Unofficial Kohana 3.0 Wiki

The purpose of this Wiki is to provide a place where the Kohana community can collaborate on documentation and tutorials and to provide a staging ground for writing official documentation.

There are five ways which you can call a Kohana controller from wordpress

1 – Use wordpress permalinks, .htaccess and Kohana default routing

2 – Use wordpress dashboard to bind kohana controllers to wordpress pages

3 – Use a template tag to call a controller from your wordpress templates

4 – Use a shortcut tag to call a controller from within a wordpress post or page

5 – Add a KohanaWidget to your wordpress sidebar

Using Permalinks and Default Routing

Follow the Wordpress instructions to set up permalinks for your blog. I use a custom permalink structure of /%postname%/ which works well.  If you do this then you can also call any valid Kohana controller as long as the controller name does not conflict with your post name.

For example. If you have the following Kohana controller in application/classes/controller/mycontroller you’ll be able to call this controller from the url http:/myblogurl.com/mycontroller.

Important things to remember: You’re controller will be loaded as if it is the content of a wordpress page. The page content will be whatever you set as your controller response. The title of the page however is taken from the wordpress database by default.  To set the title of your page with your Kohana controller you must update the ‘title’ property of the Kohana request object as shown below

$this->request->title = “My Page Title”;

Bind a Kohana Controller to a Wordpress Page

If you go to the Settings > Kohana section of your wordpress dashboard you’ll have the ability to set some custom page routing.  Simply enter the Kohana controller ( controller/action/id )  in the appropriate input field and select a wordpress page from the dropdown menu.  You also have the option to set the desired placement of the controller’s response.

Calling a Kohana Controller from a Wordpress Template

From any wordpress template or theme file you have the option of calling a Kohana Controller using the following syntax

<?php kohana(’controller/action/id’); ?>

Using a Shortcut tag to call a Kohana Controller from a Post or Page

If you want to call a Kohana Controller directly from a Wordpress post or page just use the following syntax when editing your content

[ request controller/action/id ]

Add a KohanaWidget to your Wordpress Sidebar

From the Apperance > Widget section of your dashboard add the KohanaWidget to your sidebar and provide a title and the controller you wish to call ( example  controller/action/id )

Questions and Support

For more support and to get answers to your questions head to http://forum.kohanaphp.com

The Files

• table_form.html  ::  This is our main HTML file.  It contains a HTML Table and a simple Form.
• table_form.php :: This is the php file which will process the form and return results back to our HTML page
• table_form.js :: This is the Javascript file which will handle submitting data to php and handle the response
• table_form.css :: basic css file to add styling

View a Demo

Download the full Source

I’ve tried to add detailed comments to the source code but if you have any questions just post them in the comments.

The Bare Bones : Row Injection

For those who are only interested in the table row injection here is a function which will get the job done and is crossbrowser. If you find otherwise let me know. The key here is instead of creating individual elements for tr and td and injecting them into the table, you create a full table element with a single row and inject that into your table.

var inject_row = function( table, data )
{
    var str = '';
    data.each(function(item, index){
        str += '<td>'+item+'</td>';
    });
    var tr = new Element('div', {
        html: '<table><tbody><tr>' + str + '</tr></tbody></table>'
    }).getElement('tr');
    tr.inject( table );
}

view the source here

Usage

• save the source code linked above as media.php and place it in your application/controllers/ folder
• place your css files in the folder application/views/media/css/
• place your js files in the folder application/views/media/js/
• place your images in the folder application/views/image/

You can now load your files easily using Kohana helpers. NOTE: using file extensions when calling files is optional

echo html::stylesheet( array('media/css/style'), array('screen') );

echo html::script(array('media/js/mootools'), FALSE);

echo html::image('media/image/loading');

Example

Show Alert then Fade

Show Alert

To use Hot Flash Alert in your web site you’ll need to complete a few simple steps.

Step 1 : Include the required Javascript and CSS files in your web site header.

The Hot Flash Alert requires Mootools.js, hot_flash.js, and hot_flash.css .

Step 2 : Add the Alert Box DIV to your theme

The Hot Flash Alert is actually a div which sits in your web page until it is called.  It’s probably best to stick the div at the bottom of your web page so that it displays on top of any other absolutely positioned elements.

<div id="alert_box">
   <div id="alert_head">
      <a id="alert_box_x" href="#">close</a>
   </div>
   <div id="alert_box_message"></div>
</div>

You can customize the DIV anyway you want but it will require all four elements ‘alert_box’, ‘alert_head’, ‘alert_box_x’ and ‘alert_box_message’. The styling of these elements is handled by the hot_flash.css file.

Step 3 :  Call the hot_flash() javascript method

Once all the pieces are in place you can pop open the Hot Flash Alert by calling the hot_flash() javacript method.

 // text = the message that will be displayed
 // duration (optional) milliseconds to fade out the alert
 hot_flash( text, duration );

Here are some examples.

  // simple alert that fades out on it's own
  // over 2000 milliseconds ( or 2 seconds )
  hot_flash('hello world', 2000 );

  // simple alert with close button
  hot_flash('goodbye world');

It’s as simple as that.

Building Wordpress Plugins using Kohana

The other PHP framework which I have to also admit having a crush on is Wordpress. While Wordpress is the complete opposite of something like Kohana, it’s still a very powerful and popular framework for building sites. I often find myself having to build a web site for someone else to manage and maintain.  Wordpress is great for this because out of the box it has a lot of features that your basic webmaster is looking for and it has a large community that can provide support ( something I don’t like doing ). The only downside to building a web site in Wordpress (IMHO) is that when it comes to building custom plugins the process is simply not OOP.

In order to bridge these two worlds and make my life a little easier I have created the Kohana for Wordpress plugin. Hopefully this plugin will be useful to some people.

More details and download the plugin here.

How to format text to be inserted into a url

If you need to pass some text or a dynamic string in a URL use urlencode() and urldecode()

// encoding the string
$str = "Jerry's Bedding Plants & Ice Cream";
$url = 'http://www.example.com/page.php?args=' . urlencode( $str );

// decoding the string in page.php
$str = urldecode( $_GET['args'] );

Parsing a query string

Want to automatically take the query string and dump the values into an array ? Use parse_str() . You can easily get the query string from $_SERVER['QUERY_STRING']

$query = $_SERVER['QUERY_STRING'];  // foo=bar&bar=foo&cool=me&you=ok
$vars = array();
parse_str( $query, $vars );
print_r( $vars );

/* output
Array
(
  [foo] => bar
  [bar] => foo
  [cool] => me
  [you] => ok
)
*/

Creating a formatted string

Most people are very familiar with printf() in php but if you’re like me you often forget about sprintf() which returns your formatted string instead of printing it to the screen.

$isodate = sprintf("%04d-%02d-%02d", $year, $month, $day);

Another one you might forget about is vsprintf() which is similar to sprintf() but works with an array

$data = array( $year, $month, $day );
$isodate = vsprintf("%04d-%02d-%02d", $data );

Formatting numbers

For some reason I always forget the arguments for the PHP number_format() function. The function takes one, two or 4 arguments ( will not accept just 3 arguments ).

// string number_format  ( float $number  , int $decimals  , string $dec_point  , string $thousands_sep  )
$number = number_format( '32456.82', 2, '.', ',' );

Count the number of times a small string occurs in a large string

// how many times do I say rad;
$str = "I've got some rad moves, super rad moves, I've got rad mad bad not sad rad moves.";
$rad_count = substr_count( $str, 'rad' );

Happy coding nerds !

Anyway here are a couple of very simple and straightforward ajax functions ( yes I’m calling them ajax even tho I hate the word ).


function ajaxPost(url,stream,callback)
{
ajaxRequest(url,stream,callback,'POST');
}

function ajaxRequest(url,stream,callback,method)
{
if( ! method ) method = 'POST';
var xmlhttp = new XMLHttpRequest();
xmlhttp.open(method, url, true);
xmlhttp.setRequestHeader('Content-Type','application/x-www-form-urlencoded');
xmlhttp.onreadystatechange=function() {
if(xmlhttp.readyState==4)
{ callback(xmlhttp.responseText); }
};
xmlhttp.send(stream);
}


Here’s an example of how to use these functions.


<script>
function callRequest()
{
var uri = "http://kerkness.ca/kerkdemo/hello.world";
var stream = "myvar=this&myothervar=that";
ajaxGet( uri, requestResponseHandler );
}
function requestResponseHandler( response )
{
alert( response );
}
</script>

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<mx:WindowedApplication xmlns:mx="http://www.adobe.com/2006/mxml" layout="absolute" applicationComplete="init()">

<mx:Script>
	<![CDATA[

private function init():void
{
	systemManager.stage.displayState=flash.display.StageDisplayState.FULL_SCREEN_INTERACTIVE
}
	]]>
</mx:Script>

</mx:WindowedApplication>

1. Make sure you have the debugger version of the flash player installed
2. Add  trace(”your test message or details”);  to your code where appropriate
3. Open Applications/Utilities/Terminal
4. Go to the location of the Flash log file..
   /Users/[username]/Library/Preferences/[App Name]/Local Store/
   
5. Type the following command
   tail -f flashlog.txt
   
6. Launch your application.