Show me some comments! Nov17 '04

The project

I thought it would be an interesting project to have PHP users show their comments for a specific blog page. After all, a good programmer always comments out their code, right?

Since a blog may contain numerous pages, it would be best to showcase just one page.

You pick it.

(By no means is this limited to PHP. That is just currently what I use to create dynamic web pages. Java, ASP, ColdFusion – all these are acceptable too.)

My PHP repository

I keep a couple of PHP pages outside of my web root directory, for security reasons. One of those files is called main.php, and I use it to store commonly used functions and global variables.

I would like to showcase my comments for main.php.

In no particular order, here they are:

# DECLARE MORE INTUITIVE VARIABLES FOR USE BELOW

# THIS FUNCTION’S ONLY PURPOSE IS FOR THE NAVIGATION TABS AT THE TOP OF THE PAGE.

# THIS IS NOT CONTROLLING INCLUDES, OR ANYTHING LIKE THAT.

# EACH CASE IS THE ACTUAL URL, IE: www.matthom.com/blog/ ... REMEMBER THE $url_array HOLDS THE FIRST WORD, AFTER www.matthom.com/

# IN THE SWITCH/CASE BELOW, WE ASSIGN A NUMBER TO EACH SCENARIO... THAT NUMBER CORRESPONDS TO ANOTHER ARRAY, $nav_items,

# WHICH PULLS OUT THE CORRECT NAV ITEM TITLE.

# THIS IS ALSO 2, BECAUSE WHEN YOU’RE IN AN ARCHIVE ENTRY PAGE, YOU STILL WANT THE ’BLOG’ TAB HIGHLIGHTED

# ARBITRARY NUMBER TO ALLOW ALL NAVIGATION TABS TO DISPLAY UN–HIGHLIGHTED, IF THE SECTION IS NOT ONE OF THE ABOVE

# NO FEEDBACK YET? AN APPROPRIATE STRING IS PRINTED, IN THOSE CASES

# IF YOU ARE ON A ’MAIN’ PAGE, LIKE THE BLOG MAIN PAGE, OR THE HEADLINES MAIN PAGE, YOU NEED THE URL TO THE ’ARCHIVED’ PAGE

# THE $url SHOULD JUST BE THE OPENING <a> TAG.

# OTHERWISE, WE JUST WANT TO PRINT THE STATEMENT, WITHOUT ANOTHER LINK – SINCE YOU CAN’T GO ANY FURTHER

# PHP DATE FORMATTING:

# GATHERS THE CURRENT DATE AND TIME INFORMATION, AND STORES THEM IN EASY TO USE VARIABLES

# NEXT TO EACH LINE IS THE OUTPUT

# TURN NEW LINES INTO <p> TAGS – COURTESY OF PHOTOMATT: http://photomatt.net/scripts/autop

# PERFORMS A SWITCH/CASE TO SELECT TO APPROPRIATE CRITERIA

# This function takes a table name as the parameter, and uses the query "DESCRIBE TABLE_NAME"

# It is usefeul for seeing the SQL layout or structure of a table.

# COLUMNS RETURNED: Field, Type, Null, Key, Default, Extra

# THIS IS A SIMPLE STRING REPLACE FUNCTION.

Now that you got the idea... show me some comments!

Categories: Projects , Web Development

Add Feedback (view all)