http://www.edmondscommerce.co.uk/blog Web Design, Development, Ecommerce and SEO in the UK Fri, 18 Jul 2008 13:09:13 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en If you are trying to get a curl script which needs follow on location functionality to run on a server which has either open_basedir or safe mode enabled you will get an error message similar to the following: CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION cannot be activated when in safe_mode or an open_basedir is set After a ... http://www.edmondscommerce.co.uk/blog/curl/php-curl-curlopt_followlocation-and-open_basedir-or-safe-mode/ Creating regular expressions can sometimes be a frustrating experience. Generally I find using regular expressions intuitive and easy, with quick and powerful results. However every now and then you stumble into a regular expression scenario that you just can't seem to crack. When this happens you might find yourself trying and ... http://www.edmondscommerce.co.uk/blog/regular-expressions/regular-expression-test-tool/ Some people like their excel files. For people who want their data exported in an excel format checkout this chunk of code. It's really easy :-) First of all you need to download this php excel class Now try this code: [php] $query = mysql_query("select * from table"); while($q = mysql_fetch_assoc($query)){ $output[] = $q; } require_once "excel.php"; $export_file ... http://www.edmondscommerce.co.uk/blog/php/php-dead-easy-excel-export/ I have recently completed the second stage of development for my ultimate oscommerce checkout system. This is a replacement for the standard osCommerce checkout which splits into numerous stages, meaning that to actually place an order meant visiting about 5 different pages. My system rolls every single stage into a single ... http://www.edmondscommerce.co.uk/blog/php/ultimate-oscommerce-checkout-fast-and-friendly/ Sending an email with PHP is pretty straight forwards. It's very useful for emailing reports generated from cron jobs etc. Sometimes though you need your application to email an attachment. After a load of messing around I have hacked together this email attachment PHP function. [php] function email_attachment($to_email, $email, $subject,$our_email_name, $our_email, $file_location, $default_filetype='application/zip'){ $email = ... http://www.edmondscommerce.co.uk/blog/php/php-email-attachment-function/ Check out this simple and easy function for extracting the name from an email address. It's not very advanced but it is quite handy. Of course it could be used for similar applications by simply changing the character to split on. [php] function email_name($email_address, $split='@'){ return ucwords(strtolower(substr($email_address, 0, strripos($email_address, $split)))); } [/php] There are some very ... http://www.edmondscommerce.co.uk/blog/php/get-name-from-email-address/ It seems that there are many UK webmasters who struggle to find a reliable UK based web developer who specialises in PHP. I have heard stories of people who claim to be osCommerce experts but in reality they simply know how to install a few contributions and that's about it. If ... http://www.edmondscommerce.co.uk/blog/php/freelance-oscommerce-uk/ Sometimes you want your script to pause for a short period of time before repeating a loop or proceeding to the next step. This may be to reduce server load or even to simulate the natural pauses that a person would make whilst browsing a site. This kind of thing ... http://www.edmondscommerce.co.uk/blog/php/php-random-sleep-function-with-flush/ If you are changing your URL structure, for example when moving to a search engine friendly URLs system, you need to be able to let Google and all the other search engines that the page has moved to the new URL. You really don't want to display the same content ... http://www.edmondscommerce.co.uk/blog/search-engine-optimisation/php-301-redirect-function-with-headers-check-and-javascript-fallback/ Server Migration Orders / Customers Synchronisation This contribution is for people who have moved or are moving server. When this happens you have to update your DNS records to point your domain name at your new server. However it takes a little bit of time for this change to fully propogate ... http://www.edmondscommerce.co.uk/blog/oscommerce/oscommerce-contribution-released-server-migration-synchronisation/