After extensive testing and rewriting, I’ve broken out of my former mold, and have taken dbshim out of the works, instead, I’m now using my rewritten rollatorDB.
While doing so, I re-implemented my RSS feeds, cleaning up quite a bit of the cruft in that code while extending it a bit more.
You, the end user can now decide how many articles you want to view, and if you want to view the entire article, or only a section. By appending “fullcontent” unto your query, it will display the full article within the feed. “num=xx” will allow you to view the last xx entries, and last, but not least, “length=xx” will break the feed at the specified number, by default, 250 characters into the article. Keep in mind that “fullcontent” is a boolean, and will override length.
So, the query of:
http://www.holwegner.com/rss.php?fullcontent&num=30will display the entire article for the last 30 entries, whereas,
http://www.holwegner.com/rss.php?num=10&length=74will display the last 10 articles, cutting off at the 74th character, good enough for a brief synopsis (usually).
Working with PHP classes is quite a bit different than just creating, and calling subroutines, but it is a rather pleasant abstraction – with my rollatorDB::fetchAssoc, and rollatorDB::fetchAssocRow making life much easier than manually stepping through everything with the archic ways of old, which looked similar to:
$result = my_db_query(“SELECT …”); while (list($myID, $myTitle, $myContents, $entryDate, $lastModDate, $entryType) = mydb_fetch_row($result)) {; ... do stuff… }It’s now as simple as:
$myVariable = $rollatorDBvar->fetchAssocRow(“SELECT ….”) ... dostuff…Of course, due to this the flow has slightly changed, but it’s for the better since I have all of my data in a local array, and all of the DB work is done by the time I’m parsing it, making for a much faster system!