If you are using Yii PHP framework you are using one of the fastest PHP frameworks around. Sometimes there are minor things that we want to do and couldn't find a document that is to the point and precise in what you are looking after. This Quick Tip article will show you how to use custom layout for your controllers and actions Controllers When you want to use custom layout other than //layouts/main then you can do it in several different ways Option 1 Include $layout property in your class definition as shown below [crayon-65766a00c03a3237407417/]  Option 2 Use init() method of Controller [crayon-65766a00c03a8720414179/] Option 3 Use beforeAction() to overwrite default value of layout property [crayon-65766a00c03a9585846890/] Please note that when you do any of the above layout is applied to all action views. If you however want to only apply a custom layout to one of the controller action then you do it this way Apply custom layout to a Controller Action [crayon-65766a00c03aa199256953/] As we see that in above snippet we are overwriting default value of layout property for just our action Test. Other action views will still be rendered in default or controller layout. I hope that this helps   … [Read more...]

Hi Guys, Yaf framework appears to be the fastest framework around, logically so because its built with C and compiled in a PHP extension. While installing Yaf, I ran into a problem where it seems like make was complaining about pcre.h missing and progress get halted at make: *** [yaf_router.lo] Error 1 ERROR: `make' failed To solve this first I would like to point out to run a yum update [crayon-65766a00c0b3f968334277/] Secondly make sure you have all of the stuff below [crayon-65766a00c0b43623010355/] and now you should install yaf normally through pecl now as shown below [crayon-65766a00c0b44604024713/] This should work now, and finally you should add the compiled so extension to php.ini file [crayon-65766a00c0b45579896788/] add line below [crayon-65766a00c0b46676868236/] Once this is done restart your apache service and yaf as module will now be available with all its APIs and stuff I hope this helps. If I missed a point or 2 please leave your comment for others to benefit from. Cheers,   … [Read more...]

Hi Guys, Just a quick tip here. There are times when you would like to convert a Timezone (say America/New_York) to another Timezone (say UTC) With classes such as DateTime and DateTimeZone available from php 5.2+ this task has become piece of cake. Let me show you how its done. In our example we will be converting America/New_York to UTC time Good thing is that Day light savings are taken into consideration automatically. Code snippet [crayon-65766a00c0c9a674792786/] This is it you can create a function for the above code in your Util class as shown below and get some conversions happening.  Generic Function [crayon-65766a00c0c9d880816168/] Usage [crayon-65766a00c0c9e037814750/]   Just in case you would like to add to above solution please leave you comments.   I hope this helps     … [Read more...]

Hi Guys, In the previous post I showed you how to get pages indexed by Google. We used function file_get_contents() to get page as HTML and then parse it to extract the value that we are interested in.   This post is pretty much the same logic with only difference that we will be using CURL to get the contents and the parse it Pages indexed by Bing can be quickly checked with query site:yoursite.com and the Number that we are interested in is directly under the search box with value something like this "1231123 Results" This post shows you how to extract that value. The PHP Code snippet Here is a function that you can include in your utility class or just [ltu] [crayon-65766a00c0db5056574326/]   [/ltu] Usage Using the above function as per the previous post is quite save and is shown below [crayon-65766a00c0db8005415764/] Bing does not have any API as such that can give you this value. So this is kinda workaround. If I am wrong to say this please correct me. I hope that this helps Cheers. … [Read more...]

Hi Guys, Lately I have been giving undivided attention to my new born daughter so for writing lengthy how-tos, I am finding less time for. But that doesn't mean that I am unable to share some quick how tos. You see, that in many Browser Extensions and/or toolbars that give information on SEO stuff they list page indexed by various search engines such as Yahoo, Bing and Google. An example is shown below. This post shows you how to get that value from Google. The PHP Code snippet Here is a function that you can include in your utility class or just [ltu] [crayon-65766a00c0ebc002843343/] Just in case above doesn't work then you can try out a curl request such as the one shown below, you may need to check if google returns a "document moved" status. In that case you will have to copy whatever Google suggest to make it work. [crayon-65766a00c0ebe253119083/] [/ltu] Usage Using the above function is quite simple and is shown below [crayon-65766a00c0ebf176161143/] This is not very pretty but there is no standard API that I am aware of doing the same. In post to come we will be looking  "Find how many pages are Indexed by Bing using PHP" Idea is the same but regular expression will be different. I hope that this helps Cheers. … [Read more...]

Hi Guys, This is a quick TIP so that I don't have a burden of not sharing this age old function I wrote ages ago with you :) Anyway there are many occasion when you would like to problematically adjust say brightness, red, green, blue depths for a color code, Let me show you how to do it in PHP PHP Function [crayon-65766a00c15a3318671172/] Above is a simple to use method which you can use and modify as per your needs. Let me show you some example usage for this function   Usage 1 - Converting RGB to HEX This example shows how to use the above function to convert our rgb() values to a HEX code [crayon-65766a00c15a6269649092/] Above will print #CC8800   Usage 2 - Converting HEX code to RGB This example usage shows how to utilize above function to convert a HEXadecimal color code to rgb() values [crayon-65766a00c15a7903473710/] Will print [crayon-65766a00c15a8839469018/] As you've got the RGB values you can adjust them to suit your purpose. You can further shrink this function by atleast 3 more lines. I hope this helps Cheers       … [Read more...]