I have just begun a major development project on behalf of Oakridge Online for one of their largest pharmaceutical clients. With an international team of consultants Oakridge will soon be delivering a blended training programme to a large number of deligates from the US, Sweden and UK with plans to pick up in Bangalore, Asia Pacific and Moscow.

Oakridge Online is based on the increasingly popular Course Management System or Virtual Learning Environment Moodle. The new 360 degree assessment tool that I am currently developing for Oakridge Training and Consulting integrates seamlessly with Moodle but if needed can be implemented as an entirely stand-alone application. Oakridge will be developing questions for the 360 degree feedback to support their Decision Making programme. The Feedback application however is being designed as a generic 360 degree feedback tool using the rating-scale question type typical of the 360 degree assessment model, so Oakridge Training and Consulting will be able to develop unique 360 degree assessments for all their future online programmes.

Sefton Court is a Michelin approved bed and breakfast in Llandudno, North Wales.

David White of Whitekite design, a close working partner of mine, won the contract to redesign the hotel website and he asked me to develop the front-end online booking system with room availability checker together with a back-end booking management application. Having looked at the option of a Joomla!-based CMS with room booking component I was commissioned in the end to develop an entirely original and bespoke application. We are now very close to launching the site, so please come back shortly to see the results!

This bespoke online hotel booking managment system includes:

• Entirely bespoke fully featured hotel booking management system
• Online automated room availability checker
• Room reservation application with secure hosting
• Encrypted temporary storage of payment details
• Hooks up easily to any online payment gateway
• Back-end administration for managing rooms, images, descriptions, rates
• Back-end booking management for manual override
• Automated email notifications
• PHP, MySQL, SSL, cryptography

playpics is a new subscription website for teachers. This new educational resource offers a large library of original images designed specially to support the primary school curriculum.

The basis of this project involves a lot of image manipulation and database development while the later phases are to feature more web 2.0 online community functionality.

As this is a brand new venture I am unable to give too much away at this stage. But watch this space.

It assumes you have a MySQL database where you store your images.
[Download sql2xml.zip for XML Slide Show]

Step 1: Make the database connection

<?php
$con = mysql_connect("localhost","username","password");
if (!$con)
  {
  die('Could not connect: ' . mysql_error());
  }
 
?>

Step 2: Query your database

<?php
mysql_select_db($database, $con);
$query_images = "SELECT * FROM images ORDER BY RAND()";
$images = mysql_query($query_images, $con) or die(mysql_error());
$row_images = mysql_fetch_assoc($images);
?>

ORDER BY RAND() – this randomizes the results of the query.

Step 3: Generate the XML markup

<?php
//start the xml dataset
$xml = '<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?>
	<slideshow>
	 ';
 
		// create a loop that outputs each row from the sql query
 
		while ($row_images = mysql_fetch_assoc($images)) {
 
		$xml .='	<image img="images/'.$row_images['image_file'].'" />
					';
 
		}
//close the xml dataset
$xml .='</slideshow>';
?>

Step 4: Write the output to file

<?php
$fp = fopen('slideshow.xml', 'w');
fwrite($fp, $xml);
fclose($fp);
?>

This will look for the file slideshow.xml and will overwrite its contents with the output above. If the fiels does not exist it will attempt to create it.

The result – slideshow.xml

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?>
<slideshow>
	<image img="images/image2.jpg />
	<image img="images/image5.jpg />
	<image img="images/image1.jpg />
	<image img="images/image3.jpg />
	<image img="images/image7.jpg />
	<image img="images/image4jpg />
	<image img="images/image6.jpg />
</slideshow>

And there you have your dataset ready for consumption by your application.

In order to use this to technique to extend the Flash Nifties XML Slideshow simply download sql2xml.zip and follow the instructions contained within.

You can see an example of the databse-driven XML Flash Slideshow at St Andrew’s Primary School website

I disovered that the reason this was happening is because the default encoding of a php-MySQL connection is utf8. So the solution turns out to be very simple: set the econding for the query session to utf8 with the query: mysql_query(“SET NAMES ‘utf8′”, $connection);

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mysql_select_db($database, $connection);
 
mysql_query("SET NAMES 'utf8'", $connection);
 
$query = "SELECT * FROM table ";
 
$result = mysql_query($query, $connection) or die(mysql_error());
 
$row = mysql_fetch_assoc($connection);

If you are using PHP 5.2 or later you need to use instead:

mysql_set_charset(‘utf8′,$connection);