Illuminati Karate, Inc. » PHP

WordPress: Send Notification E-mails On Publish

Richard Gabriel — Wed, 02 May 2012 23:52:00 +0000

We recently developed a site for a client that allows visitors to submit their stories using a custom form. The stories then go into a queue to be reviewed for approval by an Administrator. One requirement was that these user’s be notified by email if their story was approved.

After not finding any plugins designed specifically to do this, I cooked up a little function that I thought I would share.

Note: this code assumes you already have the user’s email available as a custom field on the post.

First we need to create a function that loads the e-mail address from the published post’s ID and sends a message. Add the following code to your theme’s functions.php:

^?View Code PHP

//send notification e-mail on story publish
function ik_send_email($post_id){
	//get e-mail address from post meta field
	$email_address = get_post_meta($post_id, '_ikcf_user_email', true);
 
	$subject = "Your Subject Here!";
	$body = "Thank you for your submission!  Your story has been approved!";
 
	//use this to set the From address of the e-mail
	$headers = 'From: From Address ' . "\r\n";
 
	if(wp_mail($email_address, $subject, $body, $headers)){
		//mail sent!
	} else {
		//failure!
	}
}

With that function in hand, we just need to add it to the ‘publish_post’ hook:

^?View Code PHP

//send notification e-mail on post publish
add_action('publish_post','ik_send_email');

And that’s it! A straightforward solution to send notification e-mails on publish.

Feel free to ask questions in the comments below.

WordPress: How to Exclude Categories From the Archive Widget

Richard Gabriel — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 20:28:34 +0000

Updated: 5/2/2012

We love developing in WordPress. For many of our clients, there is no need to reinvent the wheel and WordPress can be a significant time saver.

WordPress is a very thoroughly developed platform – yet every now and again we bump into desired functionality that isn’t readily available, such as excluding categories from the Archive Widget.

Recently, I developed some code to do just that and thought I would share it.

If you want to know how to include categories, instead of excluding them, read my reply to Ian’s comment below.

The default Archives Widget gives you just a few options: you can set the title, use a drop-down or a list, and display the post count next to the month. You get more functionality if you use the wp_get_archives() function, but that won’t always get you what you need (and sometimes you really want to use a widget).

After spending some time poking around in general-template.php (/wp-includes/general-template.php), I found what I was looking for around lines 918-919: two filters, ‘getarchives_where’ and ‘getarchives_join’. These filters are applied to the SQL right before the Archives query is run, so they are the ideal point to do any heavy customization to the data that is displayed there.

What each of them does is pretty self-explanatory; getarchives_where modifies the WHERE clause of the SQL query and getarchives_join modifies the JOIN clause of the SQL query. Arm yourself with a bit of knowledge as to how WordPress works and these become some powerful tools.

On to the code…

Here are two functions that will update the SQL as desired:

^?View Code PHP

//add custom SQL to the archives widget JOIN clause
function ik_custom_archives_join($sql){
	global $wpdb;
 
	$sql = $sql . "LEFT JOIN $wpdb->term_relationships ON($wpdb->posts.ID = $wpdb->term_relationships.object_id) "; 
	$sql = $sql . "LEFT JOIN $wpdb->term_taxonomy ON($wpdb->term_relationships.term_taxonomy_id = $wpdb->term_taxonomy.term_taxonomy_id) ";
 
	return $sql;
}

The above code will join in the Category information, to be used for excluding the desired Categories in the following code:

^?View Code PHP

//add custom SQL to the archives widget WHERE clause
function ik_custom_archives_where($sql){
	global $wpdb;
 
	//get categories IDs from slugs
	$exclude_cat_1 = get_category_by_slug("exclude-cat-1");
	$exclude_cat_2 = get_category_by_slug("exclude-cat-2");
 
	//list of categories to exclude
	$exclude_list = $exclude_cat_1->cat_ID . ', ' . $exclude_cat_2->cat_ID;
 
	$sql = "WHERE post_type = 'post' AND post_status = 'publish' ";
	$sql = $sql . "AND $wpdb->term_taxonomy.term_id NOT IN ($exclude_list)";
 
	return $sql;
}

The above code does a couple of things:

Loads the category data by slug (recommended as it’s hard to predict IDs)
Modifies the WHERE clause to exclude those Categories

With those 2 functions in hand, you just need to add the filters to your theme’s functions.php file:

^?View Code PHP

//add the ik archive filters
add_filter('getarchives_where','ik_custom_archives_where',10,2);
add_filter('getarchives_join','ik_custom_archives_join',10,2);

And that’s it! A simple solution to exclude certain categories from the default Archives widget.

If you know a bit of SQL you can also use this code to make other modifications to the Archives widget, such as custom date ranges, excluding or including custom post types, and more.

Here’s the full code:

^?View Code PHP

//add the ik archive filters
add_filter('getarchives_where','ik_custom_archives_where',10,2);
add_filter('getarchives_join','ik_custom_archives_join',10,2);
 
//add custom SQL to the archives widget JOIN clause
function ik_custom_archives_join($sql){
	global $wpdb;
 
	$sql = $sql . "LEFT JOIN $wpdb->term_relationships ON($wpdb->posts.ID = $wpdb->term_relationships.object_id) "; 
	$sql = $sql . "LEFT JOIN $wpdb->term_taxonomy ON($wpdb->term_relationships.term_taxonomy_id = $wpdb->term_taxonomy.term_taxonomy_id) ";
 
	return $sql;
}
 
//add custom SQL to the archives widget WHERE clause
function ik_custom_archives_where($sql){
	global $wpdb;
 
	//get categories IDs from slugs
	$exclude_cat_1 = get_category_by_slug("exclude-cat-1");
	$exclude_cat_2 = get_category_by_slug("exclude-cat-2");
 
	//list of categories to exclude
	$exclude_list = $exclude_cat_1->cat_ID . ', ' . $exclude_cat_2->cat_ID;
 
	$sql = "WHERE post_type = 'post' AND post_status = 'publish' ";
	$sql = $sql . "AND $wpdb->term_taxonomy.term_id NOT IN ($exclude_list)";
 
	return $sql;
}

Display Recent Spotify Track with Album Cover using PHP

Richard Gabriel — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 04:32:29 +0000

Many of our clients show their personalities on their websites – from Facebook to Twitter feeds, photo streams and more, they like to integrate a bit of themselves. While hooking up a Social Media feed is no problem, recently we had a unique request to develop a widget that displays the most recently listened to Spotify track with artist information and album cover.

It turns out there isn’t a straightforward way to do this; after a little digging around on the internet, and the help of the Spotify API, we were able to put together a solution that I wanted to share.

There are several steps to this process:

Create a Lastfm account and setup Spotify to scrobble to Last.fm
Pull the Lastfm Recent Tracks RSS feed
Look-up the desired Track using the Spotify Metadata API and load the data

First, we need a basic cURL function:

^?View Code PHP

function fetchUrl($url){
     $ch = curl_init();
     curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
     curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
     curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 20);
 
     $retData = curl_exec($ch);
     curl_close($ch); 
 
     return $retData;
}

With that in hand, it’s time to get down to business.

We start by loading the Last.fm RSS feed to get the latest track:

^?View Code PHP

function loadSpotifyTracks($username, $count = 1){
	$lastfm_url = "ws.audioscrobbler.com/2.0/user/".$username."/recenttracks.rss";
 
	$trackAttributes = array();
 
	$rss = fetchUrl($lastfm_url);
	$rss = simplexml_load_string($rss);
 
	for($i=0; $i<$count; $i++) {
		$url = $rss->channel->item[$i]->link;
		$title = $rss->channel->item[$i]->title;
		$pubDate = $rss->channel->item[$i]->pubDate;
		$pubDate_time = strtotime($pubDate);
 
		//format is Artist - Track
		$artistData = explode(" – ", $title);
 
		//get track album cover and info
		$trackAttributes[] = getTrackAttributes($artistData[1], $artistData[0]);
	}
 
	return $trackAttributes;
}

The above function will load the Most Recent RSS Feed of the Lastfm account passed, and will loop through $count of them, loading the attributes.

You need to include the following function to be able to load the attributes from Spotify:

^?View Code PHP

//get attributes of track from Spotify
function getTrackAttributes($trackname, $artistname){	
	//default return data
	$retData = array(
		'title' => "",
		'artist' => "",
		'cover' => "",
		'album' => "",
		'trackUrl' => ""
	);
 
	//search spotify, find match by artist and trackname, then pull that data
	$first_url = 'http://ws.spotify.com/search/1/track?q=' . urlencode($trackname);
	$result = fetchUrl($first_url);		
	$xmlObjs = simplexml_load_string($result);
 
	if ($xmlObjs) {
		foreach($xmlObjs as $xmlObj){
			//check to see if the Track and Album name both match,
			//if they do, use the data
			//there's many ways to do this, this is quick and dirty version
			if(strtolower($xmlObj->name) == strtolower($trackname) && strtolower($xmlObj->artist->name) == strtolower($artistname)){
				$albumName = "";
				$trackURL = "#";
				$albumName = $xmlObj->album->name;
				$trackURL = $xmlObj->attributes()->href;
				$uri = end(explode(":", $trackURL));
				$trackURL = 'http://open.spotify.com/track/' . $uri;				
				$coverResults = fetchUrl($trackURL);//load album cover info from track
 
				if($coverResults){
					$parser = xml_parser_create();
					$vals = $index = array();
 
					xml_parse_into_struct($parser, $coverResults, $vals, $index);
					xml_parser_free($parser);
 
					if(count($vals)){
						foreach($vals as $val){
							if($val['tag'] == 'META' && substr($val['attributes']['PROPERTY'], 0, 14) == 'og:image') {
								$coverImage = $val['attributes']['CONTENT'];
							}
						}
					}
				}
 
				//we want the fullsized image, not the thumbnail
				$coverImage = str_replace('thumb', 'image', $coverImage);	
 
				//no image? use the default data
				//you can remove this check if you're ok not having an album cover
				if(strlen($coverImage) > 4){
					//has cover image, use the returned data
					$retData['title'] = $trackname;
					$retData['artist'] = $artistname;
					$retData['cover'] =  $coverImage;
					$retData['album'] = $albumName;
					$retData['trackUrl'] = $trackURL;
				}
			}
		}		
	}
 
	return $retData;
}

Here’s what that wall-of-text does:

Searches for the Track using the Spotify API
If a matching track/album is found, generates a Track URL from the match’s URI
Loads that track’s info from the Spotify API and grabs the image from the result

A few notes:

You will want to cache your requests. It’s polite (and they’ll probably cut you off, otherwise).
You’ll probably want some fallback display data. Sometimes an exact match isn’t found. The above code isn’t perfect.
You might want to think about loading this via AJAX – the page can hang a second while waiting for the info to load.

Here is the complete code, in one box:

^?View Code PHP

function fetchUrl($url){
     $ch = curl_init();
     curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
     curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
     curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 20);
 
     $retData = curl_exec($ch);
     curl_close($ch); 
 
     return $retData;
}
 
//get attributes of track from Spotify
function getTrackAttributes($trackname, $artistname){	
	//default return data
	$retData = array(
		'title' => "",
		'artist' => "",
		'cover' => "",
		'album' => "",
		'trackUrl' => ""
	);
 
	//search spotify, find match by artist and trackname, then pull that data
	$first_url = 'http://ws.spotify.com/search/1/track?q=' . urlencode($trackname);
	$result = fetchUrl($first_url);		
	$xmlObjs = simplexml_load_string($result);
 
	if ($xmlObjs) {
		foreach($xmlObjs as $xmlObj){
			//check to see if the Track and Album name both match,
			//if they do, use the data
			if(strtolower($xmlObj->name) == strtolower($trackname) && strtolower($xmlObj->artist->name) == strtolower($artistname)){
				$albumName = "";
				$trackURL = "#";
				$albumName = $xmlObj->album->name;
				$trackURL = $xmlObj->attributes()->href;
				$uri = end(explode(":", $trackURL));
				$trackURL = 'http://open.spotify.com/track/' . $uri;				
				$coverResults = fetchUrl($trackURL);//load album cover info from track
 
				if($coverResults){
					$parser = xml_parser_create();
					$vals = $index = array();
 
					xml_parse_into_struct($parser, $coverResults, $vals, $index);
					xml_parser_free($parser);
 
					if(count($vals)){
						foreach($vals as $val){
							if($val['tag'] == 'META' && substr($val['attributes']['PROPERTY'], 0, 14) == 'og:image') {
								$coverImage = $val['attributes']['CONTENT'];
							}
						}
					}
				}
 
				//we want the fullsized image, not the thumbnail
				$coverImage = str_replace('thumb', 'image', $coverImage);	
 
				//no image? use the default data
				//you can remove this check if you're ok not having an album cover
				if(strlen($coverImage) > 4){
					//has cover image, use the returned data
					$retData['title'] = $trackname;
					$retData['artist'] = $artistname;
					$retData['cover'] =  $coverImage;
					$retData['album'] = $albumName;
					$retData['trackUrl'] = $trackURL;
				}
			}
		}		
	}
 
	return $retData;
}
 
//load Spotify Tracks
function loadSpotifyTracks($username, $count = 1){
	$lastfm_url = "ws.audioscrobbler.com/2.0/user/".$username."/recenttracks.rss";
 
	$trackAttributes = array();
 
	$rss = fetchUrl($lastfm_url);
	$rss = simplexml_load_string($rss);
 
	for($i=0; $i<$count; $i++) {
		$url = $rss->channel->item[$i]->link;
		$title = $rss->channel->item[$i]->title;
		$pubDate = $rss->channel->item[$i]->pubDate;
		$pubDate_time = strtotime($pubDate);
 
		//format is Artist - Track
		$artistData = explode(" – ", $title);
 
		//get track album cover and info
		$trackAttributes[] = getTrackAttributes($artistData[1], $artistData[0]);
	}
 
	return $trackAttributes;
}
 
//do something!
$trackAttributes = loadSpotify("username");
 
//only output data if a match is found
if(strlen($trackAttributes['trackUrl']) > 2){
	$output .= '. $trackAttributes['trackUrl'] . '" target="_blank">.$trackAttributes['cover'].'" />';
	$output .= '
			' . $trackAttributes['title'] . '
			by ' . $trackAttributes['artist'] . '
			on ' . $trackAttributes['album'] . '
		';
 
	echo $output;
}

And that’s it! A solution to display recent Spotify track with album cover using PHP.

I hope you find it helpful!

Finding the Carrier of a Cell Phone Number in PHP

George Huger — Mon, 20 Jun 2011 03:47:37 +0000

Often web apps need to send SMS messages to their users (for example: balance alerts, reminders, notifications). To send these text messages from within your app, you basically have 2 options:

1) Pay Twilio and Tropo for the use of their APIs, for roughly a penny per message.

2) Send an email directly to their carrier’s mail-to-SMS gateway – a free service most carriers provide, which will translate your email into an SMS sent to their subscribers’ phone

Twilio and Tropo are about as easy as it gets to integrate (REST-like APIs that return JSON/POX), but you pay for every single message and that can add up quickly. So #2 (mail-to-SMS gateways) starts to look pretty good.

But there’s some problems with mail-to-SMS gateways:

1) Each carrier has their own format. For example, T-Mobile’s gateway is number@tmomail.net (for the US), AT&T’s is number@txt.att.net (for most of their customers), and Verizon is number@vtext.net (unless you used to be with Alltel – then its number@message.alltel.com). A big list of mail-to-SMS-gateways is available on Wikipedia.

Bonus:some carriers want the international code prepended (the 1 in front of the number, for the US), some carriers don’t. (e.g., T-Mobile does, AT&T doesn’t)

2) Some carriers require authentication (Sprint) or don’t have a mail-to-SMS gateway at all (Google Voice).

3) If the user ports their number to a different carrier you’ll have to detect it and react accordingly.

So you’ll have to figure out what carrier they’re using in order to direct the email and meet whatever requirements – which usually means asking the user to choose their carrier from a list.

There is a better way! What if we could detect the carrier automatically?

It turns out you can. The lovely folks at CloudVox made an API that does exactly that – you give it a phone number, and it tells you the carrier and if its a cell-phone or landline. Its 100% free, with no API keys/credentials required.

Its hosted at digits.cloudvox.com, along with example calls/responses (full docs are here). It speaks JSON over HTTP.

This gives us a much better user experience:

1) User inputs their number, no carrier dropdown needed

2) We use CloudVox’s API to determine their carrier

3) Try to send them an SMS, and have them confirm ownership in the normal way (i.e., enter a confirmation code)

This will cover most people, and is free outside of the development time. If there was an error (i.e., we couldn’t find the number with CloudVox’s API, or we did but the carrier doesn’t support mail-to-SMS), we can fall back to Twilio or Tropo. We’re still paying a few cents here and there, but the default case is free.

Here’s some example code in PHP, for querying CloudVox’s API:

^?View Code PHP


	/* Finds the carrier for the given phone number using CloudVox's API. Returns the carrier name as a string on success, or false if the carrier couldn't be determined */
	function findCarrier($phoneNumber)
	{
		$carrier = false; // will contain the carriers name as a string if we are able to look it up
 
		// attempt to lookup the number with the CloudVox API
		$requestUrl = 'http://digits.cloudvox.com/' . $phoneNumber . '.json';
		$apiResponse = file_get_contents($requestUrl); // Note: needs code to handle the error case of file_get_contents
 
		if ($apiResponse)
		{
			$responseJson = json_decode($apiResponse);
			if (isset($responseJson->allocation) && isset($responseJson->allocation->carrier_name))
			{
				$carrier = $responseJson->allocation->carrier_name;			
			}
		}
		return $carrier; // will be false or the name of the carrier
	}
 
	if (isset($_GET['phoneNumber']))
	{
		// user has submitted a form via GET, containing a field called phoneNumber
 
		// collect the phoneNumber and remove any non-numeric chars
		$phoneNumber = preg_replace('#[^0-9]#','',strip_tags($_GET['phoneNumber'])); 
		$carrier = findCarrier($phoneNumber);
 
		if ($carrier)
		{
			if (stripos($carrier, 'verizon') !== FALSE)
			{
				sendWithVerizon($phoneNumber);
			}
			else if (stripos($carrier, 'at&t') !== FALSE)
			{
				sendWithATT($phoneNumber);
			}
			else
			{
				// other carrier. you'd really want to fall back to Twilio/Tropo here, and/or log the carrier so you can add it later
				echo "Unknown Carrier: {$carrier}";
			}
		}
		else
		{
			// send SMS via Twilio or Tropo instead
		}
	}
	else
	{
		// show the form
		echo '' . 
			 'Phone Number' .
			 '' .
			 ''
;
	}
?>

Facebook Graph API requires Access Token for Feed Access

Richard Gabriel — Tue, 14 Jun 2011 18:49:58 +0000

On June 3rd, Facebook updated the Graph API to require an access token to pull wall post data from public Facebook pages. This change can cause scripts to stop working, so here is a quick solution to pull wall post data from public Facebook pages with an access token.

Consider the following code:

^?View Code PHP

function fetchUrl($url){
     $ch = curl_init();
     curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
     curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
     curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 20);
 
     $retData = curl_exec($ch);
     curl_close($ch); 
 
     return $retData;
}

^?View Code PHP

$profile_id = "1234567890";
 
$data['feed_data'] = fetchUrl("http://graph.facebook.com/{$profile_id}/feed");

Before the recent changes, this was all you needed to load a Facebook page’s feed. You could load a public page’s feed by simply pulling from graph.facebook.com/{profile_id}/feed. With the recent changes you just have to make a small modification and you’re good to go.

Here is the updated code:

^?View Code PHP

$profile_id = "1234567890";		
 
//App Info, needed for Auth
$app_id = "0001234567890";
$app_secret = "abc123ebf123f3g5g6j";
 
//retrieve auth token
$authToken = fetchUrl("https://graph.facebook.com/oauth/access_token?type=client_cred&client_id={$app_id}&client_secret={$app_secret}");
 
$data['feed_data'] = fetchUrl("https://graph.facebook.com/{$profile_id}/feed?{$authToken}");

Be sure to use https instead of http, needed for OAuth. You’ll also need to create a simple Facebook app to get an App ID and Secret key. Once done, just swap out the variables in the above script for the proper values and you’re off to the races!

Free Webservice to Geocode IP Addresses Saves The Day

George Huger — Sat, 23 May 2009 06:03:06 +0000

At Illuminati Karate we love a challenge. So when our client called needing two lists of 1500 IP addresses geocoded as quickly as possible, we rose to the occasion. With the help of PHP and a freely available web service we were able to complete the task in just under an hour. Here’s how we did it.

The Challenge

Given 2 text files, each containing approximately 1500 anonymous IP addresses, we were to determine how many resolved to each US state. Separate counts were to be maintained for each list. The data was needed for a time sensitive report, and the clock was ticking.

The Tools

There are several freely available SQL databases which correlate IP addresses to their geographic location, such as this one maintained by iplocationtools.com. If we’d been building a web app setting up a local instance would have made sense, but at 4.1 million rows it was going to take too long to get a local instance running.

What we needed was a web service to do the lookups for us. In the past, we’d been unable to find a free web service to fulfill this role, as most will not provide data beyond a country level. But today we were lucky, and Google quickly turned up the perfect solution: a free REST web service running the very same database from iplocationtools.com. Its exactly what it says on the tin: a free IP geolocation webservice. It gave us even more accuracy than we needed (cities and zipcodes!), and even better it was running on Google’s App Engine, so we knew it could handle a heavy load.

With the primary problem solved, the only thing needed was a simple PHP script to read in the input files, query the web service for each IP, parse the JSON results, and maintain a total for each state.

The Solution

Thanks to PHP5′s excellent JSON support, the script to interact with the web service was trivial. I won’t bore you with the file I/O and tallying, but here’s the function which converts the IP address to its state.

^?View Code PHP


	function getStateFromIp($ip)
	{
		$resp = json_decode(file_get_contents('http://freegeoip.appspot.com/json/' . urlencode($ip)));
		if (!$resp->status)
		{
			// lookup failed
			return false;
		}
		else
		{
			return $resp->regioncode;		
		}
	}      
?>

Take note of the the json_decode function. If you’re not already familiar with it I’d highly recommend taking a few minutes to familiarize yourself with PHP5′s JSON functions. JSON is becoming a de facto standard for web services, so being able to painlessly convert to and from JSON in PHP is critical.

Finally, we simply used print_r to dump the array containing the per state totals, and used Monarch to pull the data into an Excel file which we then delivered to the customer. (Note: under normal circumstances we would have reached a more elegant solution, but given the time constraints brute force was the name of the game.)

Conclusion

On-demand web services are fundamentally changing the way we interact with data. Projects which were formerly large, slow, and expensive can now be completed in a matter of hours or days for a fraction of the cost. Perhaps most importantly, anyone can get involved.

Its an exciting time, and we’re happy to be a part of it all. Thanks for reading!

If your company needs help with a custom dataset contact us today. Even if you’re not sure exactly what to ask for, we can help fill in the blanks.