I have an about box on a profile page I'm working on (see below). Now that area shown by the textarea will have a PHP variable (about user column) produced in the space.
What I want to do is when a user clicks edit the paragraph content produced becomes an editable <textarea> which I can then save and it will write the new data to my PostGreSQL database and instantly show the new edit.
Basically I'm looking for a dynamically editable paragraph/textarea combo which will automatically update the database storing the original textual data in an about user column.
I have researched many JQuery examples like this on jsfiddle - http://jsfiddle.net/BenjaminRH/467S5/ but that doesn't have the database functionality I am looking for.
In essence, the HTML5 ContentEditable attribute could be perfect here.
This won't automatically update any databases, or anything for that matter, but nor will any other control that isn't some kind of composite made specifically for (and even genericised to handle) certain database types and scenarios and frameworks etc.
Therefore, in order to get this (a control that does it all) you're likely going to need to hunt down a third party product - there may be a free one (I've not seen one for the likes of PHP or ASP.NET or other major frameworks, and frankly I'm glad), or you may be stuck with having to buy one. As expected, I personally can't vouch for any, and wouldn't recommend such a plug n' play control anyway.
But, as per my first suggestion, there's half the task done - just write the code-behind in a reusable class and hook it up some how.
Related
I want to make Newegg's like catalouge functionality for my little website. I want mine to be sligthly different(greatly simplified) though. I haven't done anything so advanced(atleast in my books) before, and wanted to know if it's possible to do. I want to use PHP and JS. The new records will be added manually through using either phpMyAdmin or pehaps I will install and use either SQLyog, HeidiSQL or Navicat for such purposes. Could someone point me to the right resources to get this kind of job done as fast as possible and properly?
What I had in mind was:
For example the cell which contains the thumbimage, all the mini information about the product and the big price tag will not have a separate, more detailed page. Everything user will need to know will be inside that product cell.
Right under the thumbnail image there will be numbers(1 2 3 4 5 6), and when you hover over them, under the cursor, a big version of one of the all available images will appear.
Lastly, it should have the page generation(don't know what you call it). For example there's more than 20 product entries on the page, then the server should create a new page(First 1 >2< Last) to hold the older records.
Oh and there won't be any shopping cart functionality. You can't really "order" these kinds of products, you just find something you like and call me up about it.
TIA
I'm sure there are dozens of books on this subject. I'm attempting a short reply, however:
This sounds like something that could profit from:
a MCV-framework like CakePHP (or Django, Ruby on Rails etc), which could handle database-logic (including pagination, which is the word you're looking for), and
a JavaScript library like JQuery to handle Ajax, JavaScript and other UI-related stuff.
++?
For the page numbers, I recently had to do this. The technique is called pagination, and this thread helped me out immensely: PHP Formula For a Series of Numbers (Mathy Problem)
The thumbnail effect you want to include would need to be done in javascript. I'd recommend learning jQuery, as it is pretty easy to use for this sort of thing.
This is a hard question to answer because you haven't given much indication as to your skill level, or progress towards accomplishing your goal. Assuming we're starting at 0, there is probably more to discuss than this thread can contain. :\
UPDATE
To learn PHP's database functions, I would lean on W3School's PHP/MySQL tutorial for a quick summary, referring to the php manual's mysql documentation for details and code examples when W3schools isn't enough. This should at least get you the markup you will need to work with.
For the thumbnails, I would reiterate my recommendation for jQuery, specifically attaching a .hover() event to the image numbers (this is equivalent to the onmouseover and onmouseout events in JS) that uses the .fadeIn() and .fadeOut() animations to show and hide your full size images. Hope that helps.
I was wondering what would be the best approach to generate a tag cloud from a input text (while user is typing it). For example, if user types a story's text containing keywords "sci-fi, technology, effects", the tag cloud will be formed from each of this keywords ordered by relevance according to their frequency on every story. The tag cloud will be displayed in descending order and using the same font size, it's not the display algorithm, but the search algorithm I should implement.
I'm using mysql and php.
Should I stick to MATCH...AGAINST clause? should I implement a tags table?
More details
I have a mysql table containing a lot of stories. When user is typing one of his/her own, I want to display a tag cloud containing the most frequent words, taken from the input text, occurring on this set of stories that are saved on my db.
The tag cloud will only be used to show to the user the relevance of the words he/she has entered on his/her own story according to the frequency they occur on all stories entered by all users.
I think the first thing you need to do is more clearly define the purpose of your tagging system. Do you want to simply build tags based on the words that occur most frequently within the text? This strikes me as something designed with search rankings in mind.
...Or do you want your content to be better organized, and the tag cloud be a way of providing a better user experience and creating more distinct relationships between pieces of content (ie both of these are tagged sci-fi, so display them in the sci-fi category).
If the former is the case, you might not need to do anything but:
Explode the text by a delimiter like a single space explode(' ', $content);
Have a list (possibly in a config file or within the script itself) of words which will occur frequently which you want to exclude from being tags (and, or, this, the, etc. You could just jack them off pages like this: http://www.esldesk.com/vocabulary/pronouns , http://www.english-grammar-revolution.com/list-of-conjunctions.html
Then you just need to decide how many times a word has to occur (either percentage or numeric), and store those tags in a table that shows the connection between tags and content.
To implement the "as the user is typing" part you just need to use a bit of jQuery's ajax functionality to continually call your script that builds the tag list (ie on keydown).
The other option (better user experience) will incorporate a lot of the same elements, but you'll have to think about a bit more. Some things I would consider:
Do you want to restrict to certain tags (perhaps you don't want to allow just anyone to create new tags)?
How you will deal with synonyms
If you will support multiple languages
If you want a preference towards suggesting existing tags (which might be close) over suggesting new ones
Once you've fully defined the logic and user experience you can come back to the search algorithm. MATCH and AGAINST are good options but you may find that a simple LIKE will do it for you.
Good luck = )
If you want the tag cloud to be generated as the user is typing it, you can do it in two ways.
Directly update the tag cloud from the input text
Send the input text to the backend (in realtime using ajax/comet), which then saves, calculates the word frequency and returns data from which you generate the cloud.
I would go with the former using a jQuery plugin such as - http://plugins.jquery.com/plugin-tags/tag-cloud
I have a MySQL Database of more or less 100 teachers, their names, and their phone numbers, stored in tables based upon their department at the school. I'm creating an iPhone app, and I've found that UITableViews and all the work that comes with it is just too time consuming and too confusing. Instead, I've been trying to create a web page on my server that loads all the data from MySQL and displays it using HTML, PHP, jQuery, and jQTouch for formatting.
My concept is that the separators will be by department, and the staff will be sorted alphabetically under each department. On the main page, each person's name will be clickable so they can go to ANOTHER page listing their name, email address, and telephone number, all linked so that the user can tap on the email or number and immediately email or call that person, respectively.
HOWEVER, I am completely at a loss for how I should start. Can anyone point me in the right direction for displaying the data? Am I going about it wrong in using PHP? Should I opt for something COMPLETELY different?
PHP to manage the database interaction and generate HTML is fine. There are heaps of tutorials on how to do that (e.g. http://www.w3schools.com/PHP/php_mysql_intro.asp) How to make it look nice is beyond the scope of this answer, and I'd recommend you search for table/CSS examples to get some ideas of what looks good and how they're implemented. If you need interactivity such as expanding rows or changing colors, then jQuery would be an appropriate next step, though you certainly don't need more than HTML + CSS for a nice looking table representation.
What I don't know about is the auto email/call functionality you're after, and whether you can get that "for free" from whatever is rendering the HTML. That's iPhone specific, not PHP/jQuery/etc... And I'd second Alex's advice that if UITableView is the right tool for the job then you will definitely be better off in the long run just buckling down and learning it. (And going through that will probably make pickup up other parts of the API much easier to boot.)
Instead of loading my PHP in my <body>, I created a function that retrieved the data via mysql_fetch_assoc(), which added all the information and created each individual div of data AS WELL AS injecting a <script> to $.append() the list item content for each item retrieved via the mysql_fetch_assoc(). Thanks for the responses anyway!
I have an HTML table with contents, I would like to have an feature of Edit/Delete to that table. How do I do it with PHP?
I actually think that this sounds more like a job for JavaScript, which can edit/remove rows on-the-fly and with much less code. (Implement some AJAX too, and you can edit/remove rows in database too).
But if you insist on using PHP, you might just want to add some GET parameters to the Edit/Delete links that would delete or edit those rows.
Well, there is a pure PHP way to do it, and then there is a combination of Javascript and PHP. You must use PHP one way or another if you want your changes to the database to be permanent as that is your gateway to communicating with the database (as far as I know you cannot do that with Javascript as that is client-based and runs entirely in your web browser).
If using just PHP, you must generate HTML documents for each change. E.g., you click on one cell in the table and that gets you to a new HTML page where the field is editable through an input element; or you can list all fields at once for that row and edit them all at the same time. The fields are then posted in a form to a PHP page which will take the new values and update the database (or insert new values or however you wish it to behave). Here's a tutorial for how to do this:
http://www.freewebmasterhelp.com/tutorials/phpmysql/1
You can also mix in some Javascript which allows a more interactive interface to modifying the values in a cell. However, this obviously requires more code and may be overkill for what you're trying to do. Nonetheless, here is a link which demonstrates just that and also shows the code:
http://www.java2s.com/Code/JavaScript/GUI-Components/Editabletablecell.htm
Hope this is what you're looking for.
EDIT:
Forgot that you also wished to delete content in the table. That is also explained in the first link.
If you intend to work with databases, and it seems like you have little understanding of how they work, pick up a good book like: SQL - The Complete Reference. When you have enough knowledge of SQL, look at PHP's PDO extension: http://php.net/manual/en/book.pdo.php
I am facing a problem on developing my web app, here is the description:
This webapp (still in alpha) is based on user generated content (usually short articles although their length can become quite large, about one quarter of screen), every user submits at least 10 of these articles, so the number should grow pretty fast. By nature, about 10% of the articles will be duplicated, so I need an algorithm to fetch them.
I have come up with the following steps:
On submission fetch a length of text and store it in a separated table (article_id,length), the problem is the articles are encoded using PHP special_entities() function, and users post content with slight modifications (some one will miss the comma, accent or even skip some words)
Then retrieve all the entries from database with length range = new_post_length +/- 5% (should I use another threshold, keeping in mind that human factor on articles submission?)
Fetch the first 3 keywords and compare them against the articles fetched in the step 2
Having a final array with the most probable matches compare the new entry using PHP's levenstein() function
This process must be executed on article submission, not using cron. However I suspect it will create heavy loads on the server.
Could you provide any idea please?
Thank you!
Mike
Text similarity/plagiat/duplicate is a big topic. There are so many algos and solutions.
Lenvenstein will not work in your case. You can only use it on small texts (due to its "complexity" it would kill your CPU).
Some projects use the "adaptive local alignment of keywords" (you will find info on that on google.)
Also, you can check this (Check the 3 links in the answer, very instructive):
Cosine similarity vs Hamming distance
Hope this will help.
I'd like to point out that git, the version control system, has excellent algorithms for detecting duplicate or near-duplicate content. When you make a commit, it will show you the files modified (regardless of rename), and what percentage changed.
It's open source, and largely written in small, focused C programs. Perhaps there is something you could use.
You could design your app to reduce the load by not having to check text strings and keywords against all other posts in the same category. What if you had the users submit the third party content they are referencing as urls? See Tumblr implementation-- basically there is a free-form text field so each user can comment and create their own narrative portion of the post content, but then there are formatted fields also depending on the type of reference the user is adding (video, image, link, quote, etc.) An improvement on Tumblr would be letting the user add as many/few types of formatted content as they want in any given post.
Then you are only checking against known types like a url or embed video code. Combine that with rexem's suggestion to force users to classify by category or genre of some kind, and you'll have a much smaller scope to search for duplicates.
Also if you can give each user some way of posting to their own "stream" then it doesn't matter if many people duplicate the same content. Give people some way to vote up from the individual streams to a main "front page" level stream so the community can regulate when they see duplicate items. Instead of a vote up/down like Digg or Reddit, you could add a way for people to merge/append posts to related posts (letting them sort and manage the content as an activity on your app rather than making it an issue of behind the scenes processing).