Sometimes you need to get exact location by address entered by user on your website. Google Maps API offers a service that will return exact coordinate by the request you send it. See following snippet to see how to get coordinates from postcode or address by using Google Maps API.

$address = '124 Norfolk Street, Glasgow, United Kingdom';
$response = file_get_contents('http://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/geocode/json?address=' . urlencode($address) . '&sensor=true');
$response = json_decode($response);
 
echo 'Latitude:' . $response->results[0]->geometry->location->lat;
echo 'Longitude:' . $response->results[0]->geometry->location->lng;

I hope you enjoy it and make useful scripts for your project!

When setting your Zend Form with Select field you don’t always wish to have label on that filed but rather “Select one” as a first option.

Setting the required flag on Zend Select, or adding notEmpty validator won’t always work especially if your box is being populated dynamically.

Let’s say you have something like this:

<select name="example">
    <option value="Select one">Select one</option>
    <option value="value1">value1</option>
    <option value="value2">value2</option>
    <option value="value3">value3</option>
</select>

You could easily validate this by adding Zend_Validate_Regex and passing any pattern to it
as follows in snippet:

$select->addValidator(new Zend_Validate_Regex( '/[^Select\sone]/' ))
    ->addErrorMessage('You need to select one value');

This one will check if the value is not “Select one” and let your user pass validation only in that case.

PHP fluent interfaces have been around for quite some time. They are often used just for chaining methods of an object so that we get nice readable code.

Good fluent interface takes a while to build, and will take some planning to make object methods work seamlessly. However, if you still haven’t experienced the PHP fluent interface, there is a good way to start, just check out the following snippet.

class Php_Fluent_Interface_Demo {
    protected $_first;
    protected $_second;
    protected $_third;
 
    public function setFirst($firstVal) {
        $this->_first = $firstVal;
        return $this;
    }
 
    public function setSecond($secondVal) {
        $this->_second = $secondVal;
        return $this;
    }
 
    public function setThird($thirdVal) {
        $this->_third = $thirdVal;
        return $this;
    }
}

You have noticed that all setters have one line in common return $this; and this is how you set your methods to be able to chain. Example of usage follows in next snippet:

$phpFluentInterface = new Php_Fluent_Interface_Demo();
$phpFluentInterface->setFirst(1)
    ->setSecond(2)
    ->setThird(3);

I hope that this simple example is enough to get you started if you still haven’t tried PHP fluent interface. Good luck!

CSRF or Cross-Site Request Forgery is basically a way of requesting an unauthorized commands from a website by using an authorised user.

For example: Let’s assume that you are logged in on your blog and I know that. I could then send you an e-mail with following content: <img src=”http://yoursite.com/?action=delete-article&id=12″ />.

Although you wouldn’t see the image – request for deleting article with id 12 would be sent. This can be prevented by setting up a hidden input in your Zend Framework form with a value that will be posted with your request and validated when request is sent in order to prevent possible CSRF attack.

It is quite easy in Zend Framework to set CSRF protection and here is the snippet:

$form->addElement('hash', 'csrf_token',
            array('salt' => get_class($this) . 'stunt@c0d3rs~!'));

In order to see a full example of Zend Framework CSRF protection I have prepared an example of simple form with no elements on it.

Zend Framework CSRF protection

class Stunt_Form extends Zend_Form
{
    public function init()
    {
        parent::init();
        $this->addElement('hash', 'csrf_token',
                    array('salt' => get_class($this) . 'stunt@c0d3rs~!'));
    }
}

Have you ever wondered if you could let user see his website visits on his own admin page without having to leave backend of his system? I have…

Actually – the CMS I made for my clients (written in Zend Framework) has this option for quite some time, and users love it.

So – in order to implement this function on your own website (written in Zend Framework) I have shared following code. First – copy model:

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class Default_Model_Analytics
{ 
 
	public function auth()
	{
		$email = "your_email@domain.com";
		$passwd = "your_password";
 
		try {
			$client = Zend_Gdata_ClientLogin::getHttpClient($email, $passwd, "analytics");
		}catch (Zend_Gdata_App_CaptchaRequiredException $cre) {
			echo 'URL of CAPTCHA image: ' . $cre->getCaptchaUrl() . "\n";
			echo 'Token ID: ' . $cre->getCaptchaToken() . "\n";
			return null;
		} catch (Zend_Gdata_App_AuthException $ae) {
			echo 'Problem authenticating: ' . $ae->exception() . "\n";
			return null;
		}
 
		return new Zend_Gdata($client);
	}
 
	public function fetch($gdClient, $startDate = '2010-07-01', $endDate = null, $dimensions = array("ga:region", "ga:city"), $metrics = array("ga:visits", "ga:pageviews"))
	{
		if(empty($gdClient)) return false;
		if(empty($endDate)) $endDate = date('Y-m-d');
 
		try {
			$reportURL	=	"https://www.google.com/analytics/feeds/data?ids=ga:" . $yourAccountNumber . "&" .
							"dimensions=" . @implode(",", $dimensions) . "&" .
							"metrics=" . @implode(",", $metrics) . "&" .
							"start-date={$startDate}&" .
							"end-date={$endDate}&" .
							"sort=-ga:visits";
 
			$results = $gdClient->getFeed($reportURL);
			$titleRow = 1; // To output a row of column labels
			echo '<table>';
			foreach ($results as $rep) {
				if ($titleRow) {
					foreach ($rep->extensionElements as $elem) {
						$titles[] = $elem->extensionAttributes["name"]["value"];
					}
					echo "<tr><td>" . implode("</td><td>", $titles) . "</td></tr>\n";
					$titleRow = 0;
				}
				$row = array();
				foreach ($rep->extensionElements as $elem) {
					$row[] = $elem->extensionAttributes["value"]["value"];
				}
				echo "\t<tr>\n\t\t<td>" . implode("</td><td>", $row) . "</td>\n\t</tr>\n";
			}
			echo '</table>';
		} catch (Zend_Exception $e) {
			echo "Caught exception: " . get_class($e) . "\n";
			echo "Message: " . $e->getMessage() . "\n";
		}
	}
}

Then – run following code in your controller so user can see Analytics results:

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$analyticsModel = new Default_Model_Analytics();
//get: date start and date end of Analytics results
$postParams = $this->getRequest()->getParams();
 
if($this->getRequest()->isPost()) {
    $gdata = $analyticsModel->auth();
    $analyticsModel->fetch($gdata, $postParams['year1'] . '-' . $postParams['month1'] . '-01', $postParams['year2'] . '-' . $postParams['month2'] . '-31');
}

Notice: This is not the proper way to write code in Zend Framework, but is used as an example.

Simple question that developers in Magento sometimes ask is: “How can I add custom attribute to customers when using Magento”. The answer is simple – it is shown in the snippet below. But before you use it lets imagine what we want to do… Lets say that we want to give discount to users that payed by using preferred method, and that we want to be able to change that customer attribute in our Magento admin. So – we should run following code – once – anywhere in your Magento installation.

After you have run this script, your Magento customer will have new attribute in administration area. You will be able to access it from your code and allow administrators to change this attribute. This added customer attribute in your Magento admin will have label “Preferred payment method”, and variable name “client_payment_method”.

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$setup = new Mage_Eav_Model_Entity_Setup('core_setup');
$setup->addAttribute('customer', 'client_payment_method', array(
	'label'		=> 'Preferred payment method',
	'type'		=> 'text',
	'input'		=> 'text',
	'visible'	=> true,
	'required'	=> false,
	'position'	=> 1,
));

Once you ran this script – you can delete it from your code. Enjoy the functionality you have achieved with custom added attribute to Magento customer!

There is an easy way to get current domain name in Zend Framework. To get domain name in Zend Framework – use following snippet in your view file.

echo $this->serverUrl();

Get number of Twitter followers using this PHP snippet is easy. Once you get all the data from Twitter, you just have to isolate followers_count. Besides followers count, you can extract following data as well:

1. id
2. name
3. screen_name
4. location
5. description
6. profile_image_url
7. url
8. friends_count
9. created_at
10. lang

Now, finally, to get number of Twitter followers, use following snippet:

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$screenName = 'stuntsnippets';
$getData = 'followers_count';
 
$xml = file_get_contents('http://twitter.com/users/show.xml?screen_name=' . $screenName);
 
if(preg_match('/' . $getData . '>(.*)</', $xml, $match) !=0)
	echo $match[1];

Notice: Don’t forget to do some PHP caching for your script. You don’t want to have too many requests toward Twitter.

Have you ever wondered how to display Magento static block inside your app/store? It is an easy task, so just use following snippet. First, you have to create your static block in Magento admin, and than use its name to load it in your web application.

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$block = Mage::getModel('cms/block')->setStoreId(Mage::app()->getStore()->getId())->load("Magento_static_block_name");
echo $block;

So, almost every website needs contact form – is it a real contact form or just a feedback from your users. We need to make a contact form as easy to deal with as possible. There is a simple way of dealing with all elements on your contact form by doing a simple trick. We are going to use a name convention to easily get all elements entered by user, to wrap them, and finally – to get them sent to the website owner.

First we shall start with a little bit of HTML as it is necessary for our contact form to live. Here – we are going to use our name convention to easily deal with details.

HTML contact form:

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<form action="contact.php" method="post">
<dl class="php_contact_form">
	<dt>
		<label for="php_contact_form[email]">E-mail:</label>
	</dt>
	<dd>
		<input type="text" name="php_contact_form[email]" />
	</dd>
	<dt>
		<label for="php_contact_form[subject]">Subject:</label>
	</dt>
	<dd>
		<input type="text" name="php_contact_form[subject]" />
	</dd>
	<dt>
		<label for="php_contact_form[message]">Message:</label>
	</dt>
	<dd>
		<textarea type="text" name="php_contact_form[message]" ></textarea>
	</dd>
	<dt>
 
	</dt>
	<dd>
		<input type="submit" value="Submit" />
	</dd>
</dl>
</form>

Now – you might have noticed that all names are in “array” naming convention. They all belong to a single parameter that is going to be posted: php_contact_form.

As we are posting data from our PHP contact form to a contact.php, this is how contact.php should look like:

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//if there is any data posted - we should process it
if(!empty($_POST)) {
  //we shall be sending e-mail with data from our php contact form,
  //so let just fill in a message
  $message = '';
 
  foreach($_POST['php_contact_form'] as $name=>$value)
    $message .= $name . ': ' . $value . '<br/>';
 
  $headers  = 'MIME-Version: 1.0' . "\r\n";
  $headers .= 'Content-type: text/html; charset=utf-8' . "\r\n";
 
  //now that we have a message from our php contact form
  //we should send it to recipient
  mail('contact@domain.com', 'New message from our php contact form', $message, $headers);
  echo 'Thank you for contacting us!';
}

Notice: Real contact form should have some form of validation on both client and server side. It should also be protected with (at least) simple php captcha to prevent spam bots from sending a large amount of SPAM mail. However – this is just an example of how PHP contact form can be made for easy handling.