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Most sites have pages for Terms and Con­di­tions, a Pri­vacy pol­icy and /​or a page about cook­ies. Pre­sum­ably they are usu­ally tucked away in a CMS some­where, or as sta­tic HTML — no doubt copied & pasted ver­ba­tim from the Inter­net. Whether the CMS is the nat­ural place for them remains to be seen, and cer­tainly if a site doesn’t have con­tent as such then sup­port­ing those sorts of pages intro­duces new prob­lems — is the con­tent sim­ply dropped into a view somewhere?

To help solve this prob­lem — in Lar­avel 4, specif­i­cally — I’ve cre­ated a sim­ple pack­age called Legal­pages. The idea behind it is sim­ple — you install it, enter a few pieces of infor­ma­tion about your busi­ness or organ­i­sa­tion in a con­fig­u­ra­tion file — and done, your site now has Terms and Con­di­tions, Pri­vacy and cookie pages. I’ve used some boil­er­plate doc­u­ments, which get tai­lored accord­ing to the infor­ma­tion you pro­vide, but you can cus­tomise them if you wish — they wind up in your app/storage direc­tory in Mark­down for­mat for easy editing.

I’ve cre­ated a sim­ple pack­age for work­ing with UK Post­codes. It con­tains two prin­ci­ple components:

1. A sim­ple class to encap­su­late UK Postcodes
2. A wrap­per to this web ser­vice

The post­code class can be used for:

• val­i­dat­ing postcodes
• for­mat­ting them, e.g. “sw1a2aa” -> “SW1A 2AA”
• get­ting the out­code (the first part of a post­code; e.g. M1, SW1A, GL9)

The meat and bones of the pack­age, though, is the web ser­vice. Most notably, it allows you to take a post­code, and find out its lat­i­tude and lon­gi­tude. Here’s an exam­ple of how it’s used:

// Create the client
$client = new Lukaswhite\UkPostcodes\UkPostcodesClient();       

// Call the web service
$postcode = $client->postcode('sw1a2aa');

print get_class($postcode);
// Lukaswhite\UkPostcodes\UkPostcode

print $postcode->formatted();
// SW1A 2AA

print get_class($postcode->getCoordinate());
// League\Geotools\Coordinate\Coordinate

print $postcode->getCoordinate()->getLatitude();
// 51.503539898876

print $postcode->getCoordinate()->getLongitude();
// -0.12768084037293

print get_class($postcode->getCoordinate()->getEllipsoid());
// League\Geotools\Coordinate\Ellipsoid 

print $postcode->council->title;
// City of Westminster

print $postcode->council->code;
// E09000033

print $postcode->council->uri;
// http://statistics.data.gov.uk/id/statistical-geography/E09000033

print $postcode->ward->title;
// St. James's

print $postcode->constituency->title;
// Cities of London and Westminster

I signed up for an online ser­vice the other day (Com​mando​.io), and they had a really nice lit­tle inter­ac­tion dur­ing the signup and signin processes. As soon as you enter your email address, it auto­mat­i­cally dis­plays your Gra­vatar. Nice lit­tle touch.

So, I thought I’d write a quick tuto­r­ial on how to repli­cate the effect.

There is a demo here.

Get­ting Started

For sim­plic­ity, I based the form on one of the exam­ple tem­plates for the Boot­strap frame­work.

It’s pretty straight­for­ward to down­load the Boot­strap frame­work using Bower:

Some­times you may wish to run Arti­san com­mands from your admin dash­board /​appli­ca­tion, with­out using the com­mand line. Per­haps you don’t have access to the com­mand line (in which case per­haps it’s time to switch host­ing!), or more likely per­haps you want to man­u­ally run tasks right from your appli­ca­tion. Here’s a quick guide to how you might set that up.

Run­ning a command

To run a com­mand pro­gram­mat­i­cally, you sim­ply do this:

Artisan::call('my-command', array());

The first argu­ment is the name of the com­mand, the sec­ond your options, which I’m going to ignore for brevity.

It’s prob­a­bly more use­ful if you can get a hold of the command’s out­put; you can do this by pass­ing a third argu­ment, which should be a class that imple­ments Symfony\Component\Console\Output\OutputInterface. Per­haps the most use­ful of these classes is StreamOutput. So, for exam­ple, you can write the out­put to a file:

Lar­avel 4’s pag­i­na­tion func­tion­al­ity sup­ports Twit­ter Boot­strap out-​of-​the-​box. How­ever, if you pre­fer to use Zurb’s Foun­da­tion, here is the code you’ll need. Just drop the pre­sen­ter class some­where where your autoloader will pick it up, pick one (or both) of the tem­plate files, and con­fig­ure your app/config/view.php file to point to the appro­pri­ate tem­plate file.

First, the pre­sen­ter class:

The sim­ple tem­plate file:

The slider tem­plate file:

I haven’t writ­ten any­thing here for quite a while, but I have been writ­ing. I’ve had quite a num­ber of arti­cles pub­lished on Site­point (and before the re-​brand, the PHP­Mas­ter site).

Here’s a list of my lat­est articles.

Cre­at­ing a Subscription-​Based Web­site with Lar­avel and Recurly, Part 1 and Part 2

- Site­point, Sep­tem­ber 2013

Build­ing a subscription-​based web­site or appli­ca­tion with Lar­avel, using Recurly to process recur­ring pay­ments. In this first part I look at set­ting up the appli­ca­tion, con­fig­ur­ing users and roles, and build­ing an authen­ti­ca­tion system.

When­ever I start a new web project, the ini­tial steps are pretty much the same:

• Cre­ate a new folder, in my case in /var/www
• Change the own­er­ship of the new folder
• Come up with a new host­name, e.g. myproject.local
• Cre­ate an entry in etc/hosts
• Cre­ate an Apache vir­tual host for it
• Cre­ate a new database
• Cre­ate a new Git repository
• Intialise the Git repository
• Cre­ate a new project in Sublime

Not par­tic­u­larly hard, but pretty repet­i­tive. And if something’s repet­i­tive, chances are it can be scripted!

So here’s what I came up with:

Until very recently, this web­site was pow­ered by Dru­pal. Now although Drupal’s great in a whole raft of sit­u­a­tions, there are times when either it’s overkill for some­thing small, or just doesn’t fit into one’s work­flow. I came to realise that both of these applied to this site, so when it came to re-​developing, I decided to aban­don Dru­pal for the site altogether.

In the end, I decided to rebuild the site using Jekyll, along with a few other tools along the way.

This post explains the moti­va­tions behind the deci­sion, what I did next and some of the chal­lenges I faced along the way.

The Need for Re-​development

There were sev­eral aspects that made re-​developing my site some­thing of a priority.

First, it wasn’t mobile-​friendly. I may have been able to get away with that some years ago when I first drafted the site, but now that’s just not accept­able. After weigh­ing the pros and cons of a respon­sive vs a sep­a­rate mobile site, I decided on the for­mer — and the only way to do that would be to start the front end build again from scratch.

There isn’t really an out-​of-​the-​box solu­tion for gift cer­tifi­cates in Dru­pal Com­merce; there’s no mod­ule (at time of writ­ing) you can sim­ply down­load, enable and for­get about. Being Dru­pal, there are many ways to skin a cat, so to speak, so in this post I’m going to out­line how I got them work­ing on a site I built.

Of course, the way your gift cer­tifi­cates work may well dif­fer from site-​to-​site; I had a way I wanted it to work, but your require­ments might be sub­tly dif­fer­ent, but hope­fully what­ever your require­ments, some of what fol­lows is of some use.

To out­line, here’s what I wanted to achieve:

1. Gift cer­tifi­cates avail­able as prod­ucts, which a cus­tomer can purchase
2. A range of val­ues (£5, £10, £20 etc) available
3. A prod­uct dis­play page that dif­fered from “con­ven­tional” prod­ucts — there are less fields required, so the lay­out was likely to be different
4. I wanted a cus­tomer to be able to spec­ify a recip­i­ent for the gift certificate
5. The cus­tomer needed to sup­ply an email address for the recip­i­ent, so we can send it to them via email
6. I wanted the cus­tomer to be able to spec­ify the recipient’s name, to per­son­alise the email
7. The cus­tomer ought to be able to enter their name as they wished it to appear on the email; the billing name on the order might well be too formal
8. There ought to be an optional text field to add a per­sonal message
9. The gift cer­tifi­cate needed to be sent out via email when the order was com­pleted, and paid for

I’m writ­ing my first book at the moment. Lately I’ve been doing all my writ­ing in Mark­down, but ulti­mately i’ll need an alter­na­tive for­mat. For word pro­cess­ing, such as it is, I tend to use Open Office — so really I wanted to be able to write in Mark­down, but con­vert to Open Office (or indeed, any of a vari­ety of for­mats). For one thing, it’s nice to get an idea of the num­ber of pages, which my Markown edi­tor just can’t do. Also, I pre­fer to work with sep­a­rate files for each chap­ter — but I’m not entirely sure what order the chap­ters will end up in. So, what I really wanted was a quick way to do two things — con­cate­nate all my chap­ters, and then con­vert the lot to Open Office format.

My solu­tion to this is in two parts.

First, a shell script to con­cate­nate the files. It’s impor­tant it’s fairly easy to rearrange chap­ters, so the for­mat of this was crucial.