I purposely asked a lot of myself with my original design document, as I wanted a challenge, and have enjoyed trying to achieve all I set out to do. I ran out of time on a few features, namely the ‘remember me’ and ‘forgotten password’ functions, but these were always going to be bonus options. I did manage to read up a little on how to achieve these features, so I will try them out at a later date.

I also managed to add a few features that i had not planned, like the offensive words check and the change password page, so overall I feel I did a good job of meeting my expectations.

Given the chance again, I would have used a template for the style, or updated a current site, but I still managed to make the site look good and sit nicely, and I believe for this task, the functionality is more important than the look.

I have enjoyed the challenge of this task greatly, and now look forward to using my learned knowledge in the real world, as I have just been given a job of creating a site that features, among other things, a members login area!

I finally ended up following the technique used in the Ullman book (Ullman 2008). It took a bit of fiddling to shoehorn it into my site, as I added it to the display_listings function, so I used PHP_SELF for the links, for example, but eventually I got it all working nicely. The calculations take a bit to get your head around (or at least mine did), but taking it step by step, it all made sense in the end.

Later, I also added pagination to the ‘favourites’ page.

PHPMySQLTutorial. 2008. Paging Using PHP.http://www.php-mysql-tutorial.com/wikis/php-tutorial/paging-using-php.aspx (accessed August 30, 2009).

Ullman, L. 2008. Common Programming Techniques (Paginating Query Results Section). In PHP 6 and MySQL 5, 277-284. Berkeley: Peachpit Press.

This was so the new page knew which review to display in the form. While testing this page, I realised I had made a small error in my clean() function for checking offensive words. I realised that because I had the ‘if’ error message outside the while loop, the loop would continue regardless of whether it found an error or not. This meant that an error would only be returned if the last offensive word in the db was found.

To fix this, I just had to move the ‘if’ clause inside the ‘while’ loop, and add a ‘break’ as soon as an error was found.

The example just had the user enter the new password twice, but I wanted the user to enter their current password as well for extra security.

I then checked that the current password matched the user id in the db before proceeding

Then I would update the db when all was validated, and check a change had been made by using the mysql_affected_rows function

Ullman, L. 2008. Example – User Registration (Password Management Section). In PHP6 and MySQL5, 524-528. Berkeley: Peachpit Press.

After the form validated, I then updated all the users details, regardless of whether the details had changed or not. Both these techniques where picked up from the Ullman book (Ullman 2008)

Ullman, L. 2008. Common Programming Techniques (Editing Existing Records Section). In PHP 6 and MySQL 5, 274. Berkeley: Peachpit Press.

All I did to achieve this was to put the ‘currentpage’ id in an if clause, as the ALA article did, but then placed the link in an else clause, so it only became a link if not the current page. I already had the page title in a variable, so I just used this again to check for a match with the navigation.

So now the current page is unlinked and will be highlighted when I get round to adding style!

Pearce, J. 2003. Keeping Navigation Current With PHP.http://www.alistapart.com/articles/keepingcurrent/ (accessed August 27, 2009).

Still plenty to do. On we go…

I searched around, but most tutorials added a filter and replaced the words, like these ‘YouTube’ videos that I found useful as a starting point (PHPAcademy 2009). I just wanted an error message to be displayed instead. I also decided that I would store the offensive words in a new table in the database to make adding new words simple. After much searching, I found this forum discussion that provided the inspiration for what I eventually did (CodingForums 2009).

It still used a replacement technique, but otherwise was what I was after. I decided to look up the php string functions to see if I could find a suitable one to use instead of replace. I found the answer at W3Schools (W3Schools 2009). stristr() would return a value if it found a matching pattern in some text, and is case insensitive, so it was perfect for the job.

So I created a function called clean() to check through the submitted string, and return an error message if it found anything offensive

Now I just need to fill the db table with loads of offensive words!!

CodingForums. 2009. Censoring messages through PHP http://codingforums.com/showthread.php?t=171988 (accessed August 27, 2009).

PHPAcademy. 2009. PHP Tutorials: Swear Word Filter (Part 1 & 2) (YouTube videos). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TUTbODM5JF4&feature=related (accessed August 27, 2009).

W3Schools. 2009. PHP stristr() Function. http://www.w3schools.com/PHP/func_string_stristr.asp (accessed August 27, 2009).

I then set about creating the ‘submit review’ page itself. It starts out similar to the ‘register’ page and uses the same validation technique from Ashwell (Ashwell 2008).

My first new addition was to add htmlentities() to the posted variables to help prevent XSS attacks (Ullman 2008l)

We need to first check that the user has not already reviewed the selected product. This is done by performing a simple sql check, similar to the registration check on the username, that displayes a message and exits the script if a record is returned that matches the current user id and product id

The form includes a pulldown menu for the ‘Rating’ score. I first had to look up how to do this, as it was such a long time since I had done this!! (Castro 2006). For validation, I checked that the default ‘-Your Rating-’ was not posted, meaning that a score had not been selected, and also confirmed that the selection was numeric, just in case.

As I had done previously, I wanted the error message to be displayed along with the form and inputted data, so I had to make the form ‘sticky’ again. This was easy for the ‘Review Title’, but for the others I had to do a bit more research. I found how to make the pulldown menu sticky in the Ullman book (Ullman 2008k). This involves checking to see if the posted rating matches each option, and adding selected = “selected” if it does

The Ullman book didn’t seem to cover making ‘sticky’ textareas, But I found the solution on PHP Builder (PHPBuilder 2008). It turned out to be quite simple, just echo the entered text back into the textarea!

Then once the data has all been validated, it gets written to the db as per ‘Research’. Done

Ashwell, S. 2008. PHP form validation basics.http://www.total-php.com/article/17/php-form-validation-basics/ (accessed August 1, 2009).

Castro, E. 2006. HTML, XHTML, and CSS, Sixth Edition (Visual Quickstart Guide): Peachpit Press.

PHPBuilder. 2008. Making a textarea sticky.http://www.phpbuilder.com/board/showthread.php?t=10356687 (accessed August 26, 2009).

Ullman, L. 2008k. Example – E-Commerce (Page 550). In PHP6 and MySQL, 550. Berkeley: Peachpit Press.

Ullman, L. 2008l. Preventing XSS Attacks (in Security Methods). In PHP 6 and MySQL 5, 374. Berkeley: Peachpit Press.

I limited the results to only include products with a rating of at least 9, and limited the return to just 2. So now if you load the Home Page you get something like this

And on reload, you may get something like this

Next, I wanted the user to be able to view all high rated products, so I created a link to a new ‘favourites’ page. This used a similar query as the Home Page, but instead of the random order and limit, it is just ordered by rating.

This worked fine, but when a user went into the product details from the favourites page, I wanted the breadcrumbs to list ‘favourites’ rather than the products category. I originally thought of creating a session in the favourites page that if set would do the job. I got this working, but after some more thought, I decided to append the url instead, due to the problems I had previously with sessions.

So I added a new value to the url (Ullman 2008i) in the link

and then added a clause to check for this value in the product detail page (Ullman 2008k), before the switch clause to display the breadcrumbs

So now if a product is selected from the ‘Favourites’ page, the breadcrumbs look like this

Ullman, L. 2008i. Common Programming Techniques (Sending Values to a Script Section). In PHP 6 and MySQL 5, 260-263. Berkeley: Peachpit Press.

Ullman, L. 2008j. Introduction to SQL – Numeric functions. In PHP 6 and MySQL 5, 150-151. Berkeley: Peachpit.

Ullman, L. 2008k. Common Programming Techniques (Using Hidden Form Inputs Section). In PHP 6 and MySQL 5, 264-266. Berkeley: Peachpit Press.