~/jrtashjian

php

  • Featured Image Fallback for Child Pages

    Continuing from the same project where I needed to highlight a parent page in a WordPress menu when on a child page, featured images is another place where I wanted some custom functionality. This custom functionality I’m about to share wasn’t necessarily a requirement but I wanted to make it as simple as possible for the…

  • Highlighting parent page in WordPress menus

    Menus in WordPress are a really simple and easy way to manage various navigation bars in a theme. wp_nav_menu() does a lot of the work automatically and includes a number of CSS classes for styling. Highlighting the current page is especially useful using .current-menu-item and .current-menu-ancestor classes. There was one issue I recently ran into though.…

  • Postmark API Wrapper for CodeIgniter

    Notice: This project is no longer maintained. I’ve been using Postmark and it’s API for quite a while. If you’re still sending out emails through PHP’s mail() function, you need to check out Postmark! With Postmark you can off-load those transactional emails and not have to worry about it yourself. While there is a Postmark API…

  • CodeIgniter Form with Text CAPTCHA

    “A CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing Test To Tell Computers and Humans Apart) is a program that protects websites against bots by generating and grading tests that humans can pass but current computer programs cannot.” captcha.net The current CAPTCHA system I started using is Text CAPTCHA. The Text CAPTCHA web service generates text-based CAPTCHAs which…

  • Turn on Error Reporting

    It’s PHP 101, yet so many developers fail to remember it. Always enable the display of errors on your development server, disable them on the live server. Showing all errors will help you find those stubborn programming mistakes quickly. Set these options in your php.ini file.

  • Modular Sidebar in WordPress

    Like all good developers, I go back and look at past code to see what I could have improved and how I can apply the new knowledge to a current project.Both of the projects in question had sidebars with sections that are shared throughout the site. However, not all sections are being displayed at once.…

  • CodeIgniter’s alternator() function


    It’s surprising to me how often I find little functions for tedious tasks, that CodeIgniter already has built in. One of these functions is the alternator() function in the String Helper.

  • Image Thumbnail Creation & Caching With CodeIgniter

    How you handle the saving and display of images is very important while planning your web app. Questions you would ask yourself include: How should images be stored? What will the standard naming conventions be? How will thumbnails be created? In this article, I will be focusing on how I decided the way thumbnails would…