Create a form that requires the user to enter both a username and password. If the username field or password field is left blank then a message will be displayed.

Learn how to use the animate function within the jQuery library to create an effect similar to the table of contents for the table of contents on codeigniter.com.

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Over the next few weeks I am going to be completely redesigning the whole of TheTutorialBlog so that it is a lot more user friendly. From that point on I will be creating high quality video tutorials very often so that they are easy to follow and viewers learn more.

I may also be interested in having other people write tutorials and create screencasts; so please get in touch if you think you are capable of doing this.

In this tutorial you will learn about writing information to a text file and then retrieving the information you wrote to the text file. Retrieving the files that are in a directory and about arrays.

This is a quite basic script and there isn't much to write about it so if there is something that you don't understand look the function up within the PHP manual online.

Step 1

In the first step we are going to get the current page that we are at and store it within a variable. The information in that variable will then be wrote to a file called stats.txt.

Include the following code in the pages that you want the number of visits to be counted for. If you have a file such as a header file than put this code in there.

<?php
 
// write current page to stats file
$cur_page = $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'];
if(empty($cur_page)) {
	$cur_page = 'index.php';
}
$file = fopen("stats.txt", "a+");
fwrite($file, $cur_page . "\n");
fclose($file);
 
?>

Step 2

The next piece of code that we are going to write is going to retrieve the information in stats.txt and put it into an array. We then use the function array_count_values to see how many times the page url occurs. We also retrieve the files in the directory which this script is in to compare them with the files in stats.txt.

<?php
 
$file = fopen("stats.txt", "r");
$files = scandir('./');
$num_files = array();
while(!feof($file)){
	$line = fgets($file);
	$line = substr($line, 1, -1);
	$line = explode(",", $line);
	array_push($num_files, $line[0]);
}
 
 
$num_cv = array_count_values($num_files);
 
foreach($num_cv as $f => $c) {
	echo 'file: ' . $f . ' - ' . $c . '<br>';
}
 
?>

If you have any other alternatives or need any help then feel free to post a comment.

What kind of new tutorials would you like to see on this website?

Post a comment or email me (wez [at] thetutorialblog.com) and let me know and I will start writing tutorials on things that you would like to see posted on here.

There are many ways of getting traffic to your website such as with search engines, social network websites and telling friends. The best way that I have found besides search engines of getting traffic to your website is by submitting your tutorials to tutorial submission websites.

There are tutorial websites that allow for submission of specific tutorials such as only PHP or Photoshop tutorials and there are websites that allow you to submit a lot of different types of tutorials to that website.

CodeBounce is one of the tutorial submission websites that allow you to submit a range of different tutorials. Its system is somewhat similar to that of Digg's. CodeBounce is a great website and is easy to get to grips with. They allow for the submission of ASP.NET, PHP, CSS, Photoshop, Wordpress, Graphic Design, Web Design and Java.
Developer Links and Tutorials.
 

LearnPHP is a website that I recommend submitting your PHP tutorials too because I receive a lot of visitors from them and overall the website is easy to navigate and understand. They only allow for the submission of PHP tutorials as you can probably tell from the name.

Tutorialized is a great website that allows for the submission of many different types of tutorials. Tutorialized has been a website that has been around for a long time and if you submit a tutorial to this website and you get accepted then expect quite a lot of hits from here as they have a lot of visitors.

If there are any other websites that you like submitting tutorials too and have received a good amount of visitors from then share it with everyone and let us know by posting a comment.

The plugin that I'm going to show you how to create within this post is a plugin that I created for MakeUseOf.

Creating plugins for WP is relatively easy and uses actions to call functions that are included in pages within the main WP files. To learn more about creating plugins for WP go here.

Ok so lets get started with creating the plugin.

When creating a plugin for WP make sure that you include your own unique word or acronym to your functions so that they don't conflict with any other plugins that may be installed.

Because I created this for MakeUseOf the acronym I use is MUO and then AF because I named the plugin author footer so every function within this plugin begins with MUO_AF.

So to start our plugin we add this

Here is where we add the name of our plugin, a description, your name and the version number of your plugin.

The next bit of code that we add is the register_activation_hook and register_deactivation_hook so that when the plugin is activated and deactivated the code within functions that we will create in our next step will be executed.

We're now going to create two functions called MUO_AF_activate and MUO_AF_deactivate so that the register hooks work correctly.

In the next step we will write code that will be called and displayed within the Your Profile page in the admin-cp.

When the Update Profile button is clicked the information from the previous bit of code will be retrieved in the next bit of code and the database will be updated.

The code we will write now is the code that will grab the contents of the post and then attach the authors signature to the end of that post.

We will now add the functions to actions, this is the most important part of the code because without this none of the functions would be called and nothing would happen.

Then at the end of the file close the php tags with

I have not been very descriptive in this tutorial of what the actual code within the plugin is doing because I created this tutorial wanting to show people the basics bit of code that are needed to call functions and make a plugin work.

I hope that you have learnt something by reading this tutorial and feel free to post a comment with your thoughts on this post.

I'm sure if you've been programming for a few years that you've come across when you need to check if something equals something than do something else a few times.

Well the best way to do this is like so.

Say for example we have a variable called $num and the value of it is 5.

You could store it in a variable.

or you could print it straight to the users browsers

So what happens here is if $num is greater than 0 print More than 0 else print Less than 0.

I hope you've found this quick tip helpful and use it throughout future projects.

If you haven't checked out the previous tutorials then click on the names to view them. Part 1, Part 2, Part3.

In Part 4 of this tutorial you are going to learn how to edit and delete your posts from the admin page.

Connect to the database

The first thing that we need to do is go to index.php under the admin folder and to the after the first <?php add this:

Display The Posts

After this line in index.php

add below it

What we're doing here is querying the database to display all the posts in the table news_system from the newest post to the oldest post. We then use a while loop to loop through and display each post. You will see that each post links to editpost.php so what we will do now is create an editpost.php file.

Creating editpost.php

After you have created your editpost.php file add the following code to it

What we're doing here is opening the php tags then including dbconnect.php that connects to the database. $_GET['id'] gets the id from the URL and stores it in a variable called $id. Then we close the php tags with ?>.

Before the ?> insert the following code.

Below this we're going to create a html form and display the information that we have retrieved from the database within it so that we can edit it.

What happens in this piece of code is if the post hasn't been submitted then include the form. Within all the form elements you'll see that they all have value and that value is the variables. We also include the id in a hidden element so that we can carry it over for when the submit button is pressed. Under the submit button there is a link to a page that we will create in a minute that will delete that post.

In the next lot of code we're going to make it retrieve all of the values from the form and store them in variables that will then be used to update the row within the table.

All the code together should look like this:

Now that we have created the editpost.php file its time to create deletepost.php.

Delete a post

In this delete file I haven't added any confirmation to ask the user if they're certain that they want to delete the post. It might be a good idea to add it using submit buttons or javascript.

As usual we include the php tag and the database file as we're going to be querying the database. We then get the id from the URL and store it in $id. Then we query the database and delete the post and last of all we display a message to the user saying the post has been deleted.

Thank you

Thanks for taking the time to read this tutorial. I hope that you have learnt something and that you keep returning to check out our latest tutorials.

If there is anything that you need help with then please post a comment and I'll write a tutorial on it or get back to you.