When I add more and more functionality I’m exploring a lot of handy tweaks or commands that are not always just as you see on your webserver. Here are several of this tweaks and I’m sure I’ll explore more in the future. Do you guys have some suggestions?

Virtual host

Setting up a virtual host is very easy and the url is very nice, short and clean if you have set it up. You can get a address like this: http://domainname.local or something like that.

Just add the following lines at the bottom of your .httpconf file that can be found in the folder /etc/apache2/

<VirtualHost *:80>
DocumentRoot “/Users/myusername/Sites/domainname/public”
ServerName mylocaldomain.local

# This should be omitted in the production environment
SetEnv APPLICATION_ENV development

<Directory “/Users/myusername/Sites/domainname/public”>
Options Indexes MultiViews FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride All
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
</Directory>

</VirtualHost>

Chmod

For uploading files you’ll have to make the folder writable with the chmod command. Instead of opening your favorite ftp client, just open Terminal and type the following line:

Chmod 777 sites/domainname/etc/images/

MySQL server

Download MySQL Community Server for OSX and have MySQL available in seconds. A nice MySQL status tab is added to the Preferences tab. You can also start the MySQL server on startup.

You can download phpMyAdmin to maintain the database or use another MySQL administration tool.

Google Maps

If you need some Google Maps functionality it can be an outcome to develop on your own machine. I’ve requested my API key with the local addres, http://domainname.local, and this works! I’m glad Google hasn’t blocked this!

NOTE
Google Maps is not available when another user on your network visits your testing server. If you’d like this you’ll need to buy a Google Enterprise license.

In this case you always need to run an extra query to retrieve the total records. See the examples below.

Old style

$sql = "SELECT id, name FROM table WHERE cat = 1";
$res = mysql_query($sql);
$count = mysql_num_rows($res);

Read more about the basic error handler in a previous article.

PDO style

try{
	$sql = "SELECT COUNT(id), name FROM table WHERE cat = 1";
	$res = $this->db->prepare($sql);
	$res->execute();

	//count the rows
	$count = $res->fetchColumn();
}catch(PDOException $e){
	//Basic error handler
	return $e->getMessage();
	return $sql;
}

1. Look to the future, not to the easiest way
   Use PDO or another extension so you can also use your applications with php > 6.0
2. Never, but I mean NEVER use ` (back ticks)
   Choose the fieldnames in the database wisely. Take a look at the list of reserved words for MySql and you’ll know wich words you don’t have got to choose.
3. Choose the correct field type
   When you save a date, choose a DATE filed, when you have a decimal choose DECIMAL and so on…
4. Destroy, blowup and sink the functions DATE_ADD() and DATE_SUBB()
   Use the more logical INTERVAL when you’re calculating with dates. Read more about the MySql time and date functions.
5. Write clean handy query’s
   I know I don’t do this on this website but that’s because of the syntax highlighter.

//A not-clean query.
$sql = "SELECT t.id, t.name, t.cat FROM table AS t INNERJOIN ctable AS c ON t.cat = c.id WHERE t.cat = 1 AND t.name = 'Testdata' ORDER BY t.name ASC LIMIT 0,10";

//A clean one. Note that the syntax highlighter is struggeling with this one and on this blog the 'dirty one' is used...
$sql = "SELECT
			t.id,
			t.name,
			t.cat
		FROM
			table AS t
		INNERJOIN ctable AS c ON t.cat = c.id
		WHERE
			t.cat = 1
		AND
			t.name = 'Testdata'
		ORDER BY
			t.name ASC
		LIMIT 0,10";

The principles

• Run the query with php
• See if there is an error with the query
• Display the error while the rest of the script don’t dies!

The php

$sql = "SELECT name FROM table WHERE id = 1";
$res = mysql_query($sql);

	//an error occures
	if(!$res){
		trigger_error(mysql_error($sql.'<br />'.$res));
	}else{
		//fetch the output
		while($row = mysql_fetch_assoc($res)){
			echo $row['name'].PHP_EOL;
		}
	}