So i've done a lot of searching on here and Google and haven't seem to come across anything that is known to work or that I think will accomplish what i'm looking to do.
Basically right now i've been using www.thumboo.com to create thumbnails via their API however they do not support SSL and where im creating the preview is under a customer area where SSL is required.
So i'm looking to either develop something myself or find something already developed to use, i would like to create a simple "screenshot" or "thumbnail" of a website address on the fly, not sure if i want to cache it yet or not, but either way doesn't matter.
Does anybody know of any scripts out there that can accomplish this? I'm not looking to get a screenshot of the "entire" page, just what a "browser" would originally see without scrolling down, just like how it works on www.thumboo.com.
I'm not too concerned with the scripting language but i plan on outputting the file using php by pulling the file from somewhere or activating the script with java or php.
Does anybody know of any other thumbnail services that may have an API That works with SSL or any scripts that are still developed for this purpose? Everything i have found has been outdated which makes me wonder if there is some easy way to do it now with some type of function or module i may need to add to PHP.
I am server admin so i can customize PHP and the server as i need to get it to work.
Thanks ahead of time!
http://www.thumbalizr.com/apitools.php
i have never use but seems like this works for you.
Related
I am developing an application in the Kohana PHP framework that assesses performance. The end result of the process is a webpage listing the overall scoring and a color coded list of divs and results.
The original idea was to have the option to save this as a non-editable PDF file and email the user. After further research I have found this to be non as straight forward as I hoped.
The best solution seemed to be installing the unix application wkhtmltopdf but as the destination is shared hosting I am unable to install this on the server.
My question is, what's the best option to save a non editable review of the assessment to the user?
Thank you for help with this.
I guess the only way to generate a snapshot, or review how you call it, is by storing it on the server side and only grant access via a read only protocol. So basically by offering it as a 'web page'.
Still everyone can save and modify the markup. But that is the case for every file you generate, regardless of the type of file. Ok, maybe except DRM infected files. But you don't want to do that, trust me.
Oh, and you could also print the files. Printouts are pretty hard to be edited. Though even that is not impossible...
I found a PHP version that is pre-built as a Kohana Module - github.com/ryross/pdfview
Alright all,
Been doing a bit of research and want to know if anyone else has tried this... and what approach would you take.
I'm planning on doing a website which will display a screenshot of a website (maybe based on the url in someones email address).
There's going to be alot of people getting this so, pre-production of the screenshots isn't a solution.
Soooooo... does anyone know of any solutions:
Thumbnail service that builds on demand (no queuing)?
HTML5/Canvas script that will let me do this. I've found one but it won't run cross site.
Any other solution?
It'll be built in PHP.
Thanks
PVS.
This site http://html2canvas.hertzen.com/ is the best you will get right now with regard to a client side script. It uses the calculated properties of elements to render a page, and I must say it looks good!
Update:
A demo here: http://html2canvas.hertzen.com/tests/templates/projection/index.html . Click to toggle the 'real' view with the rendered image.
I've played about with wkhtmltoimage before, it was pretty good for what I was using it for, but does require you to install onto your server
For taking screenshots of websites (one of the features) i built a service ontop of the awesome PhantomJS which is an excellent headless browser which uses the webkit engine (same that safari uses). Although it's headless, it still has deps in QT and a virtual framebuffer (xvfb). Hope this helps: http://www.phantomjs.org/
You can use html2canvas. More information here.
I recently had a website developed by an external source. They gave me the source code as well as sql files.
When I extract the source code I see folders like Smarty, fckeditor and many php files. I want to start editing these as I find it to be the best way to learn. What tool should I use. I tried using trial version of PHPdesigner, but it just doesnt open my php files.
Is there any tool that can take all these files in the form of a project and simultaneously show me a visual display of any changes that I make.
I suppose it is very clear that I am new to this. Any help will be greatly appreciated.
Just use simple text editor with some code highlight like Notepad++
It is free to use, very fast and it does what you need.
First of all try to know what are the different file types and which lanuguage are those targeted to. Once you know that you can then decide on the editor.
What i recommend is you try to find out if they used a framework for the website, something like CakePHP or CodeIgniter. The next step after you find out is to go the framework website and start reading the documentation.
If the site id developed in php most likely any type of WYSIWYG editing is going to inaccurate. This is because a number of different files need to be processed and combined by the php interpreter before they come together to make any given page or view. Thus the only way to really preview is to run it on a server. Since you say there are sql files he has laso used a DB to store something so most likely any changes you would need to make are going to be spread between both the php source files and the records in the db.
Aptana (Which is Eclipse based) is great at handling many different file type in one IDE. I would use Studio 2 w/ the plugins you need or if you feel cutting edge try Studio 3. It's cross platform so Linux/Windows or OSX.
I built a php site that is hosted with an ISP. A friend who is a designer is supposed to edit the page content. There's an area on the page that is open for page content, but most of the outer "wrapper" is built with include() files.
When she opens the files in design mode, everything is broken. I tried to set up a test server in DW, but this didn't work either. I never use DW and am stuck.
Is it possible to work on a file off of a server via ftp in real time with DW? If not, can it at least be configured to render the php code in design mode somehow?
Thanks,
D.
PHP is a server-side language, Dreamweaver is catered toward simple client-side HTML web pages. You would need to setup a PHP interpreter somehow in order for Dreamweaver to show you the output of the PHP, last I recall when I used DW years ago it didn't have that feature, so I doubt you'll be able to do this.
#meder: It appears you are correct for exactly the reasons you stated. The last time I used DW, I was only on the code side, so it never came up. I know we were saving to the server then, so I was thinking it could draw it from the server as well.
Alas, no luck. Sorry to post before I RTFW more.
I know there is not a direct way to take a screen shot of a web page with PHP. What would be the most straightforward way to accomplish this? Are there any command line tools that could do this that I might be able to execute from a PHP script (I'm thinking something that would run in a 'NIX OS (OS X and/or Linux in particular)?
Edit: Or maybe some sort of web service I could access via SOAP or REST or ...
Edit #2: I found a related question discussing the CLI option, but I'd still be open to other methods if anyone knows of anything.
See webkit2png for an OSX commandline program that does this.
The page also mentions Linux alternatives.
[edit]: wkhtml2image is the newest kid in town, and it works better then anything else i've ever used.
[edit2]: As of 2014, PhantomJS seems to be the way to go, as it has the newest webkit version of the alternatives I know about.
[edit3]: In 2019, Puppeteer is the way to go. Official headless chrome, always up to date.
You can use the GD functions imagegrabscreen() or imagegrabwindow() to take a screenshot, but they're only available on Windows at the moment.
http://www.thumbshots.org/
html2ps does a decent job for relatively simple pages, and it requires very little in terms of external binaries, meaning it's very easy to install/use. If you control the pages you'll be capturing, then you can ensure that they'll render appropriately in html2ps. If you're hoping to capture arbitrary URLs, however, I'm not sure that the PHP port of HTML2PS is up to the task. It's also not the fastest thing in the world (expect render times in the seconds for complex pages), but that doesn't really matter for some applications.
Not sure if this would be enough for you, because it has some added stuff there, but would be worth giving it a try: http://www.snap.com
It's possible to get a base64 encoded image of a site by using the Google pagespeed api.
You can specify desktop or mobile views, but you are limited to an image of a certain size.