What do you need to do? Nothing! Put it in a subfolder.

Trying to find the awnser on the question: “How do you use Zend Framework in a subfolder” a lot of resources I found referred to an article on Alexander Netkachev’s blog. At the time of writing Alex is reviewing all of his articles, so I had to figure this out one myself. Hopefully Alex’s article will be online anytime soon. I’m sure it contains valuable information. However, I guess it is not the information I was looking for. On Zend Devzone Carl Evans refers to Alex’s article and the 2 solutions found by Alex. He quotes the opening paragraph, revieling some information about 2 provided solutions in the last few lines:

First is rather a hack then a recommended solution, but with it you can start the applications and examples that use standard router. The second is neater but it depends on the Zend_Controller_RewriteRouter class.

A hack? Depends on the router? Not sure we are adressing the same problem here. Maybe his solution is for people having no access to the directory above the public directory. I don’t know. My solution is almost to easy. It only needs minor editing of index.php. Off course there is are some caveats.

Firstly I will make clear what we are talking about here. What is the folder structure we are creating? Next I will show you how to put your Zend Framework in a subfolder. Be sure to also read the conditions to be met when using this solution. As you might expect, these are mainly about links to pages and resources inside your own domain. The Zend View Helpers BaseUrl and Url are key to our solution.

Sub folder structure for your Zend Framwork project:

To be clear, this is the directory structure I’m looking for:

application/
library/
project1/
    application/
    library/
secondproject/
    application/
    library/
otherproject/
    application/
    library
public/
    css/
    imgages/
    js/
    .htaccess
    index.php
    project1/
        css/
        imgages/
        js/
        .htaccess
        index.php
    secondproject/
        css/
        imgages/
        js/
        .htaccess
        index.php
    otherproject/
        css/
        imgages/
        js/
        .htaccess
        index.php

Each project’s application, library, etc. (see Zend Framework recommended file structure) in it’s own project folder. One directory up from the public directory (as recommended).

Inside the public directory each project has it’s own folder containing index.php & .htaccess files and css , js etc. folders.

The solution

Put your files like the structure above. For each project, open the index.php file and adjust the APPLICATION_PATH and php_include_path. For project1:

'/../application'

now becomes

'/../../project1/application/'

Same goes for php_include_pahts. All projects can live on one set of Zend_ files. Change paths accordingly. Many tutorials will tell you to set the baseUrl. You don’t set it (you can off course), you use it. Done, simple enough?

The first cotcha I ran into is my .htaccess file in the main public folder was setting the APPLICATION_ENV. Be aware of this.

Use of the Zend View Helpers BaseUrl and Url

The second thing to check are urls for navigation to other pages on the website. They all have to start with ‘/project1′ (if you look at pages inside project1 folder). This means that if you want to use your projects in sub-folders, you have to use either the Zend_View_Helper_BaseUrl or the Zend_View_Helper_Url to create your internal referring urls. See documentation for proper use of there helpers. One example:

before you would have:

/users/peter/id/3

you will now either use:

$this->baseUrl('users/peter/id/3')

or:

$this->url(array('id'=>'3'),'default')

Zend Navigation

When using Zend_Navigation for creating menu’s etc, you have to define all modules, controllers, actions, routes etc. Yes, I know.. This solution is only for people going ‘all the way’ with the Zend_Navigation. You can’t use Zend_Navigation with uri based navigation descriptions. You don’t have to use Zend_Navigation, the options stated above work as well.

Css files, image paths relative

Don’t forget to use the baseUrl helper on you css file paths, same applies for javaScript files.

$this->headLink()->appendStylesheet($this->view->baseUrl('css/style.css'));

What about the background images used in css? Write your image urls relative (without starting ‘/’  ) to the path of the css file referring to them. This means location of css file and  its images are bound to each other, relatively. Put css in your css folder, background images in a css/img folder. You’ll be fine.

Summary how to put Zend Framework in a subfolder

• Give project’s resources (application, library) a folder in the sub directory  from public directory
• Create a subfolder for public files, index.php, .htaccess, css-files etc.
• Change APPLICATION_PATH in index.php
• Change php_include_paths in index.php

Check the following:

• Zend_Navigation must use MVC pages
• Urls are created with
  • View helper: url
  • View helper: baseUrl
• Don’t forget css and javaScript files
• background-images have relative path

Did this help? Are you stuck? Do you need an other folder structure? What other things did you run in to applying this method? Let me know!

HTML file to read websites

Take this html.

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
<html><head>
<script src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.4.4/jquery.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script>
$(document).ready(function(){
$("#allh2").load("http://www.yourdomain.com/loader.php h2",{want2Read:'http://www.want2read.com/'},function(){
//Write your additional jQuery script below. For instance:
$("h2").attr("class","coolheader");
});
});
</script> </head> <body>
<h1>Wow, this stuff is need</h1>
<p class="optionalcontent">All headers from <a href="http://www.want2read.com/">want2read</a>, I learned this from <a href="http://www.sitegrind.nl/">Sitegrind</a></p>
<div id="allh2"> </div>
</body> </html>

In this html file, you must change 2 things:

1. change ‘yourdomain‘, in the script you see in the header, in -duh- your domain name
2. change ‘http://www.want2read.com/'in the domain you want to loan content from

This is what you leave alone:

• want2Read, the first one in (want2Read:'http://www.want2Read.com/')
  • fyi: this is the name of a variable php is going to use
• The $("#allh2") and <div id="allh2"> </div> ,

  • if you change, keep them complying with each other

What you can change. Save this for later, make files working first. Nevertheless, be inspired!:

• Feel free to write you own test in the html file. Don’t forget to be gentle. Always put a reference to site you borrowed the content from.
• the h2 after yourdomain ("http://www.yourdomain.com/loader.php h2" )
  • examples: h1, div#goodstuff, a[href*='domainname'], img.realones

This is where the good stuff happens! Although not clearly recognizable because of omitting $ sign, this is where you can use our so beloved jQuery selectors! I haven’t tested in how far the chain ability of jQuery applies to this special use of selector and its unusual semantics. Let me know if you tested. I like to use this as a first selection. And than use the callback function to perform further action.

save this file as index.html on your server.

The php to help jQuery load the website

Copy and paste this php in a text file and save on your server as loader.php, in the same directory as the index.html. Change nothing.

<?php
extract($_POST);
$str = file_get_contents($want2Read);
echo $str;
?>

Many of sites protect their content, if this doesn’t work you can use the alternate php code. See the original article.

• Must know:
  • How to put a html website online.
  • Copy and paste. That sounds cheap and it is. Nevertheless this code can be of great value to you
• Must not know:
  • For this tutorial you don’t have to know javaScript (I don’t)
  • php
  • jQuery. Nevertheless, people using jQuery will have a special interest in this article!

Like quick and dirty? Leave this tutorial with all its explanations. Have a look at the cool demo first, wow, loading all images from a complete other website! Than copy the complete, small html and php scripts. Thunderbirds are go!

Php reads html file

Php can do what you came here for in the fist place: load content, e.g. images from other web pages and show it on your own website. The file_get_contents function reads html code. The  php code you are going to use looks like this:

extract($_POST);
$str = file_get_contents($site2Read);
echo $str;

You don’t have to understand that. This is what you do. Copy this code literally, do not replace anything.  As I said before, copy in a .txt file and save as loader.php , in the same directory as your html file.

PS: for some domains this piece of php will not work. These are protective restrictions. Webmasters try to prevent your script to read their content like this.  Try this alternate code instead. Works more often. It still is copy paste, just as much work as the code above. Copy in tekstfile (notepad) and save as loader.php  :

extract($_POST);
$page= get_url_contents($site2Read);
echo $page;
function get_url_contents($url){
$crl = curl_init();
$timeout = 5;
curl_setopt ($crl, CURLOPT_URL,$url);
curl_setopt ($crl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt ($crl, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, $timeout);
$ret = curl_exec($crl);
curl_close($crl);
return $ret;
}


Many thanks to the How-To Geek for this.

Load function from jQuery for images only

So far for the php part. The reason I want to do this with jQuery in the first place is because of its sweet filtering functions. You can start filtering content in the jQuery load function already! This means you can pick, for instance, all images / pictures from a site. And show them directly on your site, next to your other content. Or all links from an an other site, or all headers (h1, h2). Or all divisions containing the word ‘hello’. Or all unsorted lists (<ul>) having an id-attribute with text ‘favorites’ in it. And so on, get the idea? You know some jQuery, right? Here, as an example, we are going to get all header 2 elements  from a website, the <h2> part. My original tutorial loaded all images from a html site. But images are often well protected. To make things working fast we are going to use h2. This is the proper load function:

$("#allh2").load("http://www.yourdomain.com/loader.php h2",{want2Read:"http://www.want2Read.com/"});

• Replace http://www.yourdomain.com/loader.php with -duh-…
• Replace http://www.want2Read.com/ with the website you want to read.
• Make sure there is a division with id=”allh2″ on your html-page. Thus:<div id="allh2"></div>

Use jQuery after the content loaded

This is some additional info. If you want to perform more jQuery actions on the loaded content, you can use the callback from the load function. What does this means? It means that you write you jQuery like this:

$("#allh2").load("http://www.yourdomain.com/loader.php h2",{want2Read:"http://www.want2Read.com/"},function(){
//Write your additional jQuery script here, for instance:
$("h2").css("background-color","#ff0");
});

As you see, you can now access the h2 elements with jQuery. If you would have written it after the load function, instead of using it in the callback, it would have had no effect on the loaded images. All words. Just copy paste and let the fun begin! Copy extra easy from the article with complete html and php script listings.