Sorting PHP by date modified results from glob - php

Question

I need to go into a directory [named 'People'] and pull the names of folders and then construct some HTML that builds links using the contents of the directories.
I take a folder named: article-number-one and display a title, link, thumbnail, and excerpt based on the folder name.
Here is my code. It works except for the ordering. It is alphabetical. I want it to be by date created...newest on top:
<?php
$files = glob("people/*");
foreach($files as $file)
{
echo '<div class="block"><img src="people/'.basename($file).'/'.basename($file).'-thumbnail.jpg" height="180" width="320" alt="'.basename($file).'"/><br/><br/>';
echo ''.str_replace('-', ' ', basename($file, "")).'<br/><div class="excerpt">';
include 'people/'.basename($file).'/'.basename($file).'-excerpt.txt';
echo '</div><hr></div>';
}
?>
Please help me to order the resulting HTML newest to oldest.

Answer 1

Do this in several steps. This way you can check out how it proceeds and test each step separately.
// Get an array with all useful file info
$fileInfo = array_map(
function($filename) {
$short = basename($filename);
// Excerpt
$excerpt = $filename . DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR . $short . '-excerpt.txt';
if (is_readable($excerpt)) {
$text = trim(file_get_contents($excerpt));
} else {
$text = 'Excerpt not available';
}
return [
'full' => $filename,
'base' => $short,
'thumb' => $filename . DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR . $short . '.jpg',
'name' => ucwords(str_replace('-', ' ', $short)),
'date' => filectime($filename),
'text' => $text,
];
},
glob("people/*", GLOB_ONLYDIR)
);
To sort the array:
// Now sort the array. Have a function decide when a file is before another
usort($fileInfo, function($info1, $info2) {
if ($info1['date'] < $info2['date']) {
return 1;
}
if ($info1['date'] > $info2['date']) {
return -1;
}
return 0;
});
Finally you get the HTML in a variable. As a rule, it's good to have as few echo/print's as possible. Mixing PHP and output can be a maintenance nightmare.
// Get the HTML. You could put this in a .html file of its own
// such as 'template.html' and read it with
// $template = trim(file_get_contents('template.html'));
$template = <<<INFO2HTML
<div class="block">
<a href="{base}"><img
src="{thumb}"
height="180" width="320"
alt="{base}"/></a>
<br />
<br />
{name}
<br />
<div class="excerpt">{text}</div>
<hr />
</div>
INFO2HTML;
// Repeat the parsing of the template using each entry
// to populate the variables.
$html = implode('', array_map(
function($info) use($template) {
return preg_replace_callback(
'#{(.*?)}#',
function($keys) use ($info) {
return $info[$keys[1]];
},
$template
);
},
$fileInfo
));
print $html;
Testing
$ mkdir people
$ mkdir people/joe-smith
$ echo "this is the excerpt" > people/joe-smith/joe-smith-excerpt.txt
$ touch people/joe-smith/joe-smith-thumbnail.jpg
$ ls -R people
people:
joe-smith
people/joe-smith:
joe-smith-excerpt.txt
joe-smith-thumbnail.jpg
Sample run outputs:
<div class="block">
<a href="joe-smith"><img
src="people/joe-smith/joe-smith.jpg"
height="180" width="320"
alt="joe-smith"/></a>
<br />
<br />
Joe Smith
<br />
<div class="excerpt">this is the excerpt</div>
<hr /> </div>

Answer 2

usort($files, function($a, $b) {
return ($a['date'] < $b['date']) ? -1 : 1;
});