INTN 2201: Lab Assignment 4:
Chapter Files from Textbook

Due Date and Marking

Lab 4 is due by February 20th 2010, by midnight. This means that you must have submitted your link by that time (see "Handing In" section below). You will receive feedback within a day or two, giving you your mark out of ten, and the reasons for any loss of marks, to be used as constructive criticism (i.e. fix the problems before the next lab is submitted)

General

For this assignment you will be required to access the book PHP 5 Fast & Easy Web Development on Books 24x7. You will be reading and wokring through example exercises, creating several files for this assignment.

You are to read chapters 4 and 5 and work through all of the example exercises.

After doing the required reading, you are going to have to produce a link from your "index.html" page (in your navigation section) to your "lab4.php". It should be clearly labeled as Lab 4.

Specific Requirements

• Your php files are to implement your cascading stylesheet from Lab 3 (this should be achieved by including your header).
• Your PHP pages must be XHTML valid, to the same standard as your first three assignments and the first term test.
• To ease web site maintenance you will pull the banner and nav bar off of your standardized pages, and place them in a file called "header.php"
• You will pull any bottom of the page and/or right side nav bar and place it in a file name "footer.php". This footer.php should include the XHTML and CSS validation images.
• You will replace the tops and bottoms of your standardized pages by including "header.php" and "footer.php" in the appropriate spots. E.g.:
  <?php include 'header.php'; ?>
  Be sure to change your file extension on your "index.html", "lab1.html", "lab2.html" "lab3.html" and "termtest1.html" to *.php. Otherwise the server will not know what to do with the include statement
• At the top of each page you are to create string variables named $title, $date, $filename, $banner and $description that contain the title for the page, the date the file was created, and a brief description of what the page is doing. These should be declared above the include 'header.php'; line, inside the header.php file. You are to echo these variables (the $title inside <title> tags, and the $date and $description as part of your HTML comments <!-- -->.
• Each file produced below for this assignment should include a set of php comments that state your name, and the course code (INTN2201) and the date you created the file.
• Each file produced should also include a set of header tags (in the body of page) that states title of the textbook section, and <p> tags giving a description of what the file is doing/demonstrating.
• Each PHP file produced should also include a clearly labelled link back to the lab4.php (in addition to the nav bar included as part of the header.php file). page
• Your "lab4.php" file should have a clearly labelled link to each of the php files created below (be sure that your a:link and a:visited css selectors work, for ease of marking).
• Produce one appropriately named php file (with a lab4 prefix), including implementing your header.php and footer.php files, for each of the following program examples in the textbook titled:
  1. PHP Start and End Tags (Chapter 4) E.g. this file could be named lab4tags.php
     (Click to see an example of what the instructor is looking for).
  2. Code Cohabitation (Chapter 4)
  3. Escaping Your Code (Chapter 4)
  4. Commenting Your Code (Chapter 4)
  5. PHP Variable and Value Types (Chapter 5)
  6. Using Constants (Chapter 5)
  7. Using Constants 2 (Chapter 5) untitled section in USing Constants section, refers to constants2.php
  8. Assignment Operators (Chapter 5)
  9. Comparison Operators (Chapter 5)
  10. Logical Operators (Chapter 5)
  Your pages ALL need to be XHTML valid, therefore do not use the UPPER CASE letters on you HMTL tags as shown in the text. Remember this is a PHP textbook, NOT an HTML textbook.

Handing In

Publish your pages on the opentech server and submit the URL of your index page to YOUR lab instructor. The preferred method/location for the various instructor is:

Don't mail your files themselves or save them into WebCT; they are useless away from the server.

To publish your pages, upload them to the server in the directory /var/www/users/intn2201/userid (this is the only folder that will work because that's what the Apache Web server software is configured to look in for your files).
Keep your files on-line until you are sure they have been marked!
Directory and file names on the server are case-sensitive, so be sure to put everything in lowercase letters. The default page name is index.html. Don't use spaces, apostrophes, uppercase letters or quotation marks in your file name (keep it simple, using letters and digits, otherwise people won't find your pages).

Linking file names to URLs

Let's say your login ID is speedy, then your file name on the server is:
 /var/www/user/intn2201/speedy/index.html
The corresponding URL is:
 http://opentech.durhamcollege.ca/~intn2201/speedy/
Don't forget the ~ (tilde) symbol. It means "speedy's home directory".

For the rest of the files in your site, you need to give the name in the URL. The file named:
 /var/www/users/intn2201/speedy/page2.html
has the corresponding URL is:
 http://opentech.durhamcollege.ca/~intn2201/speedy/page2.html