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Color Inspiration: Awesome Red Websites

Red is a very powerful and strong color. It’s associated with a variety of things, from courage and bravery to warnings and danger. It’s also, of course, strongly tied to love and passion.

It’s a popular color in website design, though, due to its boldness, it’s most commonly used as an accent color. With that said, there’s no reason why it can’t take on a more prominent role in a website’s overall design, as demonstrated in these twenty-five awesome red websites.

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Intensity in Ten Cities

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Big Spaceship

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Grafik

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jonwallacedesign

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Codebutton.com

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Chrome

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Khai Liew

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Thierry Castel

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Hemlock

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Sonze Design Studio

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Host Riser

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Youth Against Sudoku

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Take the Walk

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Remood

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Waider Mediendesign

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Liga Retro

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Saforian

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Red Relevant

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Coalmarch Productions

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Avalon Business Advice

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Mirror Communications

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Blogsessive

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New to York

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Associate

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Truf Creative

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Quick Tip: Loop Through Folders with PHP’s Glob()

Are you still using opendir() to loop through folders in PHP? Doesn’t that require a lot of repetitive code everytime you want to search a folder? Luckily, PHP’s glob() is a much smarter solution.

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Introduction

Here’s an example of echoing out some information from a folder, using the traditional opendir() function.

	$dir = "/etc/php5/";

	// Open a known directory, and proceed to read its contents
	if (is_dir($dir))
	{

		if ($dh = opendir($dir))
		{

			while (($file = readdir($dh)) !== false)
			{
				echo "filename: $file : filetype: " . filetype($dir . $file) . "\n";
			}

			closedir($dh);

		}

	}

That should look somewhat familiar. We can massively shorten the code above with:

	$dir = "/etc/php5/*";

	// Open a known directory, and proceed to read its contents
	foreach(glob($dir) as $file)
	{
		echo "filename: $file : filetype: " . filetype($file) . "<br />";
	}

Isn’t that much easier? Eager to learn how the method works? If yes, then let’s get on with it.

glob() supports a total of two arguments, with the second argument being optional. The first argument is the path to the folder, however, it’s a bit more powerful than that.

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Step 1. The First Argument

This first argument supports a pattern. This means that you can limit the search to specific filetypes or even multiple directories at the same time by using multiple asterixes “*”. Let’s assume that you have a website that allows users to upload images (just because I read this). Each user has his/her own folder within the folder “userImages.” Inside these folder are two additional folders, called “HD” and “TN,” for high definition (full-sized) images, and for thumbnails. Let’s imagine that you want to loop through all your users’ “TN” folders and print the filenames. This would require a relatively large snippet of code if you were to use open_dir(); however, with glob(), it’s easy.

	foreach(glob('userImages/*/TN/*') as $image)
	{
		echo "Filename: " . $image . "<br />";
	}

This will search userImages/any/TN/any and will return a list of the files that match the pattern.

	Filename: userImages/username1/TN/test.jpg
	Filename: userImages/username1/TN/test3.jpg
	Filename: userImages/username1/TN/test5.png
	Filename: userImages/username2/TN/subfolder
	Filename: userImages/username2/TN/test2.jpg
	Filename: userImages/username2/TN/test4.gif
	Filename: userImages/username3/TN/styles.css

We can even take things a step further, and be more specific by including a file format in our foreach statement:

	foreach(glob('userImages/*/TN/*.jpg') as $image)
	{
		echo "Filename: " . $image . "<br />";
	}

Now, this will only return Jpegs.

	Filename: userImages/username1/TN/test.jpg
	Filename: userImages/username1/TN/test3.jpg
	Filename: userImages/username2/TN/test2.jpg

It gets even better. What if, for instance, you require Jpegs, but also Gifs; nothing else? Or what if you want to print only folder names? This is where the second argument comes into play.

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Step 2. The Second Argument

The second argument is, as mentioned previously, optional. It does, however, provide a very nice set of optional flags. These will allow you to change the way your glob() behaves.

• GLOB_MARK: Adds a slash to each directory returned
• GLOB_NOSORT: Return files as they appear in the directory (no sorting)
• GLOB_NOCHECK: Return the search pattern if no files matching it were found
• GLOB_NOESCAPE: Backslashes do not quote metacharacters
• GLOB_BRACE: Expands {a,b,c} to match ‘a’, ‘b’, or ‘c’
• GLOB_ONLYDIR: Return only directory entries which match the pattern
• GLOB_ERR: Stop on read errors (like unreadable directories), by default errors are ignored

As you see, the potential requirements that we noted at the end of Step 1 can easily be fixed with GLOB_BRACE:

	foreach(glob('userImages/*/TN/{*.jpg,*.gif}', GLOB_BRACE) as $image)
	{
		echo "Filename: " . $image . "<br />";
	}

which will return this:

	Filename: userImages/username1/TN/test.jpg
	Filename: userImages/username1/TN/test3.jpg
	Filename: userImages/username2/TN/test2.jpg
	Filename: userImages/username2/TN/test4.gif

If we wish to only print subfolder names, we could use GLOB_ONLYDIR:

	foreach(glob('userImages/*/TN/*', GLOB_ONLYDIR) as $image)
	{
		echo "Filename: " . $image . "<br />";
	}

which will print:

	Filename: userImages/username2/TN/subfolder

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Conclusion and One More Example

This method has been available since PHP 4.3, however, it’s not used very often, strangely. I didn’t learn it until quite late myself. Now, I often use glob() when loading plugins into my framework:

	foreach(glob('includes/plugins/*.php') as $plugin)
	{
		include_once($plugin);
	}

That’s all; I hope you enjoyed this quick tip, and let me know if you have any questions!