I managed to finish a couple of small programming tasks this week that have been on my "todo" list for quite some time. I finally got around to updating the Victoria's Garden Registration Request pages so that they now automatically send email notifications to the customers with their login and password, a task which previously had to be done manually. I took a peek at the victoriasgardenonline.com database today and I was surprised to find a total of over 5,000 records across three different tables.

Now I need to figure out how I can write a couple of utilities using PHP to connect to the MSSQL database on the server. This should be simple. Install PHP on the server, which is already running an IIS web server, and when write the PHP to connect to the local MSSQL database. Well, I was unable to successfully install PHP on the Windows 2000 server, and I am limited in how much I can do because it's a production server and I don't want to screw around with it too much. I would much rather run a second web server using Apache on my Linux box, which is running on the same LAN. I would then need to setup a connection between the Linux server and the MSSQL database on the Win2k Server. Again, I tried this but ran into a few problems. I'll hopefully be able to tackle it again this weekend.

I run CPanel on my web server and I recently needed to add an FTP account for one of the domains I am hosting. This is easy enough using the FTP Accounts option from the domain's CPanel page. However, I needed to set the home directory for the FTP account to be outside the root web directory (/home/username/public_html). This is not possible from the CPanel interface, most likely because it's a security risk. I checked my server and it shows that I'm running pure-ftpd, so I have no idea why I needed to use the proftpd directory. Heres how I did it:


[email protected]:~# cd /etc/proftpd
[email protected]:~# ls
./ savememo username2 username3
../ username4 username5 username6
[email protected]:~# vi savememo

savememo:RiIR2pPqeBWSM:32023:32024::/home/savememo:/bin/ftpsh
ftp:Ad3Dg04yDsk2dF:14:50:FTP User:/home/savememo/public_ftp:/sbin/nologin
savememo_logs:RiIR2pPqeBWSM:32023:32024:savememo:/usr/local/apache/domlogs:/bin/ftpsh


As you can see, /etc/proftpd contains a file for each of the accounts on your server. Edit the file for the domain in question, in this case savememo.com, and locate the line for the FTP account for which you wish to change the home directory. If I wanted to change the savememo FTP account's home directory to /home/savememo/myfiles, the new file would look like this:


savememo:RiIR2pPqeBWSM:32023:32024::/home/savememo/myfiles:/bin/ftpsh


After editing the file using your favorite console editor, in my case it's vi, save the file and then restart your pure-ftpd service (I'm not sure if this is required).

[email protected]:~# /etc/init.d/pure-ftpd restart
Stopping pure-config.pl:
Stopping pure-authd:
Starting pure-config.pl: [ OK ]
Starting pure-authd:


And that should do it. Now if you go into the FTP Accounts section of the CPanel for the domain you're working with, you should see the new home directory for that FTP user.

I must have spent an hour looking for a solution to this problem. Hopefully this post will save someone from the agony I went through. This problem is specific to PEAR HTML_QuickForm, so anyone who doesn't know what that is can enjoy the pretty colors. 🙂

With the standard 'checkbox' element you can simply append the word 'checked' as the last attribute in the addElement method, like this:

$form->addElement('checkbox','remember','Remember me?',
                         '(Check this to remember your login info.)', 'checked');

However, with advcheckbox, which is required if you want to define the checkbox values, setting the checked value from the addElement method is not possible. So how do you do it? First a quick review of the options available with advcheckbox:

  addElement('advcheckbox',
             string element-name,   // name of advcheckbox
             string element-label,  // label output before advcheckbox
             string text,           // label output after advcheckbox
             mixed attributes,      // string or array of attributes
             mixed values);

OK, now here is what I had to do to solve the problem:

$formCheckbox = $form->createElement('advcheckbox',mycheckbox,'',
                                               $row['name'],null,$row['permission_id']);
if(in_array($row['permission_id'], $groups2perms))
	$formCheckbox->setChecked(true); // <-- this is where the magic happens!
else
	$formCheckbox->setChecked(false); // <-- here too!

$form->addElement($formCheckbox);

Thats it! As you can see, you need to use the setChecked() method. However, before you can use it you have to assign the object to a variable ($formCheckbox = $form->createElement(..,..)) and then call the setChecked() method on that variable ($formCheckbox->setChecked(true)). Keep in mind that you can call any number of available methods on the variable before using the addElement() method.