Author: Joe

I create a lot of web forms and like to share the data with those whom the form was created for. And while I was brushing my teeth the other morning I thought why not dump it straight to a Google Docs Spreadsheet, since most of the people I do this for are very familiar with working with a spreadsheet anyway.

Thanks to the Google Data Spreadsheets API this and many other features are possible. The site is well documented and the Zend Framework PHP client is a huge help. Luckily someone else had tried the same thing and documented it on his blog, so check that out as that was a tremendous help for me figuring out just how to do this.

The folks at Google have added some very cool features to the YouTube API. They now offer the ability to upload and make other write calls using the API. So now it’d be possible to have users make comments or even upload their own videos without leaving your site. This is very cool and I can already think of a few things I’d like to try out with this.

It looks like they’re also offering a Javascript API that allows you to control the player via javascript. Along with that they’re also offering a chromeless player too. So now you can make custom controls for embedded YouTube videos. I can’t wait to get started with these features. A custom player can really make the movies work better with someone’s site.

The PHP Client Library (Zend Framework 1.50RC2) was also updated today too.

I just developed a rating system to go along with my blog entries. Currently I’ve just included it with video game review, but it can apply for any type of posting. I used the Word Press Custom Field to store the rating. I created a custom field called Review and input a value of 0-5 as the rating via the post admin. That stores the rating with the post.

The following PHP code checks if a post contains a rating and if so, displays it:

if (get_post_meta($post->ID, "Review", true)) {
<div class="star-rating">
<p class="current-rating" style="width: echo (get_post_meta($post->ID, "Review", true) * 20); %;">Currently echo get_post_meta($post->ID, "Review", true); /5 Stars.</p>
</div>
}

Here’s more info about the get_post_meta function().

So it ends up outputting:

<div class="star-rating">
<p class="current-rating" style="width:80%;">Currently 4/5 Stars.</p>
</div>

Here is the CSS that styles it, right now I’m just using some standard stars I found elsewhere, but will probably change it to something else.

#yui-main .post .star-rating ul {
margin: 0;
padding: 0;
}
#yui-main .post .star-rating ul li {
list-style: none;
}

.star-rating,
.star-rating .current-rating {
background: url(/images/star.gif) left -1000px repeat-x;
}
.star-rating {
position:relative;
width:125px;
height:25px;
overflow:hidden;
list-style:none;
margin:0;
padding:0;
background-position: left top;
}
#yui-main .post .star-rating p {
display: inline;
margin: 0;
padding: 0;
text-indent: -9999px;
}
.star-rating .current-rating {
z-index:1;
position:absolute;
top:0;
left:0;
text-indent:-1000em;
height:25px;
line-height:25px;
outline:none;
overflow:hidden;
border: none;
background-position: left center;
}

And that’s it, a simple rating system by using the built in Custom Fields and a little PHP scripting and some CSS.