Column 3');

$row = 1;
for ($i=0; $i<2; $i++) {
	xls_write_cell($row, 0, 'Row ' . $row . ' Column ' . $i);
	xls_write_cell($row, 1, 'Row ' . $row . ' Column ' . $i);
	xls_write_cell($row, 2, 'Row ' . $row . ' Column ' . $i);

	$row++;
}

xlsEOF(); //End the Spreadsheet

exit(); //Exit the script after download

?>

No comments »

Posted in PHP, Time Savers

Tags: Downloadable Spreadsheet Microsoft Excel PHP

Clickbank Payment Processor Integration

January 15th, 2009

Clickbank is an payment processor that doesnt seem to have any documentation or working complex examples. However, and this is a big however, they take payments on their site from a single url (ie no form need be posted to their site) and even better it handles the entire affiliate click through arrangements for your products. They seem to have a monopoly on this particular area so have no need to upgrade their systems to fall more inline with other processors (like Paypal for example).

I shall start from the beginning with the initial steps. Let us assume that we have a clickbank account for the time being…

The first step is to log into your clickbank admin account and set up your products with the price, name and, something else they require, a thankyou page.

Note that for the first product you sell with clickbank there is a $50 fee for the priviledge of having it activated. I have no idea whether you get this back or not.

So set up your product, get it activated and keep note of the Product ID…

As previously mentionned, Clickbank takes money for you when you send your clients to a specific payment page on a url which is formed in the following way:

http://[product_id].[clickbank_user_name].pay.clickbank.net

Where the parts in square brackets must be replaced with the appropriate information.

That is essentially it…. you create the product, generate the url, put it on your site and start collecting money.

But what if you want to do something useful with the payment like provide a service of some sort or systematically keep a record of transactions on your own server?

For this you need to enable the IPN (Instant Payment Notification) service which requires ticking a couple of boxes to prove you aren’t an idiot (which, if doing this type of integration, you most likely won’t be). You also need to give it the url to ‘Call Back’ to (The url of the script that will be dealing with the data collected during the transaction).

Once IPN has been enabled you can write a script to receive the data sent by Clickbank on each payment. This basically needs to do three things:

Verify that the request is valid
Send back a 200 OK response code
Do anything you like with the data

The first part is fully documented on their site, carefully hidden but fully documented with examples in various languages. It basically consists of taking the first 8 characters from a sha1 encoded string built up of the concatenated variables sent via POST with your ‘Secret Key’ on the end. When compared to the verify code they send you in the same POST request you can see whether the request is genuine or not.

See the ‘You might also be interested in’ section at the bottom of this post for a code example and links to official documentation

This is the first time that I have mentioned the secret key but it is just that, a key which you set up in the Clickbank admin system that you also put in your script but NOT tell anyone else.

Once you have verified the request is a genuine one then you can move onto the part that does something to your site/database.

The data that it sends you says:

Type of transaction it is (SALE, BILL, REFUND, TEST…)
Product sold
Time and date of sale (in a useful unix timestamp)
Who purchased it (name and email)
Product ID

This is useful for basic systems that simply log a sale so with this data you should be able to email yourself to send a book or get it to activate an account etc..

I needed a bit more information than this though so needed to use another variable it sends through called ‘cvendthru’. What cvendthru does is gives you a list of the extra arguments which were given against the sell url (example above but with ‘/?myvariable=test’ or something useful at the end).

This makes life alot easier when updating records and storing more information because it can contain anything at all in a string which looks like ‘var1=1&var2=2&var3=3&var4=…’. You can use your script to ‘explode’ this into an array and use the variables contained within. It did take me a few attempts to work out how to do this as Google seems to have few results with cvendthru in the name.

My Forum

January 11th, 2009

I have been getting the odd comment about various posts of mine and each one has lead to an off site conversation about the comment. I decided to install a forum on this site so if ever anyone decides to ask me anything then they can do without any problems.

I have used Simplepress Forum as it installs like a plugin unlike BBPress which is separate and is a pain to integrate.

Feel free to ask me anything, I get a few emails about Google Map API and Geocoding. If you prefer not to speak on a public forum then my email address is barton.sean@gmail.com

Update: Binned it because I decided SimplePress was rubbish

No comments »

Posted in News

SB Child List Plugin

January 11th, 2009

I have been working on my boat site for a short while now and want to show some sort of heirarchy in the pages. I have decided to call one of my pages ‘articles’ and have my articles use it as their parent.

Logically you would expect to see a list of the child pages on the articles page along with a pretty picture and some intro text. This doesn’t seem possible natively with wordpress so I decided to make it happen.

Adding the hook to any page will by default show an unordered list showing the children and links to them. If you prefer to style it yourself then don’t worry because you can do that too using the templating system on the settings page.

There is also add another tag, , that allows you to provide a back to parent link from any child. This enables you (in the articles example) to add a “click here to read more on this subject” link. It is also template based so it can say anything or look however you see fit.

Download it here: Download Page

11 comments »

Posted in Plugins, Wordpress

Tags: Wordpress

User Account Control in Windows Vista

January 5th, 2009

Are you running Windows Vista? Does your screen constantly ask you if you ‘really’ want to do things because they may pose a security risk?

What you have there is called ‘User Account Control’ and not only does it interfere with the more seasoned users’ ‘Windows Experience’ but it will make the lower end computer slow to a crawl.

Are you sure you Reeeeeealy want to do that?

It’s incredibly easy to turn off and I was going to write a step by step as a how to but obviously someone else got there first! They detail four ways to do it:

MSCONFIG
Registry Editor
Group Policy (gpedit)
Control Panel

I used option 4, the control panel method. This is more preferable for me because I prefer for Windows to adjust it’s own behind the scenes files and even more of an obvious option if they provide a nice interface to do it with!

The site is: http://www.petri.co.il however I have copied option 4 in to make it easier for you:

Open Control Panel
Click on one of the user accounts
Click on the “Go to the main User Account page” link
Click on the “Change security settings” link
Under “Turn on User Account Control (UAC) to make your computer more secure” click to unselect the “Use User Account Control (UAC) to help protect your computer” and press OK
You will be prompted to reboot your computer and once restarted it will no longer bother you

You can reverse the procedure by just re-checking the box and restarting again. I feel I should add that even though you have turned UAC itself off, you will not have turned off another small annoyance in the security bubble thing in the system tray. A small price to pay for a less irritating and slightly faster user experience.

No comments »

Posted in Windows

Tags: User Account Control Windows Experience Windows Vista

Windows XP Update Popup

January 5th, 2009

The windows update popup has lost me hours of work for the last time!

Please Restart... Please Restart... Please...

Ok.. so that may be a little over the top, maybe minutes of work but it’s still irritating losing all of the windows I have spend days opening and lovingly arranging. After the umpteenth popup of the day I thought I would Google the answer to turn off this unwanted menace.

I found a site that told me exactly the answer I was hoping for and I was popup free in under 5 minutes. The depressing thing is that it was written in 2006 and it took me nearly three years to build up the inclination to do something about it.

So here’s how to do it:

Click on the Start button and choose ‘Run.’
Type: gpedit.msc.
Expand Local Computer Policy, Computer Configuration, Administrative Templates, Windows Components, Windows Update.
Select “Re-prompt for restart with scheduled installations.”
Choose “Enable” and then type in how many minutes you want to wait.

I do feel it necessary to put a little disclaimer in here, gpedit is not something that you should really go playing with and I imagine you need to be an administrator on the machine (most home computers are set up so you are the admin) to make the change

I got this handy hint from Tech Target however you are bombarded with advertising as you enter the site. you have been warned.

Tortoise IT

Archive for January, 2009

More ‘Your Brand’ Products Released/Updated

XLS Download from PHP Class!

Creating a Downloadable Spreadsheet from PHP

Clickbank Payment Processor Integration

My Forum

SB Child List Plugin

User Account Control in Windows Vista

Windows XP Update Popup

Maurice Barton is 2 years, 2 months, and 13 days old

Beatrix Barton is 1 year, 1 month, and 3 days old