Set favicon in cross browser and more…

<link rel="shortcut icon" type="image/ico"  href="images/favicon.ico">

<link rel="shortcut icon" href="images/favicon.ico" type="image/vnd.microsoft.icon" *gt;

<!--[if IE]>
<link href="images/favicon.ico" type="image/x-icon" rel="shortcut icon" />
<![endif]-->

Usefull function for custom post type in wordpress and more

I’m gonna share someuseful function here which is really handy for custom post type. Some guys really don’t know about those functions, as i got those useful after digging some solutions for real life problem.

1. is_post_type_archive(‘POST-TYPE-NAME’), this is needed when you are checking something for post type archive/listing page like in common header/footer. we frequently use for add some js/css or some class in common places.

2. get_query_var(‘var_name’), we frequently use this to get category name, its retrieve corresponding value of given variable name. I have got this most useful when i need the slug/post_name of a post of any post type. For the last couple of month, i used below code to get last/second segment of URL of a post :

$subpath = $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'];
$tokens = explode('/', $subpath);
$scn_seg = $tokens[sizeof($tokens)-3];

But that was the extra effort to get URL segment for a post, we can do it by get_query_var(), we need to pass post type name as a parameter to this function like for ‘news’ post type we will use get_query_var(‘news’).

$news_post_slug = get_query_var('news');

So for the URL : http://example.com/news/lorem-ipsum-dolor/, we can get the post slug(post_name used in DB) by get_query_var(‘news’).

3. wp_deregister_script() sometimes we use plugins for some extra facilities like custom post type/twitter feed, plugins use wp_head() to inject its necessary js/css or others function to hook, same as for wp_footer(). wp_deregister_script() is needed when we use our own js like jquery library. So there will be 2 jquery file when using own with wp’s native 1. and sometimes for new bee, its hard to find out why js error occurred and js functions are not working …. wp_head() renders some others links also. to avoid this type of situation, we need to remove that, we can use just wp_deregister_script('jquery'); in theme’s functions.php file.

This is useful to give a condition for admin section like below, otherwise admin panel’s may create problem:

if( !is_admin()){
   wp_deregister_script('jquery');
}

Its also better to add your own library just after de-register wp’s native jquery like below :

if( !is_admin()){
	wp_deregister_script('jquery');
	wp_register_script('jquery', ("http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.3.2/jquery.min.js"), false, '1.3.2');
	wp_enqueue_script('jquery');
}

Finally its handy to remove the jQuery from your wordPress font-end/theme files, add wp_deregister_script(‘jquery’) just before wp_head() on your theme’s header.php file like below.

wp_deregister_script('jquery');
wp_head();

Will add some other WP function soon which we need frequently in development.

On page SEO tips – must follow list!

You own a online shop or have a business, you want more customer, more interaction, so SEO takes part here to be more reachable you to your audience. Now a days, without SEO, we can’t think a website. I have listed here some vital points about SEO, which you can digg more and try to apply.

Here goes the basic tips of SEO:

• king content, be sure to have unique, well written, useful content with the relevant keywords
• build quality back-links with your keywords/phrases
• need fresh, new, updated content always
• be sure to link texts with the relavant name like ‘html tags’ with the text ‘html tags’, not just ‘click here’
• keyword/text with location name like our main branch can be ‘our main branch in Dhaka’
• Always use appropriate keyword/phrase in text/links/image ‘alt’ tag
• ‘Spiders can crawl text, not Flash or images’, so whenever you design website think about SEO issues also.
• Links from .edu domains are given nice weight by the search engines. search for possible non-profit .edu sites that are looking for sponsors
• Use RSS feed with proper title and description.
• Use the words “image” or “picture” in your photo ALT descriptions and captions. lot of searches are for a keyword plus one of those words.
• Check server headers. Search for “check server header” to find free online tools for this. You want to be sure your URLs report a “200 OK” status or “301 Moved Permanently ” for redirects. If the status shows anything else, check to be sure your URLs are set up properly and used consistently throughout your site.

More list is coming soon………

Show user login form in sidebar/template in wordpress

Recently, i was looking for a solution to show a simple user login form in site sidebar, googled but it referred for using plugin like sidebar-login. Suddenly i got wordpress have already its native function to use for login form.

wp_login_form() allows to add the form in any place you wish. some parameters exist there to control the form attributes. i can just put your attention to the following :

• ‘redirect‘ — where to redirect after login
• ‘remember‘ — whether to remember the values.

Let us see an example:

if (is_user_logged_in()) {
   echo 'Hello, ', $user_login, '. <a href="', wp_logout_url(), '" title="Logout">Logout</a>';
} else {
   wp_login_form();
}

here, we just checked for logged in user to show different message.
If you want you can customize the look of the form by defining extra css putting it within a div as following screen.

So instead of using a plugin with extra feature,using native function is as easy as better!

WordPress ‘Featured Image’, how to use…

WordPress stands for most common and popular CMS now a days. Sometimes we need just a media field for a image to be added in a post. WordPress latest 3+ version has this facility, so you don’t need to use any ‘custom field type’.

In default theme, this feature enabled by default, but when you are using a custom made theme or a theme of your choice which you downloaded, but not supported ‘featured Image’ section, then what to do.

Its very simple for wp developer to add that support to your theme. Add below code to your theme’s functions.php file :

add_theme_support('post-thumbnails');

Now you will see that section in your admin sidebar when adding/editing any page/post. And also you will find option at your ‘Screen Options’ section as below, so from there you can enable/disable that for future need.

In right sidebar, ‘Featured Image’ section after adding a image:

Now, You knew how to add theme support and how to add an image on admin panel. So to show this image on front-end, in any single post/page or in any loop, just add below code to show it between wp post loop:

<?php the_post_thumbnail();?>

This will show that image as you added in admin panel with that image ratio. Note that this code will execute when you are using wordpress’s default loop code like <?php if ( have_posts() ) while ( have_posts() ) : the_post(); ?> and <?php endwhile; ?>

If you use custom loop code using other function like get_posts() or custom query like $wpdb->get_results(), then it depends on that way and you have to pull data with correspondence format.

Use, modify and share your thoughts and happy blogging

Add Page Excerpt Option in WordPress Admin Panel

WordPress is not a blogging platform now, has many other features, options, resources, plugins to fulfill your requirements.

In some wp version(like 3.1), for ‘pages’, no ‘excerpt’ option, even not option in ‘Screen Options’ to display it . So an easy way to add this to your wp admin panel, follow below steps:

add the following code to your functions.php file.

 //Add Excerpts to Pages 
function themeprefix_add_page_excerpt_support() {
 add_post_type_support( 'page', 'excerpt' ); 
} 
add_action('init', 'themeprefix_add_page_excerpt_support');

We have done this excerpt option by a wordpress hook. At first we used add_post_type_support function to use a specific post type option then we packed within a function. And this function called by a worpress hook/filter to make it available for admin panel.

Functions.php is found in “wp-content\themes\[your-currently-active-theme]\”.

Cheers

OpenCart config url,dir path problem and htaccess issue

Opencart is another easy, robust and handy e-commerce CMS. For beginner, there are some common problem related to URL, Directory path and .htaccess issues.

Following issues need to keep in mind during installation, moving to another server or installation on windows:

• Use trailing slash after the url like define(‘HTTP_SERVER’, ‘localhost/myproject/’) otherwise it may not load all css, images and js files.
• For windows, use path like define(‘DIR_APPLICATION’, ‘F:\wamp\www\myproject/catalog/’); as well as for other settings. It may be ok in normal way like define(‘DIR_APPLICATION’, ‘F:/wamp/www/myproject/admin/’);
• For htaccess, if your store/project is in your document root which is generally public_html on cpanel servers that is ok for for default RewriteBase, but if it’s in a subfolder you will need to edit the file and change the ‘RewriteBase /’ to ‘RewriteBase /subfoldername/’

That’s all for some common issue. Have fun with open source opencart

isset() use techniques in php

isset() is the most commonly used php construct as well as a good friend of a programmer. we frequently use it to check whether a variable has been set or not. it returns true if the variable has been set otherwise false… also return false if the variable has been set to null.

isset() is the only one of the three language constructs that accepts an arbitrary amount of parameters. Its accurate prototype is as follows:

<?php
isset($var1, $var2, $var3, ...);
?>

It only returns true, if all the variables have been defined; otherwise, it returns false. This is useful when you want to check if the required input variables for your script have really been sent by the client, saving you a series of single isset() checks.

So writing it with arbitrary parameters can be interesting upon your need! cheers!

Magento Admin Panel Login Problem

Magento! : ECOMMERCE PLATFORM FOR GROWTH …. recent days, Magento became most popular CMS for ecommerce.Recently when i started work with magento, fallen in problem regarding login to admin panel.

There are several issues to consider :

• Using 127.0.0.1 in place of localhost for your base url when going to setup in localhost.
• Best way is using IP, like your PC IP address or default 127.0.0.1.
• Use 127.0.0.1 instead of localhost while db configuration in installation (may fix the problem)
• For cookie related issue, please properly enable your browser cookie settings.
• Finally check out for both ‘mod rewrite option’ and ‘base url validation option’ during installation.

** Recently I got another useful solution during installation of magento in another PC. The solution is to modify the core Magento code.

> Open app/code/core/Mage/Core/Model/Session/Abstract/Varien.php.

> Comment out the lines 80 to 83. The line number may vary in different magento version. But these lines exist near to line 80. You need to comment the comma (,) in line:: $this->getCookie()->getPath()//,

For Magento 1.4 or greater than 1.4 :

you have to comment code from line 86 to 98 in app/code/core/Mage/Core/Model/Session/Abstract/Varien.php. Like this:-

This may be helpful for beginners who are gonna to start magento.

Cheers!

Simple PHP Security in CodeIgniter

As web is now the part of our life and we can’t think our daily works without www. For both users and developers, security is a key question. I would like to share some simple security points in this post, which are common.

• Cross Site Scripting(or XSS) is one of the most common application-layer web attacks. XSS commonly targets scripts embedded in a page which are executed on the client-side (in the user’s web browser) rather than on the server-side. An example of XSS may be as from user input. Suppose you put <textarea> on your site to get user input. But malicious user give input like this :

<script type="text/javascript">
window.locaton('http://example.com');
</script>

or it may be a unwanted alert message in javascript, which is not expected.So you definitely want to prevent this type of attack. I’m going to show the solution here in CodeIgniter. CodeIgniter has its built in input class.The example is below:

$data= $this->input->post('UserInput');
$data_xss = $this->input->xss_clean($data);

At first, you get user input by post method and now just pass that value to the function. if you print the final value, you will see the javascript code will be replaced by others like [removed].Now you can pass the value to database query or do anything with that value.

• Use htmlentities( ) for user input . It will convert all applicable characters to HTML entities like below.

$str = "A 'quote' is <b>bold</b>";
// Outputs: A 'quote' is &lt;b&gt;bold&lt;/b&gt;
echo htmlentities($str);

Some useful links for best practices and security:

• http://bit.ly/5W1yoi
• http://bit.ly/c3KxsL
• http://bit.ly/7I4A

Cheers and practice with best approach.