Parse.com Create New Object Using PHP CURL

Parse.com is an external BaaS (Backend as a service) provider.

Parse.com provides REST API that lets you interact with Parse.com from anything that can send an HTTP request. In this tutorial we will send and HTTP request to Parse.com using PHP CURL.

This tutorial assumes that you have Parse.com account. Follow the below mentioned steps to create a Parse.com App and obtain Application Id.

  1. Sign In to Parse.com
  2. Move to Dashobard
  3. Create a New App
  4. Copy Application ID, Client Key and REST API Key

The code below will send a PHP CURL request to REST API of Parse. To create a new object on Parse, send a POST request to the class URL containing the contents of the object. You have to place you Application ID and REST API Key with the placeholders. You can run this code on a PHP server.

When the creation is successful, the HTTP response is a 201 Created and the Location header contains the object URL for the new object:

The response body is a JSON object containing the objectId and the createdAt timestamp of the newly-created object:

WordPress Permalinks

WordPress Permalinks are the permanent URL’s to the individual posts, pages, as well as categories and other lists of the WordPress blog postings. It is called permalink because the URL to each post should be permanent, and never change — hence permalink.

Different web server use different modules for creating permalinks. Permalinks are available under:

  • Apache web server with the mod_rewrite module
  • Microsoft IIS 7+ web server with the URL Rewrite 1.1+ module and PHP 5 running as FastCGI
  • Microsoft IIS 6+ using ASAPI_Rewrite
  • Lighttpd using a 404 handler or mod_rewrite

Choosing your permalink structure

In the Settings → Permalinks panel (Options → Permalinks before WordPress 2.5), you can choose one of the “common” structures or enter your own in the “Custom structure” field using the structure tags.

Please note: You never, ever put your site url in the permalinks slot. You must use one of the structure tags, or a combination of tags only. To activate PATHINFO permalinks, start your permalink structure with index.php/.

permalink-settings

Structure Tags :

You can use these tags to customize your “Pretty” or “Almost Pretty” permalinks.  Make sure to end your structure with either %post_id% or %postname% (e.g. /%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/) so that each permalink points to an individual post.

Following is the list of the structure tags:

  •  %year%  : The year of the post, four digits, for example 2013
  •  %monthnum%  :  Month of the year, for example 03
  • %day% : Day of the month, for example 15
  • %hour% : Hour of the day, for example 16
  • %minute% : Minute of the hour, for example 43
  • %second% : Second of the minute, for example 33
  • %post_id% : The unique ID # of the post, for example 423
  • %postname% : A sanitized version of the title of the post (post slug field on Edit Post/Page panel). So “This Is A Great Post!” becomes this-is-a-great-post in the URI.
  • %category% : A sanitized version of the category name (category slug field on New/Edit Category panel). Nested sub-categories appear as nested directories in the URI.
  • %author% : A sanitized version of the author name. 

Category base and Tag base

The Category base and Tag base are prefixes used in URLs for category and tag archives, which look like this:

  • example.net/wp/category_base/category_name
  • example.net/wp/tag_base/tag_name 

The default values for these are category and tag. You can change them, but you can’t remove them from the URLs altogether. Custom permalinks work on most systems without any problems, but there are still some conditions where problems occur. 

How-To: Write a WordPress Plugin

WordPress Plugins help us to easily modify , customize and enhance the WordPress Blog. We can use the WordPress Plugins to add functionality to WordPress instead of the modifying the core programming of the WordPress.

If you need a specific functionality for your blog you must first search WordPress Repository for existing plugins to see if someone has already developed a plugin that suits your requirements. If not then you should proceed developing your own plugin which is explained below:

I assume that you are already familiar with the basic functionality of WordPress, and PHP programming.

Creating a Plugin

This section will take you through the steps of creating a well-structured WordPress Plugin.

Names, Files, and Locations

Plugin Name

You should choose a name for your plugin which describes what the plugin is going to do. For example a Stock Exchange related plugin should use wordpress Stocks in its name. You should also check the WordPress repository to check if the proposed name is available or already taken .

Plugin Files

Create a plugin file with the name based on the name of the plugin. It is not cumplosary but you should follow the rules. You can place this file directly under the /wp-content/plugins/ directory or in the directory of you plugin (e.g: /wp-content/plugins/your-plugin/

Readme File

If you want to host your Plugin on http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/, you also need to create a readme.txt file in a standard format, and include it with your Plugin. See http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/about/readme.txt for a description of the format.

Note that the WordPress plugin repository takes the “Requires” and “Tested up to” versions from the readme.txt in the stable tag.

 Creating Plugin Files

Now it’s time to put some information into your main Plugin PHP file.

Standard Plugin Information

Your Plugin’s main PHP must start with the following code. 

 These lines will serve as the definition of your plugin. You can write your plugin code after these lines. The whole plugin logic will follow these lines .

How-To: Create a WordPress Theme in 5 minutes

It is fairly easy to create a WordPress Theme. A few things before you need a template are:

  1. Create a layout of your blog by figuring out what is to be placed where.
  2. Create a HTML layout based on the above layout.

A sample layout which we are using in this tutorial can be seen in the image here.theme-layout

Right Then !!! We are ready to proceed

The files necessary for a theme to function properly in WordPress are:

  1. header.php -> Header
  2. index.php -> Content glued with header, sidebar and footer.
  3. sidebar.php -> Sidebar
  4. footer.php -> Footer
  5. style.css -> CSS

Now we will write some sample code for all the default files

The header.php

   

Basically, this is simple HTML code with a single line containing a php code and a standard WordPress function. In this file you can specify your meta tags such as the title of your website, meta description and the keywords for your page.

Right after the title the line we add

. This tells WordPress to load the style.css file for the theme. It will handle the styling of your website. The part of the line is a WordPress function that loads the stylesheet file.

Next, we have added the beginning of a “div” with class wrapper which will be the main container of the website. We have set class for it so we can modify it via the style.css file.

After that we have added a simple label HEADER wrapped in a “div” with class “header” which will be later specified in the stylesheet file.

The index.php file

Main Area

 

Posted on

 


 

The code in this file begins with  which will include the header.php file and the code in it in the main page. It uses an WordPress function to do this. Then we have placed a Main Area text to indicate which section of your theme is displayed in this area.

The code next to the  function checks whether your WordPress installation has posts to publish or not. If it has posts, they are displayed.

After this we will include the sidebar.php file with this line –. In this file you can display your post categories, archives etc.

After this line, we insert an empty “div” that will separate the Main Area and the Sidebar from the footer.

Finally, we add one last line – which will include the footer.php file in your page.

The sidebar.php file

In the sidebar.php we will add the following code:

In the sidebar.php file we use internal WordPress functions to display the Categories and Archives of posts. The WordPress function returns them as list items, therefore we have wrapped the actual functions in unsorted lists (the tags).

The footer.php file

We have added these lines to the footer.php file:

With this code we add a simple FOOTER label. You can also add additional links in the footer.

The style.css file

The style.css will handle the styling of the theme. Add the following lines to the style.css file to create some styling for the theme:

This simple css file sets the basic looks of your theme. The theme will look something like the image here:

theme-sample1
So after doing all this we have basic theme functional.

How-to: Create Multiple Dynamic Sidebars for WordPress Widgets

In this post we will learn how to create multiple dynamic sidebars for WordPress widgets which will in turn help you customize your WordPress Theme even more.

Follow the under mentioned simple steps:

Edit functions.php for Multiple Dynamic Sidebars

The functions.php in a theme usually comes with a code to add at least one sidebar widget. We will now edit this functions.php to add multiple sidebar to the WordPress theme. All we need is to use the following function.

The $args parameter supplied to the register_sidebar can have following values:

The parameters to the function are described below:

args: (string/array) (optional) Builds Sidebar based off of ‘name’ and ‘id’ values.

Default: None

  • name – Sidebar name (default is localized ‘Sidebar’ and numeric ID).
  • id – Sidebar id – Must be all in lowercase, with no spaces (default is a numeric auto-incremented ID).
  • description – Text description of what/where the sidebar is. Shown on widget management screen.
  • class – CSS class name to assign to the widget HTML (default: empty).
  • before_widget – HTML to place before every widget(default: ‘<li id=”%1$s” class=”widget %2$s”>’) Note: uses sprintf for variable substitution
  • after_widget – HTML to place after every widget (default: “</li>n”).
  • before_title – HTML to place before every title (default: <h2 class=”widgettitle”>).
  • after_title – HTML to place after every title (default: “</h2>n”).

In the example below you can see that two sidebars are registered with the name sidebar1 and sidebar2. The code now looks like this –

After writing this code the the functions.php if you now visit your widgets area you can see the two sidebars appearing there. Now you can drag and drop widgets of your choice to both the sidebars and customize the options. Remember to Save Changes or else all customization is lost.

Add Dynamic Sidebars to WordPress Template

Now we need to place the code in the WordPress Theme template wherever we want the sidebars to appear in our template.

Sidebar1 code goes like this

Sidebar2 code goes like this

Save the template and watch your widgets go live. You can add any number of dynamic sidebars in any combination to your theme.