RAGARD » Tutorials http://www.ragard-jp.com Simple Themes & Tutorials Sat, 04 Jul 2009 06:25:32 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.6 en hourly 1 Useful .htaccess Tricks for Webmasters http://www.ragard-jp.com/tutorials/useful-htaccess-tricks-for-webmasters/ http://www.ragard-jp.com/tutorials/useful-htaccess-tricks-for-webmasters/#comments Mon, 15 Sep 2008 16:42:24 +0000 ne-design http://www.ragard-jp.com/?p=157 I just did a little google search and found a lot of .htaccess tricks that you might want to use for your websites. Those who are new to .htaccess Password Robot Blog has a good quick introduction. There’s also a online .htaccess editor that can be useful available in English, French, Spanish, Chinese and more.

Don’t forget that if you or the person you know is working on the server has a root access to the server you could do the same thing without using .htaccess, which is recommended.

Custom 404 Error Pages

Whenever your visitors access to the page on your site that doesn’t exist, they get an error saying “Page Cannot be Found” which is not user-friendly. Here’s a sample on how to use your custom page:

ErrorDocument 404 /404.html

You could make it like this too:

ErrorDocument 404 http://www.ragard-jp.com/404.html

Need some ideas on how to design a 404 error pages? Smashing Magazine has some smashing 404 error pages listed.

Redirect Visitors

Sometimes you don’t want your visitors to see you working on the website. Instead you would like to show them a page telling that you are updating or still under construction. Here’s the code that can let you do that:

order deny,allow
deny from all
allow from 123.456.789.101

ErrorDocument 403 /update.html


allow from all

Make sure to change 123.456.789.101 to your IP address and change update.html to the file name you would like to display to your visitors.

Change Home Directory

Usually when visitors types in the url to your site, by default they will land on index.html, index.php, or index.htm. You could actually change the file you would like to display:

DirectoryIndex new.html

Change new.html to any file you would like to have as your home directory.

Prevent Directory Browsing

When you don’t have any index pages in your directory, visitors can easily see what you have inside. To prevent this you could simply make a blank index.html on every single directory or just set up using .htaccess:

Options All -Indexes

Protecting Data Files

If your using a script that saves data or log you need to make sure that it is secured. If you have information about your customers, people can download the data or log file by just accessing from the browser. You can protect it easily:


deny from all

Not to worry, your cgi or php can access the data files like before.

Force To Download Files

Have you ever had a problem visitors streaming your media files instead of downloading? With this code you can force your visitors to download even when they left click. Just try it and you will see how sweet this is:

AddType application/octet-stream .avi
AddType application/octet-stream .mpg
AddType application/octet-stream .mov
AddType application/octet-stream .mp3
AddType application/octet-stream .wma
AddType application/octet-stream .pdf

It even works for pdf files!

]]> http://www.ragard-jp.com/tutorials/useful-htaccess-tricks-for-webmasters/feed/ 9 PHP Tricks for Non-Programmer http://www.ragard-jp.com/tutorials/php-tricks-for-non-programmer/ http://www.ragard-jp.com/tutorials/php-tricks-for-non-programmer/#comments Wed, 20 Aug 2008 03:13:23 +0000 ne-design http://www.ragard-jp.com/?p=54 There are several PHP tricks you can use easily on your websites. I do recommend reading Jeffery Way’s “Learn PHP from Scratch: A Training Regimen” at NETUTS. These tricks will make it easy for you to maintain your website. If you have used a CMS like WordPress before this might be nothing new.

Automatic Copyrights

Most of us have our copyrights on the bottom with the year labeled. Let’s make this year label dynamic so you don’t have to keep on changing it every year.

©  <?php echo date('Y'); ?> RAGARD. All Rights Reserved.

Pretty simple. Basically date(’Y') prints out the year in 4 digit. The outcome would be like:

© 2008 RAGARD. All Rights Reserved.

Easy Template

You don’t want to keep changing each file when you have a common header, sidebar or footer. Let’s make it a template so we don’t have to go over every single page to change a menu.

First, let’s start off cutting out the common part and make a new file. In this example we will use the heading as our common part.

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" dir="ltr" lang="en-US">
<head profile="http://gmpg.org/xfn/11">

<title>Site Title</title>

<div id="header">
<h1>Site Title</h1>
<ul id="menu">
	<li><a href="/">Home</a></li>
	<li><a href="/about/">About</a></li>
	<li><a href="/contact/">Contact</a></li>
</ul>
</div>

We will save this file as header.php. Next we write this php script on the page where the header will be needed.

<?php include('header.php'); ?>

You’re done! Same thing will apply for sidebar, footer and any other parts you have in common.

Manage Information in One File

Sometimes you might have a same kind of information in a different parts or pages. Some example could be like e-mail address, phone number, address and name. Have you ever thought having these information in one file to make changes easier?

Start making a file name information.php with the php script like this:

<?php
$name = 'ne-design';
$tel = '(000) 000-0000';
$email = 'sample@ragard-jp.com';
?>

Now that we have some information we could use, insert the following code on every page you might use this information.

<?php include('information.php'); ?>

Everything is now ready to go. All we need is to write a script to echo the information. Here’s the sample of echo.

<?php echo $email; ?>

From now on you will just need to change your information.php to change your e-mail. This is actually the basic of how PHP works.

Example

Some people were getting confused on how the echo would be used. In this example, you will see the purpose for echo is to tell where you want the certain information to be displayed. Instead of writing ne-design, I would write <?php echo $name; ?>.

Here is an example of my index.php:

<?php include('information.php'); ?>

<p>Hi my name is <?php echo $name; ?>!<br />
Need any help? You could contact me by calling <?php echo $tel; ?> or email me to <?php echo $email; ?>.</p>

The outcome for this would be:

<p>Hi my name is ne-design!<br />
Need any help? You could contact me by calling (000) 000-0000 or email me to sample@ragard-jp.com.</p>

I will be revising this php trick post to help you guys.

]]> http://www.ragard-jp.com/tutorials/php-tricks-for-non-programmer/feed/ 11 Localize WordPress Theme http://www.ragard-jp.com/tutorials/localize-wordpress-theme/ http://www.ragard-jp.com/tutorials/localize-wordpress-theme/#comments Wed, 07 May 2008 04:43:04 +0000 ne-design http://www.ragard-jp.com/?p=7 Did you ever wanted to have the WordPress theme you liked to be in your language? or did you ever wanted to make a theme that is available for translation? In this tutorial I will cover on how to make any WordPress themes to be localized.

You will need to know a little about php to understand this tutorial. Just the basic would be fine.

Step 1 – Choose a domain

This would be the name for your translation. Usually I use the theme name as a domain. In this tutorial I will use my theme “Vanilla Globe” as in example. So the domain would be “vanillaglobe”.

Step 2 – Replace text with function

Inside the themes you will see text like

404 Error: Not Found

change the text into a function like this

<h2><?php _e('404 Error: Not Found','vanillaglobe'); ?></h2>

As you can see you will need to replace the text that you would like to translate with the function 

<?php _e('text','domain'); ?>

Step 3 – Add __

Not only text, you would also want to have some parameters within the template tag to be translated. Example would be like

<?php the_content('Read more...'); ?>

add __ and the domain

<?php the_content(__('Read more...','vanillaglobe')); ?>

if there is more then one parameter, sample would be like this

<?php comments_number(__('No Responses','vanillaglobe'), __('One Response','vanillaglobe'), __('% Responses','vanillaglobe'));?>

Step 4 – Include the function

Open the header.php and at the very top include the code below

<?php load_theme_textdomain ('vanillaglobe'); ?>

This code is needed for WordPress to understand to use the language file that is inside the theme folder.

Step 5 – Build .po and .mo

Lastly, build the translation file in your language! You can look here to learn how to translate using poEdit. Make sure you have the files inside wp-content/themes/themename/. The name of the file should be the name of the language.

]]> http://www.ragard-jp.com/tutorials/localize-wordpress-theme/feed/ 4