So, if you try to activate a WordPress plugin, but can’t, due to a memory allocation problem, you can either modify the wp-settings.php script, or, if that has no effect, increase the ‘memory_limit’ variable in the php .ini file. If you can access the php .ini file yourself, great, if not, contact your host.

To change the wp-settings.php file, open it up and locate the following lines:


if ( !defined('WP_MEMORY_LIMIT') )
define('WP_MEMORY_LIMIT', '32M');


Now change ’32MB’ to ’64MB’, so it reads:


if ( !defined('WP_MEMORY_LIMIT') )
define('WP_MEMORY_LIMIT', '64M');

Again, if this doesn’t and you can’t change the php .ini file yourself, contact your host. Incidentally, if you’d like to see your ‘memory_limit’ allocation, pop the following code into a php web page and upload it to the server:


<? php echo phpinfo(); ?>


This is a convenient little resource featuring the abovementioned tip and plenty of others.

With the Photoshop designs in hand, I set about cutting and marking them up with XHTML and CSS. With the basic interface complete, work was started on the server side. This involved coding a number of scripts in PHP to search for and display properties, all accessed through a MySQL database.

Once a property’s selected from the results list, the user’s taken to an individual proprty page, as above. In order to upload properties to the website, an admin section was built behind a password protected log in.

The code and database design for this project are bespoke, as a content management system for the entire site wasn’t needed. Had it been, and had a property blog been stressed, the project would have been WordPress based. To sum up, I coded the entire site, but did not carry out the design work.

extract( $_POST );

This creates a value pair corresponding to each key/value pair in the $_POST array (the elements in the contact form). So, the names in the posted form fields become the variable names, whose values are automatically assigned to their respective form values.

Take the following basic form:

<form action="emailSent.php" method="post">
<fieldset>
<legend>Personal information</legend>
<label>Name</label><input type="text" name="name" />
<label>Email address</label><input type="text" name="email" />
<label>Telephone</label><input type="text" name="phone" />
</fieldset>
<strong><label>Message</label>
<textarea name="message" ></textarea>
<input type="submit" name="SUBMIT" value="SUBMIT" />
</form>

Upon clicking ‘submit’, the form’s sent to the processing script, ‘emailSent.php’. There, the extract() function would appear:

extract( $_POST );

Which would immediately capture the $_POST array elements as:

$name=name;
$email=email;
$phone=phone;