indeedle » PHP

Error Messages

Cody — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 06:40:22 +0000

I had a complete geek moment over the weekend. Ended up working on my side project I’m doing in my spare time, and I ended up writing my error management classes.

Inspired by the weird, wonderful and wacky errors found online, I decided my exception handler would also do the same. So what it now does is log the error + details to a file, then display one out of many random messages. The way the site is set up means output is captured before being sent, so if I run into an exception I can discard the built output and display the customized error page instead.

So far I came up with the following (inspired by online sources).

A message telling the user to sit very still. Once they move their mouse a new message appears, complaining that they moved and interrupted the process, and that the server was going into a huff.
A request to read the following End User Agreement, followed by a long string of random gibberish.
A video from Youtube (showing Glee’s "Over the Rainbow" cover).

Having a lot of fun coming up with these. Hopefully they make the error experience a little better.

More Geekiness (Auto Signature)

Cody — Sun, 11 Jul 2010 02:08:07 +0000

Some new geekiness going on. I have a journal/blog over at SweetnLeo.com, where I talk about things relating to GaiaOnline. I wanted a way of making this available inside Gaia, so I came up with this.

It’s an image that shows the last 4 blog titles. How it works if I have a script that uses MagpieRSS to pull the feed from the blog, and then using PHP + GD I generate a simple image. When I make a blog post, it pings the update image script, meaning when I add a new entry the image will update.

It gives me a way to show what’s going on. Now to make it more pretty (as it’s just plain text right now).

Object Oriented Fun

Cody — Mon, 17 May 2010 06:22:00 +0000

Currently my attempt is to rewrite my progress so far in a more OO manner. What I’ve previously done is use classes and objects, but infrequently. Let’s see if I can do this better, third time around.

phpbb3 + Flyspray Part 2

Cody — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 02:53:18 +0000

In my previous post I mentioned how I wanted to bridge phpbb3 and Flyspray. Well, I’ve done that, but due to the way Flyspray works, it was basically a complete pain.

I love Flyspray, I really do, but I think it is time I moved on to a new bug tracking system. Unfortunately though I don’t know of that many (if you do, definitely please contact me through the comments!). I’ve tried Trac, but on the host I use it is an absolute nightmare to get installed. What I’d really like is a simple PHP-based system like Flyspray, but one that does get updated regularly.

The trouble I had with Flyspray is I basically had to hack it to get it working with my forum. In the end I get phpbb to do the authentication (on each page load), and if the Flyspray user doesn’t exist it manually creates it.

It definitely isn’t the ideal solution, the DokuWiki bridge that someone else (awesome person) wrote works perfectly, but that comes down to DokuWiki being easier to modify with plugins.

So yes, if you are interested in bridging Flyspray and phpBB3, it is possible. However it basically is bypassing all of Flyspray’s authentication and saying “This is the ID of the logged in user”. You also have to rename their Database and User classes, since they clash with phpBB.

All in all, if you’re looking for a bug tracking system that can easily bridge with a forum, look for something else.

phpbb3 + Flyspray

Cody — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 06:12:36 +0000

I am currently working on a mini-project, and part of it requires a forum as well as a wiki and a bug tracking system. I have already set up phpBB3 with Dokuwiki, and they’re bridged so the accounts are linked. That’s absolutely great!

What I’m currently trying to work on is installing Flyspray, and then writing my own bridge between Flyspray and phpBB. The way I theorize it, I’ll create a hidden group in phpBB called “flyspray” or something, and then when you access Flyspray it will check to see if you’re a member of that group using phpBB’s functions.

We’ll have to wait and see if it works, but if it does I’ll see about making the bridge public.

Wish me luck!

Trust Nobody

Cody — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 04:22:38 +0000

One important lesson when developing applications (I’m focusing on websites here, but this applies to all types of applications) is to ditch user trust.

In a nut shell, do not trust any input you receive from a user. Seriously, do not assume it is clean and good, treat all user input (whether it be cookies, text from a text box or something else) as potentially dangerous. Check it, filter it, escape it.

Never let input from a user go straight into your database or on to a page without it being filtered. If you let it straight into the database you leave yourself open to SQL Injections and other attacks.

This is why you should clean up all input. (Click for bigger version)

Keep that in mind when you are developing an application, any and all user input needs to be checked out, torn to pieces, ripped apart, put back together before being considered safe.