Archive for January, 2009

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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:

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.

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Posted in PHP, Plugins, Wordpress, Your Brand

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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)

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Posted in PHP, Time Savers

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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

?>

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Posted in PHP, Time Savers

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