Paul Maunders | Web log

Recently we were looking for a Flash video player to use on our websites. Youtube’s default player was a little bloated, so one of our developers at Fubra built an alternative youtube flv player, which looks a bit like this: We’ve also released this as a wordpress plugin. You can install it via subversion if [...]

As part of our commitment to open source, we have begun work on PHP class to make it easier to for developers to work with the UK’s government gateway. The project is hosted on Google Code, and is called php govtalk. GovTalk is a set of standards for interacting electronically with government services. In the [...]

Installing First, download the Yii Framework to somewhere sensible. I prefer to use subversion to check out the code: svn co http://yii.googlecode.com/svn/branches/1.0 /usr/share/php/Yii This will take a few minutes. Once it’s done, you can use the Yii Command Runner (yiic) to set up your web application: /usr/share/php/Yii/framework/yiic webapp /var/www/html/appname If everything went well, you should [...]

Today I’m going to be helping one of our investment companies, ByteWire set themselves up with a subversion based development environment for their Street Crime game. They will use a straight forward workflow whereby they will develop and test their code locally on their iMacs, commit working code to a subversion repository, and then check [...]

If you are running WAMP and you want to be able to send outgoing e-mails via PHP’s mail function, then you will need to edit the php.ini file and change SMTP = localhost to SMTP = smtp.yourisp.com Replacing smtp.yourisp.com with the address of your ISP’s SMTP server, e.g. smtp.ntlworld.com. The php.ini is in the bin directory [...]

Some bash commands: dig @ns1.fubra.com fubra.it axfr > /root/db.fubra.it vim /root/db.fubra.it Some PHP with line numbers: 10 11 $name = ‘Paul’; echo ‘Hello ‘.$name;

Here are some tips to help you think more about security when developing a web app.  Buy a good book on the subject, such as Securing PHP Web Applications and implement what you learn in your code. Read through Web Application Security section on of the SANS Institute 2007 top 20 security risks. There are some useful [...]

Currently there is no Adsense API for accessing account statistics / reports. Fortunately, Alex Polski (Victor Klepikovskiy) runs a project on Google Code that provides a PHP class to login and download a variety of reports from Adsense.  So, if you want to monitor your Adsense reports in your own systems, you should give his PHP Adsense Account [...]

Today I needed to use Zend Framework on my iMac’s local web server, so here’s how I installed it.  I prefer using subversion where possible to download any open source projects, and since Zend have an svn repository available I decided to use that.  sudo svn co http://framework.zend.com/svn/framework/standard/branches/release-1.7/library/ /usr/lib/php/libraries/zend-framework-1.7/ This will follow the latest updates [...]

If you get a white screen after the Mollom Captcha step when trying to add a comment to your blog, then check your PHP errors logs. I was experiencing this problem, and looking into the logs showed the following: [09-Feb-2009 11:11:53] PHP Fatal error: Call to undefined function mb_convert_encoding() in /sites/pyrosoft.co.uk/http/blog/wp-content/plugins/wp-mollom/wp-mollom.php on line 1371 The [...]