Tag Archive - lt

Give Your Command Line Script Full Access to Magento

February 5, 2011 in Magento with Comments Off

In the past year, I have had the pleasure of having to write a lot of scripts that accomplish certain tasks inside Magento. It is not immediately obvious how to do this, but once you know how, you will love the power that it gives you.

In your PHP script simply put the following at the top:

<?php
error_reporting(E_ALL);
ini_set('display_errors', '1');

// Load Up Magento Core
define('MAGENTO', realpath('/path/to/magento'));

require_once(MAGENTO . '/app/Mage.php');

$app = Mage::app();

?>

You can now do anything you would normally do inside Magento. I usually end up loading and manipulating a models in my scripts. You will notice at the top that I set error reporting to be outputted. I like to do this to ensure that errors are being displayed on the command line (it will override any other settings).

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.

PHP Hello World

October 26, 2009 in Learn PHP Now with Comments Off

Not be cliché, but I any book, tutorial or website discusses a programming language always begins with a program that simply displays the text “Hello World” on the screen and I intend to follow that tradition.

The process of writing text in PHP requires you to use either the “echo” of “print” function. There are some very minute differences between these two functions, but for these purposes, we will just say that they are interchangeable. If you really want to know the differences, there is an article that details this here.

Anyways, here is the hello world program for PHP.

<?
echo "Hello World";
?>

You could also use the print function and that would look like this:

<?
print "Hello World";
?>

You will notice that at the end of each line of code there is a semi-colon. Like many other languages, this is used at the end of most of the lines of code.

Put Your Twitter Feed On Your Website Using jQuery

September 10, 2009 in Uncategorized with Comments Off

Twitter has become an amazing way to share thoughts, ideas, and information (not to mention what you are actually doing). Displaying your Twitter feed on your website is a great way to promote your Twitter to increase your followers.
Continue Reading…