AaronHardy.com » PHP

Hosting Your Own Free Sexy Photo Gallery

Aaron Hardy — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 05:07:38 +0000

By sexy I mean good-looking but I knew using the words “free”, “sexy”, and “photo” in a post title would be worth at least 50 Google bonus points, so I couldn’t pass it up. Here’s the premise of my post:

1) I have my own web server (which supports PHP).

2) I’m too cheap to purchase good photo gallery software.

3) I’m too cheap to pay for photo-hosting services like Google Picasa or Flickr.

4) I want my photo gallery to be sexy (smooth, clean, silently loads upcoming photos, doesn’t have to load a new page for each photo, etc.).

5) I want my photo gallery to be able to support categories/events.

6) I want to be able to host hundreds of photos.

5) I want my photo gallery to be as hassle-free as possible.

So, after looking at my options, I found they were much more limited than I had hoped. Don’t get me wrong–there were a lot of options, just not a lot of good ones. In the end, I found a solution that seems to appease me for the time being. Here’s the end result for all you instant-satisfaction-seekers: http://hardyhacienda.com/photos/

Now onto the good stuff. The photo gallery takes advantage of SimpleViewer made by Felix Turner/Airtight Interactive as well as the Google Picasa desktop application. To start, follow the SimpleViewer instructions but stop after you get done with step #2. Go ahead, I’ll wait.

Okay, now that you’ve got the SimpleViewer template installed, we want to tweak it just a bit. Open up C:\Program Files\Picasa2\web\templates\simpleviewer_picasa_template\header.xml and change the contents to the following:

 version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
 maxImageWidth="1024" maxImageHeight="1024" textColor="0xFFFFFF" frameColor="0xFFFFFF" frameWidth="20" stagePadding="40" navPadding="40" thumbnailColumns="3" thumbnailRows="3" navPosition="left" vAlign="center" hAlign="center" title="<%exportDescription%>" enableRightClickOpen="true" backgroundImagePath="" imagePath="" thumbPath="thumbnails/" albumDate="<%albumDate%>">

Now restart Picasa.

What we’ve done here is added the albumDate property to our album template. This means when we export an album from Picasa, Picasa will include a property in the album’s accompanying XML file stating the median date of when the album’s photos were taken. This will later allow us to automatically order our albums according to the date. Note that this date property is formatted as month/year only, so if you have two albums with median dates in the same month they may get sorted in the wrong order. This is a limitation of Picasa that I feel Google should address. The good news is that albums with median dates in different months will be sorted correctly. Feel free to reference The Picasa Web Templating System if you’re interested in learning more.

Now that we have our template configured correctly for our needs, continue with the remaining steps in the SimpleViewer instructions.

If you continue steps 3-6 for each album (what SimpleViewer calls gallery) you’d like to show up in your gallery, you’ll have all your albums on your web server. At this point you can access each album individually by typing in the album’s address like http://hardyhacienda.com/photos/Yellowstone/ or http://hardyhacienda.com/photos/Moab/ in your browser. What we want though is a central gallery that then links to the individual albums.

Here’s how we do it. Create a file named index.php on your web server in the directory that contains all your album directories. Add the following to index.php:


	
		
		
	
	
		
			
				Galleries
				
				
 
				$albums = array();
				$mydir = dir('./');
				while(($file = $mydir->read()) !== false)
				{
					if ($file != "." && $file != ".." && is_dir($file))
					{
 
						$doc = new DOMDocument();
						$doc->load("./$file/gallery.xml");
						$albumDate = strtotime(
								$doc->getElementsByTagName("simpleviewergallery")->
								item(0)->getAttribute("albumDate"));
 
 
						$album = array(
								"date" => $albumDate,
								"name" => $file);
 
						$albumInserted = false;
						for ($i = 0; $i <= count($albums); $i++)
						{
							if ($album["date"] > $albums[$i]['date'])
							{
								$albumInserted = true;
								array_splice($albums, $i, 0, array($album));
								break;
							}
						}
 
						if (!$albumInserted)
						{
							$albums[] = $album;
						}
					}
				}
 
				foreach($albums as $album)
				{
					echo "\"#\" onclick=\"frames['viewer'].location.href = '" . 
							$album['name'] . "'; return false;\">" . $album['name'] . "
";
				}
 
				$mydir->close();
				?>

What we’re doing here is making a menu on the left side of the page that contains links to each of our albums which also happen to be subdirectories. We’re reading the gallery.xml file that accompanies each album to find the median date of the photos taken (thanks to our tweak to the SimpleViewer template). We’re then sorting the albums by that date ordered from most recent to least recent and creating a link for each album. On the right side of the page, we have an iframe. This iframe will act as a container that will hold each album as it is loaded.

In my case, the iframe by default displays a directions.php page which essentially just instructs the user to select an album by clicking a link on the left side of the page. When an album’s link is clicked, the directions.php page will be replaced by the album’s page in the iframe. If everything was set up right, you should now be hosting your own free sexy photo gallery!

I know this isn’t the most comprehensive or detailed of posts, so if you have any feedback or questions, please feel free to post a comment. Good luck!

Simple AMFPHP Example

Aaron Hardy — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 04:24:14 +0000

With the advent of Flex and RIA (Rich Internet Application) development came AMF (Action Message Format). Flex, in general, focuses only on front-end functionality, meaning it does not directly hit a database to store or retrieve persistent data. Instead, database calls are written in a more traditional back-end language like Java, PHP, Python, or .NET and such services are then exposed to be “consumed” (used) by the Flex front-end.

AMF is a protocol that allows ActionScript (the language of Flash/Flex) to call services exposed by the back-end. Additionally, if you choose, AMF allows you to translate a programmer-defined object between ActionScript and your back-end language of choice. In other words, if you have a customer class in ActionScript and you want to pass an instantiated customer object to the back-end, you simply call the exposed back-end service and pass the customer object as a parameter. The AMF layer transparently translates the ActionScript customer object into, let’s say, a customer object in Java. This functionality isn’t required. Instead of using a class you have defined, you could instead just send an integer to the backend as a parameter and, after processing, send a string back to the front-end.

Before checking out my example, I recommend checking out the Wikipedia Action Message Format article to get a basic description of AMF and links to implementations for various back-end languages. I also recommend reading AMFPHP class mapping explained by Chuck Hoffman to get a good understanding of the object translation I just described. Finally, head on over to amfphp.org (the creators of AMFPHP) to get a glimpse of available documentation, files, etc. I might add that if any of the folks over at amfphp.org don’t like me distributing AMFPHP code, let me know and I’ll modify the files I’ve posted for download. The zip file below currently contains everything you’ll need to get a simple example up and running. Now to the example…

Simple AMFPHP Example Zip File

For the example, I made a Kite Finder. Basically, you enter in a kite pilot’s name and Flex populates a person object with the pilot name entered. Flex then calls a PHP service function using AMFPHP which translates the ActionScript person object to a PHP person object on the backend. In a real environment, you would then use information from the person object to hit a database to find the pilot’s kite. In our example, we just build a kite object using dummy data. Our PHP function then returns the kite object, which AMFPHP ships back to the Flex front-end, translating it to an ActionScript kite object. In reality, the person and kite classes might be a little overboard for such a simple example. I could’ve just passed two string parameters (the pilot’s first and last name) to the PHP function and an associative array (kite info) back to the front-end, but I wanted to demonstrate AMFPHP’s object translation.

Setting up the example is fairly easy:

Upload the amfphp directory to the root directory of your website.
Open the SimpleAMFPHP project in FlexBuilder and modify the “gateway” variable in FindKiteCommand to point to your new gateway address.

That’s all! You should be able to deploy the project from within FlexBuilder and see it in action. This should work even if you’re using inexpensive web hosting. If you have questions on where code is, what’s happening, how to do something, or anything else, please…join the intimate conversation!

Object-oriented PHP :: A guide for fellow ISys junkies

Aaron Hardy — Wed, 08 Aug 2007 02:31:06 +0000

I’m currently studying Information Systems at Brigham Young University where the main language being taught to students is Java, a very object-oriented language. Some students, after having learned Java, have difficulty making the jump from Java to PHP for one reason or another. While I do not profess to have reached the level of Zen Master in PHP, I do hope I can provide some insight in a way that fellow ISys junkies can take what they’ve learned and pick up PHP if they want. As always, I’m open to improvements/corrections in my code, questions, complaints, I-could-do-it-better-than-yous, whatever. So here we go!

First off, PHP has not always been an object-oriented language and has yet to become a “pure” object-oriented language (and probably won’t ever be–it’s good at filling a distinct niche somewhere between scripting and enterprise application development). For example, you can still code in PHP without using objects at all. Also, some object-oriented features that are available in other languages are still not available in PHP, like overloading (although supported, it’s not implemented the “standard” way we’re used to in other languages) and namespaces. There are hacks that can allow for such functionality, but we’ll leave those alone for now. In any case, PHP is still my friend and it can be yours too.

Before we get into the OO (object-oriented) code, I want to give a really short intro to a few PHP basics. If you’ve already played with PHP, you’re probably safe to move onto the next page.

Defining a variable

In PHP, a variable is defined the following way:

1	$myVar = "my string";

Notice I did not have to declare $myVar as a string before setting its value. If you were to then set $myVar = 6, no conversion code on your part would be necessary; PHP would convert it from a string to an integer for you. That’s one of the beauties and the uglies of PHP, take it or leave it. Every variable name must be preceded with a dollar sign (we’ll see somewhat of an exception on the next page.) PHP is also case-sensitive, so be sure you take care of capitalization.

Outputting to the browser
To output something on the user’s browser, use the echo command:

1 2	echo "A test."; echo $myVar;

The first line prints A test. while the second line prints whatever is stored in your $myVar variable.

Concatenation and variable interpretation

Because we precede every variable name with a dollar sign, PHP can easily tell what’s a variable and what’s not. Let’s look at some code:

$name = "John Doe";
echo "Hello, $name!  Welcome to my website.
";
echo "Hello, " . $name . "! Welcome to my website.
";
echo 'Hello, $name! Welcome to my website.
';
echo 'Hello, ' . $name . '! Welcome to my website.
';

This outputs the following:
Hello, John Doe! Welcome to my website. Hello, John Doe! Welcome to my website. Hello, $name! Welcome to my website. Hello, John Doe! Welcome to my website.

In our code, using double-quotes tells PHP to interpret our variables and spit out their values. On the other hand, using single-quotes tells PHP not to interpret variables, which is why our third output line came out the way it did. Finally, using a period (.) lets you concatenate the same way that you would using the plus sign (+) in Java. Usually we’ll want to use our first method unless there’s a compelling reason not to.

Now to the fun stuff…