Need a little direction for a mod I'd like to write

Regular Joined: Jan 10, 2006 Posts: 93

Hey there gents,

I'm trying to write what I think will be a very cool mod to the forum module. People often use my forum to share photos and to talk about them. In fact, I'd say a majority of posts end up with a photo in them.

I also have a photo gallery module, but over the last two years I've noticed that users have just stopped using it, in favor of posting photos in the forum, where everyone talks and discusses things anyway. They prefer to use a more "robust" photo site, like Flickr or photobucket. This is OK for purposes of conversation, but you lose the ability to view all your photos in one organized gallery.

I was thinking of a simple solution. The mod would scan any posts on the forum for pictures being posted (via link to external URL), then would grab those pictures from the external site, load them into an image directory on my site, resize thumbnails as necessary, and add them to my photo gallery's mysql tables so that they are displayed.

That is the basic algorithm, so it sounds very feasible; however I'm not too familiar with file reading/writing. I've been looking up a bit in the manual about fopen, fwrite, scandir, and some others, but I was hoping someone could just list the key functions I should look into for the various steps of this.

1) Scan the posts for image files -- should be easy enough (eregi, etc.)
2) Sanitize to make sure the image file I try to d/l is not a virus (I'm sure I can find some code in ravenuke out there I could use)
3) Get the photo file from the external website and download it to my server. (what are the functions that I would use to do this?? any example code of which you know?)
4) Resize photo as appropriate -- there's code in my gallery from which I can learn
5) Insert into sql tables -- easy as pie

Any help appreciated. Happy St. Patty's Day!

Posted: Mon Mar 17, 2008 11:09 am

should add that I have seen the file upload tutorial on w3schools. Could I use that same function but somehow with a remote (http) reference instead of a local one?

registered · Posted: Tue Mar 18, 2008 12:44 am

Grabbing content is fairly easy, you could use fopen or file_get_contents (assuming there is no special protection that detects if you are using a valid browser or not). It's like manipulating any other file (I believe PHP may have a setting to disallow remote files, but I don't remember it off-the-top)

Posted: Wed Mar 19, 2008 7:54 am

Thanks a lot evaders. I will mess around with these and post my code on the forum

Posted: Sun Mar 30, 2008 2:22 pm

OK, so here's the issue I'm anticipating running into. I don't want posters having to wait for this code to copy the file from the external server. I also don't want their post to be interrupted by it. Is there a way to pass all my relevant data to some other php file on my server that would execute it, independently of the files/page that the user is currently accessing?

Posted: Sun Mar 30, 2008 4:00 pm

Another problem I'm facing, now that I'm trying to implement.

Warning: copy(http://www.eastcoastbodyboarding.com/path/to/pictures/200602_wdbgo003.jpg) [function.copy]: failed to open stream: HTTP wrapper does not support writeable connections in /home/path/to/file/messageforum/sources/lib/post_parser.php on line 900

I am not too familiar with what this means
Edited by Guardian: to remove full path data to prevent it being used against in the wrong hands

Posted: Sun Mar 30, 2008 5:35 pm

OK so after tweaking it, this seems to come about because I was trying to write to a path defined "absolutely" i.e., with http://www.eastcoastbodyboarding.com/folder/

instead I had to change to be local references. This is kind of a pain, but at least it's working now!