Archivatory Update #005

It was a light work week for me this past week due to being away with family but I did get the RSS feeds working!

Repository

Bug Fixes

Hard coded user URI array

This issue is a back end problem that made testing in staging and on the developments server more diffcult that I liked. Having to remember to change the array location every time was enough of a pain the first time that I did away with it as soon as possible. This was pushed to development early on and is now included in the master branch.

The solution was to use the end() and prev() functions that are built into PHP. The end() function tells PHP to move the pointer to the end of the array and prev() tells PHP to give me the item in the array before the current pointer. I chose to give end($URIArray) a variable to have it in case I needed to use it. Turns out I did not so just having it execute the end() function will be fine.

Archivatory Array Update

New Features

RSS Feeds

Creating the feed.php file for each user

This works in the same way that I made PHP check for the user profile but instead of only having it create on the user's landing page upon sign in I also added it to the profile pages. The idea here is to allow the consumer of the content to find an RSS feed even if the creator has not logged in since this update.

To start I set a variable to a shell_exec() function the runs the ls command with the username piped to grep feed. This will return with "feed.php" if the file exists in the user's directory. If not than the file is created without the need of mine or a staff member's manual effort.

archivatory feed check

Displaying only the content added to the user's playlist.

Since a user may not want all of their uploaded content to show in an RSS feed I chose to only have the RSS feed display content that the user added to their playlist. This was done by querying the database of file for the number 1 as we did with displaying the content into the user's playlist. Therefore, if a user changes their playlist or added to the playlist the feed will load the content accordingly.

archivatory grab user data for rss