Fbloggs Geekdom

The following PHP code parses the date portion out of a MySQL date column and lets you format it according to the formatting rules of the PHP date function.

// Parse date portion of a date field and format it according to the date() function.
// Second parm is optional.
function FmtDateTime($dt, $fmt = "F d, Y")
{
	$arr = explode("-", substr($dt, 0, 10));
	//	$fmt of "m/d/Y" prints date in mm/dd/yyyy format.
	//  $fmt of "F d, Y" prints date in Spelled out month day, YYYY format

	echo date($fmt, mktime(0,0,0, $arr[1], $arr[2], $arr[0]));
}

To use it, you can do something like this:

<?php
   FmtDateTime($scdDate, "l d F, Y" ); ?>

(This prints 2009-09-15 as “Tuesday 15 September, 2009″).

If you omit the second parameter on the function call, the date will print like this:
“September 15, 2009″

Tags: Dates, MySQL, php, Web Development

Feedback is a jQuery plugin that lets you send feedback to a user in the form of an info message or error message, associated with any page element. It uses the jQuery UI plugin to determine the default styles of the info and error messages, but you can also use your own styles. Complete details, including demo, documentation and downloads are on this page.

Tags: JavaScript, jQuery, jQuery plugin, jQuery UI, plugin, Web Development

How to restrict access to specific content in a Drupal site so only authenticated users (those who have logged in) can view and access it. (Short answer – install the ‘content-access’ plugin.)…

Tags: Content Management, Drupal, Drupal modules, Site protection, Web Development

Firebug – debug your applications. An absolute must. Best features:

• Debugger – step through, over, etc.
• Console log for monitoring AJAX interactions -shows parms sent, data returned, round-trip time.

Web Developer – fantastic CSS diagnostic support. Best features:

• View generated source – important if your script modifies the original DOM of your page
• Display Element Information – shows all the properties of an element in a convenient popup. To use, press Ctrl+Shift+F or select menu Information/Display Element Information
• Edit CSS – lets you edit the CSS selectors in real-time, and shows you the results – almost as you type

MeasureIt. Lets you find the height and width of any element or area of the page, in pixels. Helps diagnose CSS issues, for example, when you use combinations of margin, width, padding and border attributes.

Codeburner from Sitepoint, one of my favorite online journals (www.sitepoint.com). Integrates with Firebug to provide comprehensive cross-reference information on HTML and CSS. Best feature:

• Browser compatibility tables

Tags: CSS, FireFox, JavaScript, jQuery, Web Development

Summary: Quirks of checkbox markup in HTML – differences between IE and FireFox…

Tags: Browser differences, HTML, JavaScript, Web Development

Tables do not conform to the normal CSS box model as W3C explains .

A consequence of this is that you cannot use the margin property for cells or rows. Citing the above page: “Internal table elements generate rectangular boxes with content and borders. Cells have padding as well. Internal table elements do not have margins. (my emphasis). So, something like this:

tr.spaceme { margin-top:15px; }

does nothing.

I wanted to have a table with a ‘heading’ row followed by details, another heading row, more details, etc. So the solution is to style an empty row using the padding and/or border properties. Suppose we want to have 15 pixels of white space between the top of the next heading row. Here’s some example markup:


CSS:

<style>
tr.gap {padding: 15px; }
</style>

HTML:

<table>
<tr class="gap"><td colspan="2">&nbsp;</td></tr>
<tr><td>Customer: 1</td><td>Name: Acme</td></tr>
<tr><td>Order: foo1</td><td> Item: bar1 </td></tr>
<tr><td>Order: foo2</td><td> Item: bar2 </td></tr>
<tr class="gap"><td colspan="2">&nbsp;</td></tr>
<tr><td>Customer: 1</td><td>Name: Bolts Inc.</td></tr>
<tr><td>Order: foo3</td><td> Item: bar3 </td></tr>
<tr><td>Order: foo4</td><td> Item: bar4 </td></tr>
</table>


I don’t really like this, because it requires an unnecessary table row for each heading. My example requires a colspan, too, as I suspect in most cases tables like these will have more than one column for the headings and/or details. Anyway, I’m posting this to remind myself of this quirk in the CSS box model, as I’m bound to forget it next time I have to render tables like this.

Tags: CSS, HTML, Web Development

FireFox doesn’t have a native global event handler. Here’s how to create one using FireFox’s event-capturing model.

Tags: Browser differences, FireFox, IE, JavaScript, Web Development

Firebug beta 1.0 is now available. This is by far the best toolbar available for FireFox or IE for debugging web applications. See This blog entry at Sitepoint for more details.  A few  of the features I really like are:

• The debugger  – identifies exact line of script in error.
• The HTML view – lets you view contents of externally linked Javascript files, also.
• The CSS inspector – shows you all ancestor css rules for elements, not just the current CSS rule, so you can see the total effect of the cascade.
• The ability to change CSS settings on the fly. For example, hover over a color, click on it, then change the RGB value to see another color – it does this for the specific area on the page, as well as in the sheet.

Tags: FireFox, JavaScript, Web Development