I have a basic blogging site using mongodb up and running. Horah!
Basic Features:
- Input Page without formatting
- Blog Output Page with formatting
The Blog Entries consist of these fields:
- User
- Entry Title
- Blog Entry
- Labels
- Date
So that's where the Collection design is at. I still need to work in comments.
So how did I get here. Let's look at some code. The first page to look at is the post-creater page.
The very modest looking page right now:
 |
| Blog Input Page |
<html>
<body>
<?php
if(isset($_POST["start"]) == false){
$_POST["start"] = "y";
}
echo '<br/><p> Welcome To The Overenginered Blogger Post Creator</p> <hr\>';
?>
<?php
if($_POST["start"] === "n"){
try{
date_default_timezone_set( 'America/New_York' );
$conn = new Mongo();
$db = $conn->selectDB("blog");
$collection = $db->items;
$item =array(
'title' => $_POST['title'],
'txt' => $_POST['txt'],
'labels' => $_POST['labels'],
'user' => $_POST['user'],
'dt' => new MongoDate( strtotime( date( 'Y-m-d H:i:s')))
);
$collection->insert($item);
/// disconnect from server
$conn->close();
} catch ( MongoConnectionException $e ) {
echo '<p>Couldn\'t connect to mongodb, is the "mongo" process running?</p>';
exit();
}
}
?>
<form action="postCreator.php" method="post">Enter a post:<br/>Title:<input type="text" name="title" /><br/><textarea name="txt" cols='88' rows="12"/><br/>Labels: <input type="text" name="labels" /><br/>User: <input type="text" name="user" /><input type="hidden" name='start' value='n' /><input type="hidden" name='action' value='i' /><input type="submit" value="Blog"/></form>
</body>
</html>
The key parts of the page are:
- The first few lines which checks for the POST parameter 'start'
- The large chunk of code in the middle of the page is where I am connecting to mongodb and inserting a new record.
- The form at the bottom of the page presents a form to for user to enter a new blog entry.
The first part of the code has nothing to do with mongodb. It just handles the situation when the required argument 'start' isn't passed in by creating and setting it to 'y'. This situation happens when you first go to the page and the parameter hasn't been set yet. Once you use the form and hit 'submit' you send 'start'='n' to tell the page that you want to insert a new entry.
The second part is where the meat of the code is. I connect to the mongoDB
$conn = new Mongo(); // connect
$db = $conn->selectDB("blog");
$collection = $db->items;
Then I insert the entry using the elements passed in using the form at the bottom of the page.
$item =array(
'title' => $_POST['title'],
'txt' => $_POST['txt'],
'labels' => $_POST['labels'],
'user' => $_POST['user'],
'dt' => new MongoDate(strtotime(date('Y-m-d H:i:s')))
);
The trickiest part for me was inserting the date. My real issue was that I didn't take enough time checking out all the documentation so I missed
PHP Mongodate Class. Everything went much smoother once I found that class. I'm so used to Oracle where I can do something like
insert into table (date_column)
values to_date('01-Jan-2010','DD-Mon-YYYY');
So when I first hit the point I needed to put in a date I just slapped in some code:
'dt' => date('j-m-y h-i-s')
The problem was that this put in a String instead of a Date. This turned out to be a big issue when I went to pull up Blog Entries because I needed to pull them up by date in descending order.
DESIGN FLAW #1 - WRONG DATE TYPE
By using the MongoDate class I can now sort Blog Entries by date.
Finally, the form is present to allow data entry. Its not a WYSIWYG editor (obviously). Right now I'm going with a WIKI Text Markup PEAR module to help bridge the gap. (More on that latter). This is a long post already so I'll save the Blog Output page for next time.
Until Then
Cheers,
TheSortedProgrammer
