I am new to Squarespace and I was wondering if it can interact with an external Rest-API using JSON?
For example, say I have a Database being hosted privately and I want data from it to be shown via Squarespace and certain pages being restricted according to the user's privileges.
Is any of the above possible, and if so can you direct me to an example? I seem not to be able to find anything on the above via google.
Thanks
From Squarespace:
Squarespace doesn’t support server-side code, including PHP, Ruby, Ruby on Rails, and SQL.
Therefore, the only way to connect to an external API (besides those supported by Squarespace's official 'extensions') is to use "client-side" (in-browser) JavaScript.
So, the database solution which you use must be capable of securely handling client-side connections (for example, Firebase can do that). To interface with it, you must add the JavaScript to your Squarespace site via code block or code injection. An example explanation of doing that can be found at this question.
As to allowing/disallowing content based on data returned from the database, it can be done, but only client-side. That means that, while you can make the site appear to restrict access and/or make it inconvenient for others to access certain pages based on information in the database, because it is all client-side, it could technically be circumvented by someone if they are familiar with web-development, web-inspector, etc. So it's not something you'd want to do if it is critical that the content be truly restricted.
Squarespace does have its own "Members Areas" which can be used to solve content access problems. However, it's extremely limited at the moment, and there are many scenarios it does not address.
Related
I've looked around the site to see if there are any people who have changed the CKAN API interface so that instead of uploading documents and databases, they can directly type onto the site, but I haven't found any use cases.
Currently, we have a page where people upload data sets through excel forms that they've filled out, but we want to make it a bit more user friendly by changing the API so that they can fill out a form on the page rather than downloading the template, filling it out and then uploading it.
Does CKAN have the ability to support this? If so, are there any examples or use cases of websites that have use forms rather than uploads?
This is certainly possible.
I'm not aware of any existing extensions that provide that functionality, but you can check the official list of CKAN extensions if there's anything that fulfills your needs.
If there is no existing extension that suits you then you could write your own, see the extension guide for details on how to do that.
Adding an API function to CKAN's API is possible, but probably not what you want in this case: the web UI usually does not interact with CKAN via the API but via Flask/Pylons controllers. Hence, you would add your add controller which first serves your form and then processes the submitted inputs.
You can take a look at the ckanext-pages extension, which does exactly that (for editing static pages instead of datasets, but your code would be similar).
I making web service (JSON), and web site, which uses this service. And this web site uses service function "register" to register users in web site. And I dont want to make captcha because its boring to type and easy to make mistakes while typing and I just can to loose my customers while registration procedure. So its easy to make application that will register [user00000#haha.com .. user99999#hehe.com] rage of fake accounts. How to avoid this without typing CAPTCHA?
Thanks in advance
There are a few different approaches you can use, or a combination of them:
You can have your users perform basic math instead of the CAPTCHA.
You can also use javascript to detect bots, since bots typically use straight HTTP requests, however client-side javascript requires a real browser in order to execute:
http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/07/detecting-bots-in-javascrip/
There are some nice alternatives to CAPTCHA, for example this and this and this and this (btw, you can find different alternative-CAPTCHAs here - not all of them are "hard" to use!).
Also, there are some alternative CAPTCHAs that instead of displaying twisted characters - give you a simple arithmetic equation, for example: 3+7= and you have to type in the correct result.
I've been asked to create an app that will get data back from a database where the CMS will be Wordpress. I've never used a CMS so I'm trying to get a (overview)picture in my head of how it could all work and what each of the components would be. And what a CMS actually brings to the party.
Creating the app itself is pretty clear. I've done a few already. I've made a database before and shouldnt cause a problem.
But what is going to be in the middle between the app and the database?
Part A:
I'm guessing iphone apps typically would call some php file that's hosted on the server? The php then would make a call to the database and return the data somehow, maybe as xml. But this is really basic and wouldnt require a CMS. Just a database and a phpfile, or am I wrong?
Part B:
If i wanted to run a check on the database every minute to see if any of the data in database was no longer valid and remove it if needed, that would require somekind of program running on the server. So that program would be Wordpress, since it is managing the content, so a content management system is actually needed and is for these kind of taskes. Am i understanding the role of CMS?
Many Thanks,
-Code
Part A: Yes, that's definitely how it would normally work. Of course, you're not accessing "a" database, you're accessing the database WordPress creates, but otherwise, sure.
Part B: The role of a CMS is to provide a structured, easily-edited way of presenting information. It abstracts both the database and the user interface stuff, allowing the CMS administrator to CRUD data via the use of simple forms.
In your case, no, you wouldn't (usually) ask the WordPress software to provide information because it's not set up to provide data that's programmatically requested. Instead it's designed to display HTML pages with the data embedded. The WordPress software is specifically for humans to CRUD the data through a human-friendly interface. You'd write your own, as in Part A.
This article shows some basic PHP for retrieving blog entries and user comments, likely most of what you'd want. The WordPress database format is well-documented: here's an article that lays it out and provides more PHP examples for retrieving the information.
Have a look how the Wordpress for iOS team is doing it:
http://ios.wordpress.org/development/
I would not try to access the db directly or through some custom php-code, but use the official WordPress API (which uses xml-rpc) instead.
and this xml-rpc objective-c library might even make this a pretty straightforward exercise?
I'm trying to clone a commercial Student Management System which was written in Perl. I want to use PHP, as I have no experience in Perl.
I am now trying to set up the login system, which should be (has to be?) done with PHPSESSID's, right? Now, in PHP I could transmit the Session ID via GET, POST, and COOKIE.
The Perl website doesn't add parameters to the URL (GET) and does not save cookies on my computer (COOKIE). There is also no form which could contain a hidden field (which would be POST in PHP, right?)
Can someone tell me how Perl remembers the logged in user there?
Perl takes a much more "toolkit"-based approach to building web applications than PHP does, because Perl was not designed specifically for web work. So it doesn't have any built-in way of doing web app session management; rather, there are many modules on CPAN which implement session management in many different ways.
If you were to identify the Student Management System in question and provide a URL, we might be able to look at it from the outside and identify what it's doing, but, really, I question whether you actually need to use the same session management system as the existing app unless you want to implement single-sign-on between the original version and your clone[1]. Concentrate on cloning the user-visible interface and functionality rather than the implementation details behind it.
[1] ...which would be futile anyhow unless you're also planning to tap into its session database on the back end, since neither one will recognize the other's session ids if they don't share that data.
For the sake of completeness, there are OTHER, non-standard ways to store/transmit session information than the 3 methods you listed (although I seriously doubt any of them are used in your SMS). Among them:
Sending the cookie data as part of the DOM (e.g. in HTML) and having on-page JavaScript access it from DOM
Or, just store the cookied data as JavaScript's data in the first place.
AJAX calls. E.g. the session-enabled logic is all handled in AJAX URLs and not the main URLs. Yes, I know that's completely screwy. But doable.
Don't store the cookie in main cookie database (so you can't find it using standard cookie viewing methods). For details on how that's done, please google "evercookie" for a VERY cool method of persistently storing cookie info by utilizing up to 10 redundant storage options - one good intro is http://blog.depthsecurity.com/2010/09/super-persistent-cookies-evercookie.html
All that said, I completely agree with Dave's answer - just use PHP's best practices mechanism to implement the functionality instead of cloning possibly-perl-specific and possibly-weird implementation in the webapp.
I'm trying to make a page with 2 fields (email and feedback) and 1 button. When the user clicks on the button, a table on a page else where is filled in with the data, permanently.
Does anyone have recommendations of how I should do this? I'd like to avoid having a script send me an email, or writing to a database. But if I have to, which ever is easier to configure would be prefered.
Thanks,
Matt
So you want a comments system like you find on most blogs? You'll need to store those comments somewhere, probably in a database. As for how to do it, that would depend entirely on what you already know and what the site is currently written in. You could use PHP and MySql if you already have those skills, or ASP.Net/SQL Server, or if you want to be down with the cool kids you can use Ruby on Rails or Python/Django.
If you post what languages you already have experience in, and/or what the site is written in you might get a more specific answer :-)
There're 2 types of scripts: server side and client side. The client side script (JavaScript) stores info only for particular visitor on his computer and this can't be seen by anybody else.
You need a server side script to save feedback on the server. The language or technology depends on the hosting server you use. Not all hosting services allows server side scripts. You need first to find out what scripting languages and technologies are supported by your hosting provider. Then we can help you more.
ADD:
For an unexperienced persons I recommend to search for hosting services which has most needed functionality. Something like blogs, etc. On such services you could create pages that will have comments and feedback and many more.
While it may seem outdated it's not necessarily a bad design. You can use PHP or Perl (due to it's string parsing capabilities) and simply store the main page on the disk.
Here's your sudo code/design...
You'll need need an html page that looks as follows
<tr><td>email</td><td>comment 1</td></tr>
<tr><td>email 2</td><td>comment 2</td></tr>
<tr><td>email 3</td><td>comment 3</td></tr>
Then you'll need a php script page that will read this html file in and display it.
The php page will also contain code for dealing with a user submitted comment. When a user posts a comment you need to open the html page with the rows in it and append to that file.
You need to be careful with this design however because you may run into write concurrency issues if two people attempt to read the file at the same time. Add code to handle this gracefully accordingly.