I'm working on a custom CMS in Codeigniter and I'm trying to allow users to use custom tags instead of having to place HTML into posts.
For example, if a person is posting about a game and want to include a stylized button as a call to action, they would just type [button=http://example.com]Play this game[/button] instead of the HTML <div class="action-button">Play this game</div>
Obviously, this is a simple example. Some more complex things I'd like to do would be something like [gallery=120] which would include an image gallery with an ID of 120.
I've been searching and I haven't had much luck. I feel like there's another word for what I'm trying to do but it's just not coming to me, maybe that would yield better search results.
Any tips to get me going would be appreciated.
The term you're looking for is BBCode (Bulletin Board Code).
As for parsing you could look at some forum apps and perhaps CI's template parser for inspiration. Like Jarrett already mentioned they mostly utilize str_replace() and preg_replace() functions.
Something like [gallery=120] would be more advanced though.
The short answer would be STRING and REGEX replace statements.
If your familiar with the CMS associated with CodeIgniter, that is, ExpressionEngine, it parses the templates using str_replace() and preg_replace().
Related
I would really appreciate if anybody could help me with this question :)
I want to know whether it's possible to create your own semantic markup in PHP, just like BB Codes, but I want to be able to use it within my template engine system, so I could use it to call custom modules like voting system, adding comments, login form, registration form and so on...
Let me make it clearer for you guys of how I mean;
I'm working on my own CMS not to use it for production purposes but to learn PHP in a better way;
So I had this idea to call specific modules in a page based on their position and in order to be able to do;
For instance we're having a login module which is simply a login form, nothing too crazy, however you want to be able to include that module dynamically in any page you want using the backend and not touching any code;
So all you do in the template page is using my bb codes that I told you earlier;
Something like this;
Remember this is only an idea;
<zone name="left_sidebar"></zone>
And you add this zone markup on your sidebar and if any of your module supposed to be displayed on your left sidebar, it will just by having this markup and nothing more...
And you gone have loads of these semantic markups based on how many editable blocks you have on your page; so you could have one for the right sidebar, one for footer and one for header... etc.
So I now need to know how to could lookup for opening and closing tags, in this case it would be <zone></zone> , then it need to lookup for its attribute and its value, in this case name="right_sidevar"
....
Anybody have any idea of how I could possibly do this kind of thing...
Thanks in advance :)
You could check out TWIG; while it doesn't directly support this kind of feature (because it uses a special syntax for its own elements) it does have very good support for making your own elements, tags, sub-applications and other funky things in the backend.
http://twig.sensiolabs.org/
There are also a number of systems that perform this kind of task in the front-end; this would mean that the substitution is done by Javascript in the browser. In addition to the already mentioned Polymer, there's also Google's framework, Angular.
https://angularjs.org/
Maybe you can use php's libxml module to parse your xml file.
I'm creating my own CMS from scratch as a way to build my php and mysql skills. Everything is going well, but I'm at the point where I want to create individual post pages for each blog post I write. So the index.php page has a list of all my blogs with snippets of each post and there is a read more button that should take the user to the full page for each blog post. Each post has a url created from the blog title entered in the "create post" form. I'm trying to figure out how to create unique pages for each post without passing the title, subhead, post content and other info through the GET.
This also dovetails with another feature I'm trying to add. I want to be able to create individual pages using a "create page" form like I did for my posts. So if I want an "about us" page I go to my admin form, fill out the title, add the content, and when I hit submit it creates the page dynamically. I have thought all day about how I'd do these two things but can't quite figure out how I can do this.
FYI, I'm not asking for code, I just need a push in the right direction as I try to conceptualize how to achieve this. Thanks!
If you're not familiar with the Model-View-Controller pattern, reading up on it might be prudent. MVC is frequently the right starting place for high-level design of web applications.
Also, a CMS is a big enough project you should consider using a PHP framework like CodeIgniter, Symfony, Zend, etc. to make your life easier. It removes a lot of the drudge work and common tasks.
Dynamic Page Creation and Display
I think you want to split it into two things: the text content (basically what you put in the forms) and the HTML templating surrounding that content.
When you make a page or blog post, you would want to store the actual content (what you type into the creation form) in a database of some sort (not necessarily an RDBMS, but if you're trying to build MySQL skills it's a reasonable choice).
Then you would use a separate function to bind that content into an HTML template and present it to the user when they load a given page.
URL Routing
To get nicer-looking URLs you can use something like apache's mod_rewrite. You can use that to convert a URL like this:
posts/how-to-make-a-cms
to this:
posts.php?title=how-to-make-a-cms
Then you can have posts.php read from GET as normal. How you choose to do the conversion is pretty open-ended.
To avoid getting really complicated rewrites, people often just structure everything to go to a central routing script which figures out what class and method to call and what arguments to pass it. So it would rewrite the URL above to:
main.php?a=posts/how-to-make-a-cms
Then main.php would parse out the segments of that argument from GET and figure out where to send them. Like it might take posts/show/how-to-make-a-cms and do something like:
$o = new Posts();
$o->show("how-to-make-a-cms");
If you do it that way, I think you can avoid mod_rewrite entirely as long as you're willing to accept only slightly pretty URLs, like this:
mysite.com/main.php?/posts/show/how-to-make-a-cms
I haven't done this type of thing before (because the frameworks do it so beautifully already), so I might be missing some minor details.
You should watch some tutorials from phpacademy.org or thenewboston.org, they have best and most valuable tutorials ever made about PHP.
I think you may try to start from that course/playlist:
phpacademy.org: PHP Tutorials: Creating a Blog
If you don't understand everything, watch this:
thenewboston.org: Official Beginner PHP Tutorials Playlist!
If you have no problems with PHP itself you may try to use some simple framework with MVC support. That helps A LOT in variable handling between pages, makes work with database easier etc.
phpacademy.org: Introduction to CodeIgniter
phpacademy.org: Introduction to CodeIgniter - Basic Website
I had the same problem. You can easily do this by using the fopen function. Here is a link to a tutorial: http://www.tizag.com/phpT/filecreate.php
<?php
function wwwcopy($link,$file)
{
$fp = #fopen($link,"r");
while(!feof($fp))
{
$cont.= fread($fp,1024);
}
fclose($fp);
$fp2 = #fopen($file,"w");
fwrite($fp2,$cont);
fclose($fp2);
}
//Example on using this function
wwwcopy("http://www.domain.com/list.php?member=sample", "sample.html");
//Another example
wwwcopy("http://www.domain.com/list.php?member=sample2", "sample2.html");
?>
I am looking to build a plugin for Joomla that will allow me to play video using HTML5 first before resorting back to Flash. In my effort to make this plugin in more dynamic I would like to have an easy way of embedding the video. In similar plugins I have seen where the user can put in a specific phrase surrounded with brackets. Something similar to the following:
{html5video}media/video{/html5video}
What is this method called and where can I find more information on how to implement it into a plugin?
As per my knowledge there is no specific term defined in Joomla for this method, but those who are much familiar with Wordpress calls it SHORTCODE method
You will need to create a content plugin -
use regex , php preg_match_all and extract this string and replace with your desired code.
One such plugin is available in Joomla. You can check it in plugins\content\loadmodule
You may need to modify the regex pattern used in this plugin
I'm trying to write a text parser with PHP, like Instapaper did. What I want to do is; get a webpage and parse it in text-only mode.
It's simple to get the webpage with cURL and strip HTML tags. But every webpage have some common areas; like header, navigation, sidebar, footer, banners etc. I only want to get the article in text mode and exclude all other parts. It's also simple to exclude those parts if I know the "id" or "class" info. But I'm trying to automatize this process and apply for any page, like Instapaper.
I get all the content between but I don't know how to exclude header, sidebar or footer and get only the main article body. I have to develop a logic to get only the main article part.
It's not important for me to find the exact code. It would also be useful to understand how to exclude unnecessary parts as I can try to write my own code with PHP. It would also be useful if there any examples in other languages.
Thanks for helping.
You might try looking at the algorithms behind this bookmarklet, readability - It's got a decent success rate for extracting content among on all web page rubbish.
Friend of mine made it, that's why I'm recommending it - since I know it works, and I'm aware of the many techniques he's using to parse the data. You could apply these techniques for what your asking.
you can take a look at the source from Goose -> it already does alot of this like instapaper text extractions
https://github.com/jiminoc/goose/wiki
Have a look at the ExtractContent code from Shuyo Nakatani.
See original Ruby source http://rubyforge.org/projects/extractcontent/ or a port of it to Perl http://metacpan.org/pod/HTML::ExtractContent
You really should consider using a HTML parser for this. Gather similar pages and compare the DOM trees to find the differing nodes.
this article provides a comparison of different approaches. the java library boilerpipe was rated highly. at the boilerpipe site you find his scientific paper which compares to other algorithms.
not all algorithms suite all purposes. the biggest application of such tools is to just get the raw text to index as a search engine. the idea being that you don't want search results to be messed up by adverts. such extractions can be destructive; meaning that it wont give you "the best reading area" which is what people want with instapaper or readability.
I am using phpTumblr, a wrapper around the tumblr blog api that allows you to access posts via php.
I want the site to display new posts dynamically, so I am using php to write html code. I find myself writing things like print(blablabla); or print(); ... and so on, and setting the header of the document to text/html, so that the browser would read it as html.
This just seems to me like a kind of ugly hack, and I was wondering if most dynamic pages are set up in this way, or are there different ways to convert php objects(say arrays) automatically into html tags. So far it doesnt seem like there are any.) maybe i have to be using some CMS software?
Any advice would be great.
Thanks
I believe what you're describing is known as a template engine. It essentially separates the logic from the UI, and allows you to write dynamic pages without an excessive number of print or echo statements.
For PHP, I would recommend Smarty, but Google can also help you with finding alternative ones if you find you don't like it.
PHP is a language in which you can do alot of different things and one of them is to send output to browsers. So if you want to print an array as HTML code , write a PHP function for it. PHP has NOTHING to do with HTML tags directly.
Like the above post mentions you can use Smarty templating engine ... BUT then you will need to learn the smarty language to print the array :)
All scripting languages work in this way. So lets say if any xyz language supports a function called print_array_as_html($array) .... then observe that it is a function. That's the idea of having functions/methods in a language , extend the functionality to get what you need.