Vile Works

To spare some time I tryed googleing for “don’t show trackbacks in recent comments” but wasn’t able to find anything relevant at first glance.

So, if you have the FreePress Recent Comments Widget and the long site titles from the trackbacks/pingbacks are breaking your design, here’s your quick tip from Vile Works:

• go to Dasboard > Plugins > Recent Comments (edit)
• find this line (line 234 in recentCommentsWidget.php):

  $request .= "AND comment_approved = '1' ORDER BY comment_ID DESC LIMIT $limit";

• change it to:

  $request .= "AND comment_approved = '1' AND comment_type <> 'trackback' AND comment_type <> 'pingback' ORDER BY comment_ID DESC LIMIT $limit";

What you’re doing is adding a condition in the mySQL query that the comment type should not be trackback nor pingback (trackbacks and pingbacks are also stored in the wp_comments table in the database).

Good luck!

PS: I don’t know about other recent comments plugins but this particular one offers a pretty useful fp_get_recent_comments() function you can call in your theme. Here’s what parameters you can pass into it:

• Number of comments to show: Total number of comments to display
• Number of words per comment excerpt: The first N words of the comment will be listed
• Max comments per post: This option is a “cap” to ensure that multiple posts are included in the list, even if all the recent comments were from a single post.
• Max letters per word: This option is to deal with long “words” in the comments (specifically raw URLs) that can interfere with the formating of the list, depending on the CSS rules applied.

In this tutorial I’ll walk you through the steps involved in building a databaseless PHP admin section for Smooth Gallery.

When done, without much effort you should be able to adapt the code to fit any similar JavaScript image gallery(/slider/switcher/swapper… whatever).

So let’s take a look at it:

• the manager (demo)
• the gallery you’re managing
  

Smooth Gallery Manager

As mentioned on the manager page, the password is “demo” and you don’t have sweat about  removing/adding/reordering images—the manager in the demo resets the file to an initial input each time a user logs in.

For faster testing: right click some photo from the internet, select copy image location and paste it in the Add New Item/Image location field (that’s the only required field). Then press Add. Then in the Edit Items part copy and paste image locations from one item to another and then update it.

You might want to download the gallery + manager before continuing:

download: Smooth Gallery Manager (202.90KB) clicks: 146 description: Databaseless PHP admin pannel for Smooth Gallery.

So how come no databases?

It’s an image gallery, it’s not gonna have thousands of entries. There’s not much justification in creating a database for 5-20 items. We’ll keep it all in the HTML.

And this will give us a chance to work with a really neat tool: PHP Simple HTML DOM Parser. This HTML parser written in PHP5+ is going to save us a lot of work. And I think this won’t be the last you hear of it here on Vile Works.

1. The logic behind it, in plain English

We’re going to have a simple log in/log out functionality, we don’t want anyone who knows the manager’s URI to be able edit our gallery.
After the log in, two main options will be available: add new item and edit existing items. …And a log out link.

if logged in
	if received 'add item'
		add the item;
	display 'add item' form;
	if received 'update items'
		update all the items;
	display 'update items' form;
	display 'log out' link;
else
	display 'log in' form;

The conditioned actions “if received ‘add item’ -> add the item” and “if received ‘update items’ -> update the items” are placed in the code before their forms so that they will display a success or error message in the page just above the form that was submitted.

The “add new item” functionality will add a new item at the beginning of the gallery: the image along with its title, description and a link to another page.

The “update items” will allow us to:

• change the items’ titles, descriptions, images and the URL the images link to
• delete items
• and to reorder the items

Continue reading…

Here’s the deal: I need to store some sensitive data (user names and passwords) in a flat file. I don’t want to make any use of databases because this would defeat the whole purpose of the project. Of course, the passwords will be md5 encrypted in the file, but this wouldn’t be enough.

This neat little login system, Micro Login System, seems to have the basic stuff for me to start with but, as said it stores the user info in a text file.
The contents of userpwd.txt would have been:

admin:3089af3a625carf15ed2a1a93684413ffa
user1:75580656a394292460ebb4b036ebeaf1
user2:c67ac4665947cd23ff7d1d180b8e41d5

That’s user : md5( password ).
I was concerned about this because anyone who knew about the system could have entered address/userpwd.txt in the address box and gotten that info.

My solution

Php files are pretty secure right?…

Continue reading…

How I use captcha without making my users complete the barely readable word

Capthca sucks. For more information on how much captcha can suck see John Willis’ post Top 10 Worst Captchas.
But at the same time it can be really annoying for webmasters to have their forms unprotected with all the spam bots running free out there.

What I wanted was to have the commenting feature protected against spam bots without having the innocent human users ruining their eyes on captcha like images, or complete any mathematical equation or any other additional question fields.

One very important difference between a spam bot and a human using a web browser is that the first can’t run JavaScript code. However, this isn’t a perfect criteria of selection, because there are humans browsing the web using browsers without JavaScript support (Opera Mini for mobile devices for example).

My ideea (and as I did some Google searches, I found out other people had similar ideas) was the followig algorithm:

Does the user have JavaScript enabled?
If yes, he’s ok. Let him comment.
No? He’s a suspect. Read him his rights and give him the ultimate “are you human?” test.

To do this I left the captcha system enabled and in place and wrote 2 extra lines of JavaScript that:

//complete the text field with the correct word from the image:
$('secretword').value='nospam';
//hide the div containing the captcha image and the text field:
$('captcha').style.display='none';

Continue reading…

Put your city on the map in 4 layers. Create an artistic old map of your area.

Here’s what you should be achieving:

Step 1: Getting the actual map

Go to maps.yahoo.com, find your area and zoom in to a desired level—I went in somewhere between City and Street view in some area in Bucharest, Romania but you can also do a Country view. If your part of the world isn’t covered by yahoo maps, try google maps or get a regular image of a map fmor the area you need.

Update: Simon suggests in a comment below that to avoid any legal implications in using a screen capture from Google or Yahoo Maps in your artwork, you should rather go with an open map provider as openstreetmap.org.

Hit the PrintScreen key, go in Photoshop and paste it in a new document and then Crop (C key) the image keeping only the desired part. Use the Patch Tool or the Healing Brush Tool to remove the center cross.

Step 2: Applying the old paper texture to give it a vintage look

For the second step you need an old grunge paper texture. I used this free image from cgtextures.

Continue reading…