You create a file with the name login.php, with following contents:

<?php

$user = "test";
$pw = "12345";

function authenticate () {
  Header("WWW-authenticate: basic realm=\"Restricted Area\"");
  Header("HTTP/1.0 401 Unauthorized");
  echo "Restricted Area!";
  exit;
}

if (!isset($_SERVER['PHP_AUTH_USER']) || $_SERVER['PHP_AUTH_USER'] != $user || $_SERVER['PHP_AUTH_PW'] != $pw) {
  authenticate();
}
?>

Then you have to include the login.php to the top of index.php:

<?php
  include ("login.php");
?>

Thats all! It is important that there are no other index.* files in the directory.

See comments for the resolution.

Apparently, I realized running my monthly seitwert-check, that the one of my pages got errors because of one of the plug-in installed. This time it was Google Syntax Highlighter for WordPress by Peter Ryan. Instead of using the type="text/javascript" inside of script-tag, the class="javascript" is used. The bug could be easily fixed locally by replacing the corresponding pieces of code. Peter seems to be not interested anymore in maintaining the plug-in, since there is a long list of comments claiming and voting for the bug.

Especially, if you think of the fact, that the usage of invalid (X)HTML effects your page rank by search engines and other directories in a very negative way, such hidden standards violations should be avoided.

Dashboard

The main improvement of the new version is the complete redesign of the dashboard. The structure of it becomes more convenient and clear (especially in contrast to the old versions like 2.3). The new vertical menu bar on the left is separated in three parts: dashboard anchor, authoring actions and settings. classification eases the usage, especially for the authors and editors.

Authoring actions

The authoring actions have a similar classification as in last versions: you will find actions for working with posts, media, links, pages and comments. The corresponding pages has been completely redesigned and use prety much AJAX technology. In the media library, the new items can be uploaded to the library, that allows uploading of items not related to the posts or pages.

Settings

The settings control panel was also a subject of reconstruction. The most important features are: support of web installation of plug-ins (finally, no additional file system access to the server is required), automatic wordpress upgrade (making the InstantUpgrade plug-in absolete).

Upgrade

The upgrade seems to be running without any problems. As usual by major releases you need to run the DB upgrade using a built-in script. It worked fine for this page.

Conclusion

As a conclusion, I recommend the upgrade to the new version. The promise made by the developers in their blog is fulfilled and the blogging systems really operates quicker.  The dashboard redesign seems to be adequate and the features like online-plug-in installation and built-in web update are nice. If you use Google Gears, you can enable caching of most static parts and make the blog run very quickly.

So, now about our problem. We want make our application working in all browsers, because it’s good to make it work everywhere. So we have to aks the user agent (basically the client program, not the agent Smith from Matrix), what browser are you using? And we want make it so flexible, that we can ask him this every time. For this purpose we introduce a function:

function getBrowser()
{
  $ua = $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT']
  if (strstr($ua,'Opera')) {  // Opera
    $browser = ereg_replace(".+\(.+\) (Opera |v){0,1}([0-9,\.]+)[^0-9]*","Opera\\2",$ua);
    if(ereg('^Opera/.*',$ua)) {
      $browser = ereg_replace("Opera/([0-9,\.]+).*","Opera \\1",$ua);
    }
  } elseif (strstr($ua,'MSIE')) { // MSIE
    $browser=ereg_replace(".+\(.+MSIE ([0-9,\.]+).+", "Internet Explorer \\1",$ua);
  } elseif (strstr($ua,'Firefox')) { // Firefox
    $browser=ereg_replace(".+\(.+rv:.+\).+Firefox/(.*)", "Firefox \\1", $ua);
  } elseif (strstr($ua,'Mozilla')) {  //  Mozilla
    $browser=ereg_replace(".+\(.+rv:([0-9,\.]+).+","Mozilla \\1",$ua);
  } else {  // None of them.
    $browser=$ua;
  }
  return $browser;
}

If we want our PHP script to show us the browser, we write:

echo(getBrowser());

Now we can see, what kind of browser is used and use it in our aplication:

if (getBrowser() == 'Internet Explorer 6.0') {
echo ("Please install another Browser");
}

Thats it!

• Wordpress – a popular web publishing platform for which several plugins and themes developed by TechPHP are hosted.
• DokuWiki – an easy-to install wiki system, often used as a knowledge base for which different extensions and visualization plugins are hosted.

In future, several other web topics like CMSs or shop systems probably bocome a subject of dicussion, but in the current point of time we focus on publishing of the already created resources.

Also I’m aroused and have re-factored my plug-in, which I plan to migrate to TechPHP.

So I promise we bring some useful content next days!

Let me begin by presenting some topics we are supposed to cover here in the next time.

Topics

As the name of the journal tells us, PHP will be the main topic of this page. And yes it will be, but we are not restricted to it. E.g. we plan to cover topics of client (or browser side) development, like introducing some javascript frameworks and so on.

However let me call some definite topics, we will cover the very next time.

• Wordpress Plugins (Own and others)
• Wordpress Themes (Own)
• DokuWiki Plugins(Own)
• DokuWiki Themes (Own)

Time planing and the first steps

At first we will tune this site and bring it to nice and high quality Member of the Internet. Further we want to to build up some community. There are many possibilities how people interested in web development can contribute to this project.

Due to the site is still in development phase we are very thankful for your feedback and bug-reports.

Admins Contributors

TechPHP is an joint ownership project. We are Shuron and Simon admins and Contributors of this project.