One of the cool features of WordPress is its shortcode feature. There may be times one wished to add this capability to your PHP web applications. Recently I found one such library which allows you to add shortcode features to your web apps. The library discussed here implements WordPress style shortcode syntax as a standalone package. Its a small package and so can be easily integrated into you existing applications. Content from editors, databases, etc. can be scanned by the Shortcode Manager and the contents replaced by a custom callback.
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libraries
Period: Time range API for php
Date/time programming is one of the tricky aspects of software development. Although inherently not complex in itself, coding date/time algorithms can be a subtle source of bugs. Especially in web development a feature such as payment subscription processing that ranges from days to weeks to months can get complex quickly. Also such kind of scenarios require additional features like auto renewal, scheduled email alerts to subscribers etc. Such kind of features require good date/time handling algorithms and libraries that handle such chores are always welcome.
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Easy PHP debugging with Kint
My standard debugging tool when using PHP is xdebug. Pairing xdebug with Komodo gives me a very productive environment for building PHP applications. However, testing an application code on a hosted server can be many times frustrating as one has only the print_r and var_dump functions at our disposal. What I need is a library that I can easily install on the server and start using.
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In-place editing with Twitter Bootstrap, jQuery UI
X-editable is a library which allows you to create editable elements on your page. It can be used with bootstrap, jquery-ui, jquery and jQuery and includes both popup and inline modes. This library is not supposed to be used in place of a standard form, but in places where in-place editing is required, such as data tables where quick editing is required.
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Building a self-correcting email input field
Email is one of the common input fields in any web form. Many sites use two email fields to make sure that the user has entered correct email ids. This is a common idiom in web design, and it is surprising that it has not changed over all these years. One of the interesting alternative I found is the ‘MailCheck’ JavaScript library. The library enables you to offer the user a suggestion for the domain name if he makes a mistake while entering. A demo is shown below.
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Using PhantomJS to headlessly analyze web pages
One of this year’s most interesting open source projects has been PhantomJS – a headless WebKit with JavaScript API. It has fast and native support for various web standards: DOM handling, CSS selector, JSON, Canvas, and SVG. I’ve already used it to automatically scrape data from pages and for testing. In this post we will use PhantomJS along with confess.js to analyze web page performance. confess.js currently has two main functions: to provide simple page performance profiles, and to generate a app cache manifests.
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Taking website screenshots using PhantomJS
In one of my previous posts we saw how we could take webshots of web pages using ‘wkhtmltoimage‘ toolkit. Now we have something more flexible with PhantomJS. PhantomJS is what we call a headless WebKit with JavaScript. It has fast and native support for various web standards: DOM handling, CSS selector, JSON, Canvas, and SVG. You can programmatically access web page content for scraping, monitoring or testing purposes, including webpage features that work with JavaScript, which is not possible using server side languages. For most reasons you can think of it as a browser without a window, where we drive it via JavaScript. Here we are using it to grab the webshots of web pages.
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Amazon Advertising API BrowseNodes
Amazon uses a hierarchy of nodes to organize its various items. Each node represents a collection of items, such as Harry Potter books, not the items themselves. Browse node IDs are positive integers that uniquely identify product collections, for example, Literature & Fiction: (17), Medicine: (13996), Mystery & Thrillers: (18), Nonfiction: (53), Outdoors & Nature: (290060). Amazon uses over 120,000 browse node IDs in the US locale alone.
The BrowseNodes tool automatically gets all the child BrowseNodes and their names. The program recursively traverses the BrowserNode hierarchy and returns all the BrowseNodes and their respective names. You can display the nodes on the console or save it to a CSV file. You can also include the library in your existing projects to process BrowseNodes.
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