When I was working on the cakephp localization ( l10n ) and internationalization ( i18n ), I came across a problem so I decided to let the world know about it if anyone had got the same issue.

What we want here is that a user can go to the localized version of the website according to the URL identified, for instance we want the website to load the English locale when we pass a URL like this http://example.tld/eng/Controller/Action

The problem is that while implementing the routes for the language detection, the plugins made a conflict with the rules in the routes file. Language routing is easy but sometimes can be tricky.

Why Use Language Routes?

Simply because its much better for the SEO.

Setting Up A Default Locale

Next we have to define a default language for the website in Bootstrap.php. I’m setting it as ‘eng’ since cakephp uses the 3 letter code

Configure::write('Config.language', 'eng');

This will load and use default.po located in app/Locale/eng/LC_MESSAGES/ for translation. It’s called default since its the default domain.
Any call to the function __() will load the key from the loaded PO file. You can also translate from another domain using __d($domain,$key). For instance to load a city called ‘cairo’ from a domain called ‘cities’ you can call __d(‘cities’,'cairo’) which will load app/Locale/eng/LC_MESSAGES/cities.po and translate the key ‘cairo’ to the adjacent translation since we set the locale to be ‘eng’.

Language Detection From The URL

Let’s first detect the locale or language key using cakephp routes in the app/Config/routes.php.

Router::connect('/:language/:controller/:action/*', array(), array('language' => '[a-z]{3}'));

This line says that match the language regular expression, the controller, the action and any parameters beyond, to overcome the default behavior that if we put the language key (eg. eng) it will try to find a controller with the same name for instance it will try to find a controller named ‘eng’ which is not what we want.

Next we need to set the captured locale/language key to load the appropriate language file (po file).
In the AppController.php we can implement a method to set the language from the url as the following

class AppController extends Controller {
    public function beforeFilter() {
    	$this->_setLanguage();
    }

    private function _setLanguage() {
    	if(isset($this->params['language']) &&
    			($this->params['language'] != $this->Cookie->read('Config.language')))
    	{
    		$this->Cookie->write('Config.language', $this->params['language']);
    		// set the application language
    		Configure::write('Config.language',$this->params['language']);
    	}elseif(!isset($this->params['language']) && $this->Cookie->read('Config.language')){
    		// set the application language
    		Configure::write('Config.language',$this->Cookie->read('Config.language'));
    	}
    }
}

Above we are storing the language in a cookie, if the language was not sent in the URL them we load it from the cookie,if the language was sent in the URL but different from the cookie value then we set the cookie value to the value passed from the URL. if none was sent, then we have got the default language set in the bootstrap as mentioned earlier.

The Problem (Router Conflicts)

This method works perfectly but what happens if you want to access a plugin?

There is no distinction between the controller name and the plugin name, they are both strings and have undetermined number of characters and nothing is unique about any of them. With a url like this: http://example.tld/eng/PluginName/ControllerName/ActionName it will match the plugin name as the controller which is not really what we want here.

The Solution

So in order to solve this issue, we need to match the plugin names so that it wont consider it as a controller. I have implemented the following code in order to solve this issue.

// make an array of loaded plugins
$loaded = CakePlugin::loaded();
array_walk($loaded, function(&$item,$key){
	$item = Inflector::underscore($item);
});
$loaded = implode('|', $loaded);

Router::connect('/:language/:plugin/:controller/:action/*', array(), array('language' => '[a-z]{3}','plugin' => "($loaded)"));

What are we doing here? We are getting an array of loaded plugins using the loaded() method, then we convert the Multiword plugin (CamelCase) to underscored lowercases using the Inflector::underscore() method and then implode them with the pipe generating an ORed regular expression to match the plugin key in the route. So now since we hard coded the rules dynamically in the routes so there wont be any conflicts in cakephp routing.

Hope that helps someone

Cheers!

The workers I’ve designed can send millons of SMS’s in a few minutes.

Technologies: PHP, MySQL, Cakephp, JavaScript, jQuery, AJAX, XHTML, CSS

URL: www.m-greetings.com

$who = 'world';
$world = 'World!';
$people = 'People!';
echo 'Hello ' . $$who;
// output: Hello World!

Where the variable name here becomes $world as the value of $who, if we changed the value of $who to be ‘people’, in the last line it will load the variable $people.

$who = 'people';
$world = 'World!';
$people = 'People!';
echo 'Hello ' . $$who;
// output: Hello People!

What if you want to have a variable constant? I mean like you want to lookup a name of a constant dynamically.

Suppose we have got the following constants:

define('PAYPAL_MIN_AMOUNT',5); // minimum amount of payment for paypal method
define('CREDIT_CARD_MIN_AMOUNT',30); // minimum amount of payment for credit card method

Now we want to dynamically validate the submitted amount against the minimum amount according to the payment method.

The submitted value is either PAYPAL or CREDIT_CARD
we can do the following:

// suppose this was the submitted value
$paymentMethod='PAYPAL';
echo "Minimum amount for {$paymentMethod} is " . constant($paymentMethod.'_MIN_AMOUNT') . ' USD';
// output: Minimum amount for PAYPAL is 5 USD
$paymentMethod='CREDIT_CARD';
echo "Minimum amount for {$paymentMethod} is " . constant($paymentMethod.'_MIN_AMOUNT') . ' USD';
// output: Minimum amount for CREDIT_CARD is 30 USD

We made use of the constant() php standard function to call a variable constant name. Which returns the value of a given constant name.

Happy programming

First let’s start by sending a custom HTTP header to the server. I will be using cURL library to send HTTP requests.

Sending The Request Header

Let’s say our custom header name is ‘Authorization’ and we want to set its value to ’123456′, now create a file named http-request.php with the following content:

$uri = 'http://localhost/http.php';
$ch = curl_init($uri);
curl_setopt_array($ch, array(
	CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER	=> array('Authorization: 123456'),
	CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER	=>true,
	CURLOPT_VERBOSE		=> 1
));
$out = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);
// echo response output
echo $out;

Now we have sent the request with method POST. The CURLOPT_VERBOSE option is used for debugging when you want to output the request headers and the response headers. You shall remove it on production.

Reading the custom header

Now let’s create the reads that custom header sent from the curl request. create a file named http.php with the following contents

print_r(apache_request_headers());

Now execute the http-request.php using cli to watch the debug output.
Now if you are lucky enough you will see the Authorization header as below:

Array
(
    [Host] => localhost
    [Accept] => */*
    [Authorization] => 123456
    [Content-Length] => 9
    [Content-Type] => application/x-www-form-urlencoded
)

Oh, What if I’m not lucky? then you have PHP installed as CGI and have got php < 5.4 . People who have PHP installed as an Apache module or have PHP version 5.4 are the lucky ones, but don't worry I've got your back.

Custom Headers with PHP CGI

To work around this we will have to play around with the .htaccess but you will need mod_rewrite.

    RewriteEngine On
    RewriteRule .? - [E=Authorization:%{HTTP:Authorization}]

What are we doing up there? Well we are reading the HTTP header named ‘Authorization’ by %{HTTP:Authorization} and setting it as an environment variable with the E so it will be accessible by the $_SERVER superglobal. Also make sure that the rule is right after the ‘RewriteEngine On’ statement to avoid conflicts.

Now try this in the http.php:

echo $_SERVER['Authorization'];

Voila!

Reference:
Environment Variables in Apache

class AppController extends Controller {
    protected $secureActions = array(
    	'place_order',
    	'login',
    	'checkout'
    );
}

We are going to check if the current action is in our secure actions

function beforeFilter() {
        if (in_array($this->params['action'], $this->secureActions) 
            && !isset($_SERVER['HTTPS'])) {
                $this->forceSSL();
        }
}

Then we will implement a method to redirect to the same URI but with HTTPS

public function forceSSL() {
	$this->redirect('https://' . $_SERVER['SERVER_NAME'] . $this->here);
}

Suppose that you have got a Post model and a Category model, and you have a grid, with all posts and the category title they belong to. In order to sort by the category title you will need to do as the following in your view.

echo $this->Paginator->sort('Category.title','labelForTheTableHeader');

Hope that helps anyone
Cheers

The number change schema as follows:

(old -> new)

Mobinil

012 XXX XXXX -> 0122 XXX XXXX
017 XXX XXXX -> 0127 XXX XXXX
018 XXX XXXX -> 0128 XXX XXXX
0150 XXX XXXX -> 0120 XXX XXXX

Etisalat

011 XXX XXXX -> 0111 XXX XXXX
014 XXX XXXX -> 0114 XXX XXXX
0152 XXX XXXX -> 0112 XXX XXXX

Vodafone

010 XXX XXXX -> 0100 XXX XXXX
016 XXX XXXX -> 0106 XXX XXXX
019 XXX XXXX -> 0109 XXX XXXX
0151 XXX XXXX -> 0101 XXX XXXX

so here is my little php function that will use regular expressions

function changeMobileNumbers(&$contents){
	// vodafone
	$contents = preg_replace('/(0151)([0-9]{7})/', '0101$2', $contents);
	$contents = preg_replace('/(010)([0-9]{7})/', '0100$2', $contents);
	$contents = preg_replace('/(016)([0-9]{7})/', '0106$2', $contents);
	$contents = preg_replace('/(019)([0-9]{7})/', '0109$2', $contents);
	
	// etisalat
	$contents = preg_replace('/(0152)([0-9]{7})/', '0112$2', $contents);
	$contents = preg_replace('/(011)([0-9]{7})/', '0111$2', $contents);
	$contents = preg_replace('/(014)([0-9]{7})/', '0114$2', $contents);
	
	// mobinil
	$contents = preg_replace('/(0150)([0-9]{7})/', '0120$2', $contents);
	$contents = preg_replace('/(012)([0-9]{7})/', '0122$2', $contents);
	$contents = preg_replace('/(017)([0-9]{7})/', '0127$2', $contents);
	$contents = preg_replace('/(018)([0-9]{7})/', '0127$2', $contents);
	return $contents;
}

Hope that was useful

We are going to stop the MySQL daemon to be able to run it in safe mode, then we are going to skip grant tables, which means we are skipping password authentication, then we will set our new password

First, Let’s stop the mysql service, In Red Hat’s family (Red Hat Enterprise, Fedora, CentOS) the Mysql Daemon is called ‘mysqld‘, but in Debianlike Ubuntu based distributions and OpenSuse its called ‘mysql‘. I’ll be using the debian based naming

sudo service mysql stop

OR

sudo /etc/init.d/mysql stop

Now, we’ll start the server in safe mode and skip grant tables so that it wont ask for the password we had lost when we try to login

sudo mysqld_safe --skip-grant-tables

you should see something like this

111026 11:05:46 mysqld_safe Logging to syslog.
111026 11:05:46 mysqld_safe Starting mysqld daemon with databases from /var/lib/mysql

Now open a new terminal window and run the mysql console using the main mysql database named ‘mysql‘ using the root user

mysql --user=root mysql

Then we’ll reset the password from the mysql’s users table, flush privieges, then exit the mysql console

UPDATE user SET password=PASSWORD('new-password') WHERE user='root';

flush privileges;
exit;

Start again the mysql daemon

sudo service mysql stop
sudo service mysql start

That’s All

Here is how you can change the program icon in tkinter

#instantiate tkinter
root=gui.Tk()
#change the window icon to be window.ico
#this works on windows for linux icon files shall be .xpm
root.iconbitmap('window.ico')
root.mainloop()

Where window.ico is the icon file you want to use instead of the default tkinter logo

You can convert ico to xpm using GIMP

I’ll be explaining how to install LAMP stack with PHP 5.3.8 without compiling

It’s fairly easy using the dotdeb repository

Step 1: Add the dotdeb repository:

first we need to add the dotdeb application sources to our sources list

sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list

And copy and paste the following lines and save using ctrl+o

deb http://packages.dotdeb.org stable all
deb-src http://packages.dotdeb.org stable all

Step 2: Import the GPG key for the dotdeb repository

Then we’ll add the GPG key for the dot deb repository by the following command:

wget http://www.dotdeb.org/dotdeb.gpg && cat dotdeb.gpg | sudo apt-key add -

Now we’ll refresh the packages list by the following command:

sudo apt-get update

Step 3: Installation

Now we’re ready to install our LAMP stack

sudo aptitude install apache2 apache2-mpm-prefork mysql-client-5.5 mysql-server-5.5 php5 php5-cli php5-mysql libapache2-mod-php5 php5-dev php5-mcrypt php5-curl php5-gd phpmyadmin

Now we’re all set, just need to test it
go to http://localhost/ to test apache
and we can test php by writing in the bash

php -v

you should see something like the following:

PHP 5.3.8-1~dotdeb.2 with Suhosin-Patch (cli) (built: Aug 25 2011 13:30:46)
Copyright (c) 1997-2011 The PHP Group
Zend Engine v2.3.0, Copyright (c) 1998-2011 Zend Technologies
    with Suhosin v0.9.32.1, Copyright (c) 2007-2010, by SektionEins GmbH

Update:

Since the new distros of the Ubuntu uses php 5.3, the magical command in step 3 will be sufficient, however if you need a more updated version use the dotdeb repository, if you don’t care much about which version to use 5.3.x just skip to step 3.