Category Archives: Web

Submitting a form with a radio button

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Submitting a form from a radio button is not common but it is a nice UI which is even better when done with AJAX.

A typical form with two radio buttons would look something like this.

<form action="test.html">
1 <input type="radio" name="test" value ="1"><br>
2 <input type="radio" name="test" value ="2">
<p><input type="submit" value="submit">
</form>
1
2

But with basic JavaScript you can make a simpler form like this.

<script>
function submitAction( form, absPath ) {
form.action = absPath;
form.submit();
}
</script>
<form action="test.html" id="test">
1 <input type="radio" name="test" value ="1" onchange="submitAction(document.getElementById('test'), 'test.html')"><br>
2 <input type="radio" name="test" value ="2" onchange="submitAction(document.getElementById('test'), 'test.html')">
</form>
1
2

If you are using Struts the above form’s JSP would be:

<html:form action="test.do" styleId="test">
1 <input type="radio" name="test" value ="1" onchange="submitAction(document.getElementById('test'), 'test.do')"><br>
2 <input type="radio" name="test" value ="2" onchange="submitAction(document.getElementById('test'), 'test.do')">
</html:form>

WordPress Contact E-Mail Form

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Naively, I put up email addresses for sales, information, and site feedback on the Contact Us page. The spam robots discovered these email addresses and have begun to spam me.

Fortunately there is a WordPress plugin, PXS Mail Form, for email forms that seems quite mature and even protects against exploits. You can see how it is used on this page.

I made only one change to this plugin that allows you to set the subject of the email form using a GET request. Previously you could only do this using a POST request.

***************
*** 58,69 ****
              } else {
              $show_subject = 1;
              $subject = '';
!             if (empty($_POST['your_subject'])) {
              $subject = get_option('pxs_subject');
              $subject = stripslashes($subject);
              $subject_mm = '';
              } else {
!             $subject = $_POST['your_subject'];
              $subject = stripslashes($subject);
              $subject_mm =  ': '.$subject;
              }
--- 58,69 ----
              } else {
              $show_subject = 1;
              $subject = '';
!             if (empty($_REQUEST['your_subject'])) {
              $subject = get_option('pxs_subject');
              $subject = stripslashes($subject);
              $subject_mm = '';
              } else {
!             $subject = $_REQUEST['your_subject'];
              $subject = stripslashes($subject);
              $subject_mm =  ': '.$subject;
              }

Problem connecting to MySQL 4.1 via PHP

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After installing MySQL 4.1 I was unable to connect to the MySQL database via PHP. It turns out this was because I set the root password. I tried instructing MySQL to use the old password encryption method by adding these two lines to my.ini but that did not work.

#Use old password encryption method (needed for 4.0 and older clients).
old_passwords

Finally I just uninstalled MySQL 4.1 and reinstalled it without the root password. After doing that everything was fine.

Also I noticed when I uninstalled MySQL 4.0 it did not remove the service. When I installed MySQL 4.1 it complained about the Windows service”MySQL” already being there so I had to install the Windows service “MySQL41”. Then I uninstalled MySQL 4.1 due to the above issue and it removed the “MySQL41” service.

When I installed the second time it thought I was trying to reconfigure the “MySQL” service. I instructed the installer to remove the “MySQL” service. Then I uninstalled and reinstalled a third time and this time I was able to install the Windows service “MySQL41” properly.

WordPress and Gallery2

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I installed Gallery2 for one of my clients. I then integrated Gallery2 with WordPress using this plugin.

Everything seemed to go fine except I could not get Gallery2’s URL rewrite to play nicely with the WordPress installation which resulted in thumbnail images not showing up in the sidebar. After much experimentation I finally decided just to turn off Gallery2’s URL rewrite to resolve the problem. I tried using this help page but it didn’t work for me.

I am also unsure how to make the Gallery2 pages look more integrated with the WordPress pages. Right now it’s glaringly obvious that the Gallery2 pages are not part of the rest of the site.

Gallery2 is pretty cool. It is quite improved from the original Gallery. I like how you can set the permissions for individual photos so that certain photos only registered users can see. It was annoying though that I had to type in the group name “Registered Users” instead of being given a choice in a drop down list of which group I want to assign a new permission.

WordPress fun

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Plugins

  • WPG2 – embeds Gallery2 within WordPress to share photos, videos and any other Gallery2 content seamlessly into the WordPress Sidebar and Blog entries
  • Croissanga – re-posts your published-status posts to your Xanga site
  • WeatherIcon 2.0 – displays the weather for any place in the world
  • Theme Switcher – allows your readers to switch between your installed themes

Themes

To see different WordPress themes try the WordPress Theme Viewer.