The issue of controlling which pages users can view has been something I’ve always been unsure of. When I created Neotrophies it was simple enough. I knew that most pages would be accessible by everyone, most of the rest would be accessible by anyone who is logged in and a few pages would be staff only. There were only three types of staff – artists, content writers and programmers – so the solution seemed simple enough. A variable called $logged_in was set by in the script that checked if a user was logged in, and that would be used to control access to pages that only logged in. Each user was given by default a ‘membertype’ of 0. Artists would get membertype of 1, content writers 2 and programmers 3. For a ’staff only’ page, I could just use:
if ($user['membertype']>0)
For a page that is only accessible to certain types of staff, I could use something like:
if ($user['membertype']==1 || $user['membertype']==3)
It was simple, and it worked. End of problem. More…
I’ve not had much time to post over the last month. Its been a hectic month getting started at university on my degree course. Going straight into year two didn’t help matters, I was allowed to skip year one thanks to some Open University credits and my work experience. However, things are starting to settle down now and I should get into more regular blogging.
The course this year seems quite interesting. I’m doing six modules that each run for the entire year: More…
When I last posted I said that I had been given the go ahead to spend time upgrading the callcentre suite that I built, to try and reduce my old bad coding, make it easier to maintain and increase the speed of it. Since then the plan has changed. Instead of upgrading old coding, I have now been given the go ahead to start again from scratch. This seems a great opportunity to fix all the problems that have cropped up in the last year, and ultimately come up with something much better. More…
When I first started creating the callcentre management suite for a local company, the brief was very simple. Basic customer data would be passed into the application from an external application by a range of $_GET variables. The agent would update the details, record the answers to half a dozen pre-set questions and mark the customer as either Sale, Not Interested or Callback. A simple callback tracking system was included, and managers who logged in could see a breakdown of how many sales each agent had done, how many the entire team had done and download an excel spreadsheet with all customer details from a particular day. That was it – nothing fancy, nothing too complicated, all nice and simple.
I was still on a steep learning curve at the time, having just completed Neotrophies and having very little other experience. I planned out the database, planned out steps everyone would go through for every task and set to work. After a couple of months of working on it part time, it was complete and the client was happy. A few bugs were ironed out in the first week or two, but generally everything worked. I was happy that the project was a success, and started deciding what project I would work on next.
Over the few months, I received regular phone calls asking me to make updates. More…
Figuring out the best navigation for a website has always been an issue for me.Whilst it isn’t so bad when you just need a few links, on any complex website there are issues.
When I coded Neotrophies I needed to have all areas of the site accessible from any page. There were so many pages I needed users to have access to that drop down menus seemed the best way to go. After some research, I went with Dynamic Drive’s Dropdown HTML Control. It did the job, looked alright and seemed the best of the options that I could find at the time.
Looking back, I made a mistake. More…
Here it is, my first post! Welcome to my blog. I will be mainly using this space to track my findings and thoughts on web programming. Some of my skills are less than advanced, so please forgive me if I go over anything that may seem obvious to you.
