This has been a massive project, mainly consolidating the thousands of pages the old SP site with the old Dubai Select site.
Our site is now powered by WordPress and has over 2700 seo freindly, W3C validating pages.

Plus some annoying fireworks. At some point when have time I have will write a case study report on the project. For now just take a look.

Investment Property Abroad
Dubai Immobilien
Dubai Property

Additionally I came up against two other issues:

1. Finding out the depth of the page within the hierarchy of the site.
2. Control over whether the menu displayed “sibling” links or “children” links.

A lot of the existing tutorials are great, but their implementation is very broad. The “wp_list_pages” function within WordPress is great, very flexible and well documented. Yet swapping between section or child menu based on page depth seemed to be a dead end. Until I read this great tutorial by Jake Goldman talking about a hardly mentioned but great function, called “get_post_ancestors();”. This cool function will create an array of the current posts ancestors. Using this I expanded on Jake Goldman’s great article, adding a little more finite control over the submenu.

Page depth and sibling / child code for WordPress

Heres the PHP code I dropped into the sidebar.php of my WordPress theme. Hopefully should be of use. My example displays the sibling/ section links into the navigation. While displaying the child links for all the pages higher in the hiarachy. Hope this code is usefull.

#Creates Array from the pages ancestors post ID's
$post_ancestors = get_post_ancestors($post);

#Un-comment array for guidence
#print_r($post_ancestors);

#Gets the base post id
$top_page = array_pop($post_ancestors);

#Get post depth
#After a certain depth into the page hierarchy the page displays sibling menu items in sub menu.

if (count($post_ancestors) <= 1) {
#Shallow Link Display Children
$children = wp_list_pages('title_li=&child_of='.$post->ID.'&echo=0&depth=1');

 } elseif (count($post_ancestors) >= 2) {

#Deep Link Display Siblings or Section Links
$children = wp_list_pages('title_li=&child_of='.$post->post_parent.'&echo=0&depth=1');

} elseif (is_page()) {

#Default Display Children
$children = wp_list_pages('title_li=&child_of='.$post->ID.'&echo=0&depth=1');

} 

if ($children) {
#Outputs the submenu if it exists
echo('
Sub Menu');
echo($children);
echo('

');

Example of the hierarchy of the site

• Locations
  • Manchester
  • Dubai
  • Turkey
  • Dubai Marina
    • Botanica
    • The Torch
      • Overview
      • Facilities
      • Properties
        • 2 Bedroom Apartment
      • Payment Plans
      • FAQ’s

Makes extensive use of the Jquery Slider ui and Datatables plugin. Feeding off my first Mysql database, that in turn is populated by an xml file. All ive got to do now is tie the rest of the site into the new pricing database.

1. Dont Panic. Your website is now a crime scene. Its vital you preserve all the evidence of whats happened to your site. So you can stop it again.
2. Check your other sites. if you share a number of websites on one hosting package its highly likely they where exploited.
3. Take the hacked site down and put a maintenance page up. The last thing you want to do is scare all your customers with your lack of security
4. Change all your passwords It could be as simple as this, reset all your account passwords. By that I mean EVERYTHING. FTP, MYSQL, windows login, whatever just make sure the new ones are long hard and complicated. Check who has access to the site and that your sharing settings are secure on your own computer.
5. Record everything Take note of what and when anything changed. Keep a record of the specific times. This will help you clarify what method you where hacked and stop them again. Keep a copy of the pages the hackers exploited or uploaded. As well as any PHP error logs or FTP logs.
6. Scan for viruses and malware. They might of infected you with malware, a spider, viruses or any number of evils. Better safe than sorry.
7. Get Backup If your with a good host, they should keep a backup of your site. Usually they take a snapshot of your site nightly so it could be simple case of pressing reset. If your not so lucky, better dig out all your own backups.
8. Investigate, if the hacker left his tag or link on your site. Carefully inspect it, google it. Another trick is to google your website link and words like “Defaced” or “hacked”. This will usually garner a wealth of information that will indicate the exact exploit the hackers used to get into your site.
9. Dont get even lets face it your gonna be pissed but your probally best letting it go. You dont want to upset a hornets nest of hackers after all.
10. Scan for vunerabilities theres a number of great web vulnerability scanners out there. I strongly suggest Acunetix vunerability scanner
11. learn how to hack websites in order to prevent it happening your going to have to learn how to hack your website.
12. Fix it, delete it, block it if you cant secure it, limit the access. Your never going to be 100% hack proof but you can make it harder. Finally, If you know what their IP range is, ban them. Maybe even a countries ip range temporarily if it doesnt effect business too much. Better safe than sorry, good luck!

Once i know for sure what happened with my websites I will post about how I hope i prevented it. Fingers Crossed.

For now a great place to start researching is perishablepress.

Both started off with great simplistic products… and we all have our feelings about where Microsoft went after that. Yet will Google go the same way? Hopefully not and the main thing that reassures me is the opensource nature of the Google Wave.

I want to play with it!!!!

Sadly not for a while, if your riding the crest of the latest and greatest in web the commercial applications are not going to being cutting edge. Luckily neither HTML5 or CSS3 are going to be full implemented for a long time. Considering its only supported by minimal browsers.

Your best bet is cracking open you text editer and getting freindly with the source.
My weapon of choice is Smultron its a great little mac text editor with syntax highlighting. A Good place to start to learn HTML 5 would be here.

I highly recomend the Pikachoose gallery simple for its amazing simplicity and ease of use. Easy to style and adapt to my own needs, including a inbuilt carousel feature utilizing slider.js. I’ll post a link to an example lightbox gallery soon.

List images from a folder automatically via PHP

Heres a little code snippet I used to list all the images in a folder.

// the directory, where your images are stored
$imgdir = '/images/'; 

// list of filetypes you
$allowed_types = array('png','jpg','jpeg','gif'); want to show

$dimg = opendir($imgdir);
while($imgfile = readdir($dimg))
{
 if(in_array(strtolower(substr($imgfile,-3)),$allowed_types))
 {
  $a_img[] = $imgfile;
  sort($a_img);
  reset ($a_img);
 }
}
// total image number
$totimg = count($a_img); 

for($x=0; $x < $totimg; $x++)
{
 $size = getimagesize($imgdir.'/'.$a_img[$x]);

 // do whatever
 $halfwidth = ceil($size[0]/2);
 $halfheight = ceil($size[1]/2);
 echo '


';
}

Just for you google peoples “Labourus” is spelt labourious.
Does that reflect bad on me? I mean I do a lot labourious tasks….

Recently on a new project a great piece of work was brought to my attention. A great javascript based text replacement solution called Cufon. Simply put, its great. Very little effort to intergrate, even less effort to control. Not even that much slow down on page load.

Visit here to get the lowdown

As its javascript and kicks after the page loads, it degrades gracefully if not supported. As well as leaving all the juicy web text for the web spiders to nibble on.

The only thing to be wary of is licensing issues, but hey check out this great example of Cufon in action.

Its good to chat, especially when it’s free

After getting endless quotes, for expensive solutions. Help Center Live was brought to my attention. This php mysql based solutions seems great, except its windows only at the moment. The good news is, version 3 is coming out soon with full support.

Help Center Live is an open-source, community driven live chat & support system. You may easily provide live support on your website just like large companies do with very little work. With Help Center Live, you can provide a real-time, live support or sales person experience.

Take a look at Help Center Live and let me know how things go