Corey Worrell

PHP Calendar

Go to PHP Calendar

PHP Calendar is a handy little set of classes that makes creating a calendar a very simple task. You have FULL control over how it is displayed, and can add events incredibly easy.

Kohana Framework had first created these classes for use within their framework. But development stopped, and the code was not yet fully useable. So I modified and added to their base code to create this standalone version.

Feel free to use it and abuse it. If you use it on anything and would like to share what you've done with it, please leave a comment or use my contact form to get in touch.

Kohana 3 Filter Class

Here's a class that has come in super handy for me lately. I created it for use with Kohana v3. Basically, say you have an adminstrator backend to your website and you so you have a page for blog posts and one for blog categories. Simple enough. But you wanna give your users options to filter their results so they don't have to search through hundreds or thousands of blog posts every time they wanna find a certain post. Easy enough.

But then you have the problem where the user filters the results, finds the post they want, goes to edit it, then it sends them back to the list of all posts. But whoops, they forgot they wanted to change something else in that same post. Now they have to re-filter all over again and find it. VERY ANNOYING!

So with this class you can provide it with an array of keys to keep track of over multiple page loads. It keeps every controller and actions filters seperate so that you can easily use them throughout your controllers and views. So if you want to filter by 'Author' and 'Category' then the class will look for the keys 'author' and 'category' in either $_POST or $_GET and add them to the filters. Now when the user returns to that page, all filters will still be applied. It's a big time saver!

Source and Usage on Github

Convert to HTML Entities Between Code Tags

If you're ever posting a piece of code on your blog or whatever, you've probably realized that it's a pain to have to convert any special character to its HTML entity. Why not take the pain away and let PHP handle that for you?

I'm using something similar for the comments on this blog. After I read Matthew James Taylor's post about this, I tried to come up with something using a little less code.

There really isn't a foolproof method to pull this off, and I have been told that traversing the code using the DOM would be better, but this function (as ugly as it is) actually works quite well if you have a proper HTML structure with valid code.
It checks for any <code> and <pre> tags and converts any special characters inside them to there respective HTML entity. It even accounts for nested <code> and <pre> tags, as well as any attributes you give them.

Flickr API Wrapper

There are already a couple PHP Flickr API classes out there, but they all seemed a bit over-complicated. Flickr has already done all the work for us, so why make it harder than it is. They've even got all the documentation, so if you ever need to know anything about it, just head over there.

Download Class

This class makes making a request to Flickr's API very simple. And it returns the results as a PHP object. It will even cache your requests so you aren't hitting Flickr as often, thus increasing the speed and performance of this script.

<?php

$api_key = 'your_flickr_api_key_here';

$flickr = new Flickr($api_key);

$params = array
(
    'user_id'  => 'your_flickr_user_nsid_here',
    'extras'   => 'url_m,url_sq',
    'per_page' => 10,
);

$result = $flickr->call('people.getPublicPhotos', $params);

foreach ($result->photos->photo as $photo)
{
    $p = $flickr->call('photos.getInfo', array('photo_id' => $photo->id));

    echo '<h2>'.$photo->title.'</h2>';
    echo '<a href="'.$photo->url_m.'"><img src="'.$photo->url_sq.'" alt="" /></a>';
    echo nl2br($p->photo->description->_content);
}

// Example using chaining

$result = Flickr::factory($api_key)->call('people.getPublicPhotos', $params);

For a live demo, just check out my sidebar over on the right.

CSS Compressor

So I've been noticing quite a few articles lately about speeding up your website, and compressing static files and all that. It got me thinking, and I started to mess around with some ideas I had.

Now I know there are a lot of CSS compressors on the web today, but most of them involve copying and pasting your code into a textarea, and it giving you a compressed version that you have to upload to your server and reference in your HTML document. But what if you have 4 or 5 different style sheets that you are going to be editing quite a bit, and don't want to bother having to merge your code and compress it all the time.