Background – An Overview of the Crontab

Let’s face it, having the ability to schedule tasks to run in the background is just great! From backing up an SQL database, fetching / sending emails to running clean up tasks, analyzing performance, or even grabbing RSS feeds, cron jobs are fantastic!

Although the syntax of scheduling a new job may seem daunting at first glance, it’s actually relatively simple to understand once you break it down. A cron job will always have five columns each of which represent a chronological ‘operator’ followed by the full path and command to execute:

	* * * * * home/path/to/command/the_command.sh

Each of the chronological columns has a specific relevance to the schedule of the task. They are as follows:

• Minutes represents the minutes of a given hour, 0-59 respectively.
• Hours represents the hours of a given day, 0-23 respectively.
• Days represents the days of a given month, 1-31 respectively.
• Months represents the months of a given year, 1-12 respectively.
• Day of the Week represents the day of the week, Sunday through Saturday, numerically, as 0-6 respectively.

	Minutes [0-59]
	|	Hours [0-23]
	|	|	Days [1-31]
	|	|	|	Months [1-12]
	|	|	|	|	Days of the Week [Numeric, 0-6]
	|	|	|	|	|
	*	*	*	*	* home/path/to/command/the_command.sh

So, for example, if one wanted to schedule a task for 12am on the first day of every month it would look something like this:

	0 0 1 * * home/path/to/command/the_command.sh

If we wanted to schedule a task to run every Saturday at 8:30am we’d write it as follows:

I don’t like CAPTCHAs. I don’t know anyone who does.The downfalls of CAPTCHAs are many - hard to read, annoying, impossible for those with vision difficulties - and the benefits are slim. So, I came up with an alternative: a plain text math question to ask the user. This component generates a random equation and registers the answer as a session variable. The programmer can then check the form submitter’s answer against the session-registered answer using the validation function provided in the component.

Before you get started I recommend that you take a look at Greg's upgrade video at http://www.masteringdrupal.com/screencast/upgrading-to-drupal-6. I watched it and it definitely helped with the process.

The upgrade process took me two hours. If you are using Drupal for a single user blog site, and are making minimum use of CCK and Views then I think that you should be able to execute the upgrade in the same amount of time it took me. If you're running a community site with a lot of content, a few custom content types with associated views then you're probably looking at three to four hours.

উইন্ডোজ পরিবেশে ম্যানুয়ালি সবকিছু সেটাপ শিখতে গিয়ে যেসকল নবীন ডেভেলপাররা হোচট খেয়েছেন তাদের জন্য খুব আনন্দের খবর হচ্ছে কোন রকম ঝামেলা ছাড়াই উইন্ডোজ পরিবেশে ওয়েব ডেভেলপ করার পরিবেশ তৈরি করা সম্ভব। এর জন্য খুব জনপ্রিয় দু’টি প্যাকেজ (XAMPP, WAMP) আছে যাতে Apache, PHP, MySQL সহ আরো বেশ কিছু প্রয়োজনীয় টুল একত্রে কনফিগার করে দেয়া থাকে। এদের যেকোন একটি সংগ্রহ করে সাধারণ যেকোন সফটওয়্যারের মত সেটাপ করে নিলেই ওয়েব ডেভেলপ করার প্রয়োজনীয় পরিবেশ তৈরি হয়ে যাবে। XAMPP এবং WAMP নামের এই প্যাকেগুলো থেকে আমরা অধিক জনপ্রিয় XAMPP-কে বেছে নিচ্ছি। চলুন খুব সংক্ষেপে এটি সংগ্রহ, ইনস্টলেশন ও সাধারণ ব্যবহারবিধি জেনে নেই-

Register Globals (register_globals):
Whether or not to register the EGPCS (Environment, GET, POST, Cookie, Server) variables as global variables.
We cannot disable register_globals from the script side (using ini_set, like we normally might), but we can use an .htaccess files to do this. Some hosts also allow you to have a php.ini file on the server.

Disabling with .htaccess
php_flag register_globals 0

Disabling with php.ini
register_globals = Off
 

1 .Make the database and Tables with CHARACTER utf8 and collation_connection =’utf8_general_ci’
2 . Must add following two lines just after selecting the database, i.e mysql_select_db() function:
mysql_query(’SET CHARACTER SET utf8′);
mysql_query(”SET SESSION collation_connection =’utf8_general_ci’”);
4 . Set the META-TAG as “Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8″

The menu is generated using PHP and all values default to current values for year, month, day, and hour. These values can be set along with the name and id of each element.

PHP Cheat Sheet

The PHP cheat sheet is a one-page reference sheet, listing date format arguments, regular expression syntax and common functions and designed to make life a bit easier. A description of what is on the cheat sheet follows, or if you are impatient, you can go straight to the full size PHP cheat sheet.

1.      PHP cheat sheet -1 or PHP Cheat Sheet (V1)

PHP stands for Hypertext Preprocessor. While other languages, like Javascript, function on the client-side, your PHP code will execute on the server level. It works seamlessly with our HTML. Furthermore, your PHP can be embedded within your HTML and vice versa. The important thing to remember is that, no matter how complicated your PHP is, it will ultimately be output as simple HTML.

You can change your php.ini file configuration at runtime using PHP scripts. Customize such settings as whether global variables are turned on, the default directory to upload files to when writing upload scripts, and the maximum allowed size for uploaded files.

PHP Options and Information functions enable you to get a lot of information about PHP itself, e.g. runtime configuration, loaded extensions, version and much more. You'll also find functions to set options for your running PHP.

"A coding standards document tells developers how they must write their code. Instead of each developer coding in their own preferred style, they will write all code to the standards outlined in the document. This makes sure that a large project is coded in a consistent style — parts are not written differently by different programmers.