Tag Archive - information

An Overview of Magento’s Get and Set Methods

February 16, 2011 in Magento with Comments Off

Magento handles its get and set methods in a way that if you do not understand how it works it can be confusing to you. In the beginning of this article you have to take a leap of faith and believe in magic.

In Magento you can take nearly any model and get all the information about it with a simple function call. See the example below:

$product = Mage::getModel('catalog/product')->load(1500);
print_r($product->debug());

This code will return an array of all the basic information about the product. For this example lets say that it only returned two elements to the array “name” and “meta_description”.

Now in order to get this information you will have to take the information and camel case it to create the function. So to get the information you would write the following:

echo $product->getName();
echo $product->getMetaDescription();

Do you see how the Meta Description function was formatted? The first letter of the words are capitalized (or camelized) to create the function. So lets say you had an attribute called this_really_important_long_attribute you would call $product->getThisReallyImportantLongAttribute()

Now that you understand that, in order to set the attributes value, you simply replace “get” with “set” and pass the variable as a parameter of the function. So to set the name you would make the following function call:

$product->setName($new_name);

Ok remember when I said that you had to believe in magic? That is because if you look at the Product model, you will not find these functions defined anywhere. In fact if you are hardcore you can follow the class all the way to the top and you will not find these functions defined.

Ok now that you believe in magic, let’s take the curtain away and show you how Magneto accomplishes this. Nearly every class in Magento extends from the Varien Object (which is located in the /lib/Varien/Object.php file). You will see there is a getData() and setData() functions. These look like they could do the actual setting and getting but this is not the magic we are looking for.

Farther down in the file you are going to find the __call() function. This is the magic. This magic here is actually from PHP. The __call() function gets called anytime you call a function on a class that does not exist. The __call() function takes two parameters. The first one is the name of function that was called, the second one is the data that was passed to the function.

Now what Magento does is take the function that was called, determine if the function is a get or set function. Then it parses the string to find the attribute and then it makes the appropriate function call to get or set the data.

Once you see how this works you can see how awesome this functionality actually is.

Using jQuery Listnav Plugin

February 13, 2010 in Learn jQuery Now with 2 Comments

Yesterday I was looking around for a creative way to display what will eventually become a very large list of information. Generally I would just use extra links and sort them alphabetically. For me it had never seen like the most ideal solution. Forcing the user to wait while the page reloads itself is actually a bad solution. What if you could just have all the information load once and the user could then instantly browse all that information?

This is how I came across the jQuery ListNav Plugin by iHwy. It does exactly what I was looking for. It takes a large list of information and makes it very easy to work with.

All you have to do is place the location you want the navigation bar to go, then you create your unordered list, and then just put in a single jQuery command and it does the rest. It could not be simplier.

I have so many different ideas where this could be used. The one I probably see is creating an interactive product listing for an eCommerce site. Many websites make HTML versions of their sitemaps for SEO rankings. These pages generally have little to no use for the end customer because it usually is just a bunch of links displayed. With this plugin, you really could make this information useable by customers. A very neat concept.

You can view the demo of the plugin in action here. You can also view how I used this on another one of my websites by clicking here.

Creating a jQueryUI Accordian

February 6, 2010 in Learn jQuery Now with Comments Off

An accordion is the ideal choice for when you have to put a lot of information on the screen, but you do not have a lot of screen real estate available for that information.

Luckily for us we can create an accordion very easily using jQueryUI.

First thing you need to do is place all of your information inside your HTML like this:


<div id="accordion">
	<a href="#">First Section Title</a>
	<div>First Section's Content would be placed inside of this div</div>

	<a href="#">Second Section Title</a>
	<div>First Section's Content would be placed inside of this div</div>

	.... Repeat this for as many sections you want ....

</div>

Now that you have your HTML structure set up, now all you have to do is use some Javascript to tell jQuery UI to turn it into a the accordion.


<script type="text/javascript">
	jQuery(document).ready(function(){
		$('.accordion .head').click(function() {
			$(this).next().toggle('slow');
			return false;
		}).next().hide();
	});
</script>

Now you have a very easy way to put a large amount of information inside of a limited space.

Securing Passwords With PHP

February 5, 2010 in Learn PHP Now with Comments Off

Any website that stores users login information has to store their passwords. One thing that provides an extra layer of security for your users information is to do one way encryption on their passwords. You could in theory store their passwords as plain text, but if someone were able to get in to your database, they would have instant access to every users account.

One way encryption allows the password to be store in a secure manner. In fact it is so secure that you cannot decrypt it to recover the encrypted data. In order to authenticate the user you actually have to encrypt submitted data and compare the results that way.

One of the most widely used ways to accomplish one way encryption is to create an MD5 hash of the password. Lucky for us, it is so incredibly easy to create an MD5 hash of a string. You simply use the function md5(). See the example below:

<?

$encrypted_password = md5("secret");

?>

The value of $encrypted_password is the secured password.

Use cURL to Connect To Another System

October 27, 2009 in Learn PHP Now with Comments Off

cURL is a very useful tool used to pragmatically connect and interact with other systems to do various tasks like download a Web Page or RSS feed. It is also used to send information to another computer and get a response. A common example of using cURL is when you are purchasing something online. When you get your shipping quote or authorizing your credit card, you are very likely using something like cURL.

<?
$ch = curl_init($url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $fields);
$result = curl_exec ($ch);
?>

These 5 lines of code do a lot. In line 1 you begin creating your transaction by calling curl_init() and passing the URL you want to connect to (in this case we have a variable called $url).

Lines 2-4 set different options for the transaction. The CURLOPT_HEADER option is set to zero to signify we do not want the header information in the response. CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER tells cURL to assign the data we receive to a variable rather than simply output it to the screen. CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS sets what data we want to send in the header of our request. This is a very important option when interacting with other systems as this is generally where you will put your XML or other header data that is required by the system you are connecting with.

Line 5 actually executes the request. It will reach out to the $url, with $fields in the POST areas of variables and putting the data we received into the variable $result. With this variable you can do whatever you need in order to make your application work.

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