Archiv für das Monat: August, 2012

Hi,

let’s talk today about date functions in PHP.

If you are looking for an interactive clock for your homepage, then you should look into Javascript functions. That is not possible with PHP. PHP is a server side language and can’t interact direct with the browser. Ok, you could try to play around with AJAX and reloads, but this is hard and why not using easier things…

But back to the subject. Date and PHP. I’ll show you some functions of the date class of PHP. The most important is date().

Date() return an formated date. It can be the current date or a date from an variable. For example it can be a timestamp from an database field. Also can be provided a format for the date. Just date or just time or both… and in various formats.

string date ( string $format [, int $timestamp = time() ] )

Another, often used, function is mktime(). This command simply returns a UNIX timestamp. This timestamp can be saved in a database or can be used for whatever. You can provide also a date to get the timestamp for it, for example 01-03-1998.
I use it mostly without, to get the current timestamp.

int mktime ([ int $hour = date("H") [, int $minute = date("i") [, int $second = date("s") [, int $month = date("n") [, int $day = date("j") [, int $year = date("Y") [, int $is_dst = -1 ]]]]]]] )

And with strtotime() you get the timestamp of a date which is saved in a variable. For example you got from somewhere the string „2000-07-01T00:00:00+00:00“ and you need the timestamp for this date (in a string variable). Then use strtotime() and you’ll get it and can be saved into a database or whatever.

int strtotime ( string $time [, int $now ] )

These are my 3 most used date function in PHP. There are at all 50 and more. If you like to know more about them, please have a look at php.net.

I hope that could help you a bit.

Best regards
Gordon

Hi,

today I would like to talk quick about the subject „Redirection with PHP“. Quick, because there is not much to say :)

The code for a redirect in PHP looks like that:

header() is sending the HTML-header. With „Location:“ you’re telling it that it is an redirect. After it you provide the URL to which the redirect it pointing to. And with exit(); we tell the script to abort, not to execute any other code.

But I also have to mention to thing about what you do before you set an redirect. Is it a permanent redirect, because something changed in the webpage structure (for example a page got a new URL), then you should „say“ that in the redirect, else it can occur problems with the search engine rankings.

A permanent redirect looks then like that:

The line header("Status: 301 Moved Permanently"); is sending the status code that the redirect is permanent. There are also other status codes, like the 302 code, which is for temporarily redirects.
If e.g. the Google bot comes around and gets an 301 status code for a URL, then it will save the URL change and is crawling next time straight the new page. Like that the new page gets the ranking of the old page and it doesn’t get lost.

The good thing on PHP redirection is that it happened on the server side and will always work. On the other side you can make it dynamically. Redirection with the .htaccess can be also dynamic, but not as good as with PHP. Redirects in the HTML-Header are totally underground. The same for Javascript redirects. They doesn’t work at all for spider and user without Javascript.

I hope it’s helping. If not, let me have a comment :)

Best regards
Gordon