SELECT recordId
FROM myTable
ORDER BY recordId DESC
LIMIT 10

The above query would select the last 10 records but they would not be returned in the order they were inserted into the table.

There is another way to do the query where first you select the count:

SELECT COUNT(recordId) AS recordCount
FROM myTable

Let’s say it returns 50 records. Then we can subtract 10 and use the LIMIT keyword.

SELECT recordId
FROM myTable
LIMIT 40, 10

So that would give us the last 10 records, but 2 queries are needed. Can we do it with one query?

SELECT recordId
FROM myTable
WHERE recordId
IN (
SELECT recordId
FROM myTable
ORDER BY recordId DESC
LIMIT 10
)
ORDER BY recordId ASC

The sub query finds the last 10 records and the main query compares against it while still keeping the order in tact. But this still looks complicated, and here is what I come up with:

(SELECT recordId FROM myTable ORDER BY recordId DESC LIMIT 10) ORDER BY recordId ASC

This should work well.

Facebox is a Facebook-style lightbox which can display any content loaded inside it such as images, divs, or entire remote pages.  It’s built based on JQuery.

In implementing facebox, the first thing you will have to do is, of course, to download facebox. It can be downloaded here.

Then extract the zip file and find “facebox.js”,”facebox.css”. Include the files in your code (please pay attention to the path of the files).

<script type=”text/javascript” src=”jQuery.js”></script>
<script type=”text/javascript” src=”facebox.js”></script>
/** Additional Style **/
<link href=”facebox.css” rel=”stylesheet” type=”text/css”/>

if you don’t have “jQuery.js” you can use this code instead:

<script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.7.1/jquery.min.js” ></script>

Next.. just call the javascript function that calls for facebox() method. For instance:

<script type=”text/javascript”>
function showFacebox(){
jQuery.facebox(“<p>Hello World!</p>”);
}
function ajaxFacebox(){
jQuery.facebox(function() {
var data = {};
jQuery.post(‘test.html’, data, function(response) {
jQuery.facebox(response);
})
})
}</script>

<p><a href=”javascript:showFacebox()”>Show Facebox</a></p>
<p><a href=”javascript:ajaxFacebox()”>Show Facebox using ajax</a></p>

Facebox can also be called from an anchor text link that has a specific attribute such as the ‘rel’ attribute.

jQuery(document).ready(function($) {
$(“a[rel*=anything]“).facebox();
});

The above code specifies that any link that has the ‘rel’ attribute set to ‘anything’ will have the content of its href attribute displayed inside the facebox.

Tips:
How to change ‘close image’ and ‘loading image’?
Load the following code before jQuery.facebox() is called.

$(document).bind(‘init.facebox’, function() {
$.facebox.settings.closeImage = ‘closelabel.png’;
$.facebox.settings.loadingImage = ‘loading.gif’;
})

How to disable the background page?
Well, you will have to edit facebox.js. Locate the function showOverlay(). Remark the line “.click(function() { $(document).trigger(‘close.facebox’) })” as shown below:

function showOverlay() {
if (skipOverlay()) return

if ($(‘#facebox_overlay’).length == 0)
$(“body”).append(‘<div id=”facebox_overlay”></div>’)

$(‘#facebox_overlay’).hide().addClass(“facebox_overlayBG”)
.css(‘opacity’, $.facebox.settings.opacity)
//.click(function() { $(document).trigger(‘close.facebox’) })
.fadeIn(200)
return false
}

The complete example code for implementing jQuery facebox plugin can be downloaded here.

Failed to download pear/Spreadsheet_Excel_Writer within preferred state “stable”, latest release is version 0.9.1, stability “beta”, use “channel://pear.php.net/Spreadsheet_Excel_Writer-0.9.1? to install
Cannot initialize ‘channel://pear.php.net/Spreadsheet_Excel_Writer’, invalid or missing package file
Package “channel://pear.php.net/Spreadsheet_Excel_Writer” is not valid
install failed

do the following commands:

pear config-set preferred_state beta
pear install —onlyreqdeps Spreadsheet_Excel_Writer

Include the onlyreqdeps switch so that the dependency package PEAR OLE is installed

Hope that will help!

If you want to put alexa rank in your page, here is the code:

<?php

Class Alexa {

function getAlexaRank($domain)
{
$remote_url = ‘http://data.alexa.com/data?cli=10&dat=snbamz&url=’ . trim($domain);
$xml = simplexml_load_file($remote_url);
if(isset($xml->SD[1]->POPULARITY['TEXT'])){
return number_format($xml->SD[1]->POPULARITY['TEXT']);
} else {
return 0;
}
}
}
?>

and

$alexa = new Alexa;
$alexarank = $alexa->getAlexaRank($domain);
echo “Alexa Rank: ” . $alexarank;

where $domain is your domain name.

ps: I got this script while googling, unfortunately I forgot the source.

• allow_url_fopen – should be on
• file_uploads – should be on
• upload_max_file_size – is the sum of the sizes of all the files that you are uploading. This should be larger than the files you are trying to upload.
• post_max_size – should be larger than the value that you set for upload_max_file_size.
• memory_limit – this directive has any effect only if you have used the –enable-memory-limit option at configuration time.
• upload_tmp_dir – should be a valid directory and have correct permissions for the server to write to.
• max_execution_time – should provide sufficient time.

Files are usually posted to the server in a format known as ‘multipart/form-data’.

<form method=”post” enctype=”multipart/form-data”>

Tips: if you are encountering file uploading trouble, first try uploading a small text file.

The error message generated from wp_insert_post function is “Could not insert post into the database”. And when I work further to the sql code the error is “Data too long for column ‘post_content’ at row 1 …”. That makes me more confuse.

While googling for “Data too long for column ‘post_content’ at row 1?, I see in some forums people are talking about the character set that causes the error.

Well.. Thanks Gods, I get the idea! Look at the string I am trying to insert to the post, it contains the ‘high-ascii’ character ’ (chr(146)) and ½ (chr(189)). I get this string from reading a textfile which is encoded in latin1 character set. All my mysql tables are in utf8_general_ci. In order to be able to insert the string to mysql table, I have to encode the string first. I try php function utf8_encode() but it is not enough. This utf8_encode function cannot encode the ’ (chr(146)) character and therefore I convert it to HTML entities using preg_replace. The code looks like this:

$post_content = utf8_encode(preg_replace(‘/([\200-\277])/e’, “‘&#’.(ord(‘\\1?)).’;’”,$post_content)); $post_data=compact(‘post_excerpt’,’post_content’,’post_title’,’post_date’,’post_date_gmt’,’post_author’,’post_category’, ‘post_status’, ‘tags_input’);

$post_ID = wp_insert_post($post_data, true);

Everything is okay now. The string is inserted successfully without any garbage character. So if you want to insert string that contains ‘high-ascii’ character encoded in different character set to mysql table, don’t forget to encode it first or you will get “Data too long for column….” error.

Another option (this is done manually outside the wordpress function) :
Run mysql_query(“SET NAMES latin1?,$connection) before the insert query. But this is not recommended. The inserted data is still in latin1. You’ll need to encode them while reading.

The in_array() function checks if a value exists in an array. It returns TRUE if a value is found in the array, FALSE otherwise.

While the array_search() function searches the array for a given value and returns the corresponding key if successful. If not successful it returns FALSE.

As in_array() function does not return the array key, it’s often used in  array without keys (the keys seem to be not important) like this:
$os = array("Mac", "NT", "Irix", "Linux");
$exist = in_array("Irix", $os); // return TRUE

The array_search() function is used in this form of array:
$array = array('first' => 1, 'second' => 4);
$key = array_search('4', $array); // $key = 'second'

Got it?

$cars=array(“Volvo”,”BMW”,”Toyota”);
$query=”INSERT INTO tablename (cars)  VALUES(‘$cars’);

If you run the script you’ll get “Array” as your value in the database.

In order to make it works you’ll need to use PHP’s serialize() function. This function takes arrays (and other data types), and converts the contents into data that can be stored.

$cars=serialize(array(“Volvo”,”BMW”,”Toyota”));
$query=”INSERT INTO tablename (cars) VALUES(‘$cars’)”;

But after you run the script if you look at your database, you’ll see something like this:

a:3:{i:0;s:5:”Volvo”;i:1;s:3:”BMW”;i:2;s:6:”Toyota”;}

Don’t worry! To retrieve the array data from the database use  unserialize() function.  unserialize() takes serialized array data and converts it back to a usable array.

Then, you might do this:

$query=”SELECT * FROM tablename”;
$result=mysql_query($query);
$row = mysql_fetch_object($result));
$cars=unserialize($row->cars);

There you get back your array.

Here is the trick:

ob_start(); //Start buffering
print_r($the_array); //print the array to buffer
$output = ob_get_contents(); //get the result from buffer
ob_end_clean(); //close buffer

$h = fopen(‘logfile.txt’, ‘w’); //open a file
fwrite($h, $output); //write the output text
fclose($h); //close file

Then manually open the created text file to see what happens…

To make a page redirection in php you can use the header() function and it is quite an easy task.

header( ‘Location: http://www.yourdomain.com/new_page.html’ ) ;

This function must be called before any actual output is sent unless you will get the following error:

Warning: Cannot modify header information – headers already sent by

Or you can use ob_start() and ob_flush() function to avoid this problem by buffering the output.

ob_start();
echo “Test”;
header( ‘Location: http://www.yourdomain.com/new_page.html’ ) ;
ob_flush();

Note that the code after the header function will still be executed, so to save resources you should call a die() function after the redirection.