Tim's Wee Part of the World

A funny thing happened to me on the way to my Inbox…

Well actually it happened when I got to my inbox and read this email regarding Mike Filsaime giving away the source code to his ButterFly Marketing Script.

First of all disbelief struck me. After all Mike’s been selling this script for sometime now and the people who bought it have done quite well with it.

The other reason disbelief flooded through my veins was the fact that our group at Internet Niche Lab have been developing a much smaller version of a membership script over the last few weeks and this drops in my lap!

You Can Modify this script and resell it!

That’s right, you can make it your own, promote it and sell it. Using the script itself to do it of course. Well that falls right up my alley.

I’m looking over this script!

I’ve installed the script and it worked straight out of the box as you would expect and I’m going over it to see what it has. Plus what we can do to improve/ add to it.

It’s Free So you can get your own!

Yep, you can go and grab it right now at ButterFlyOpenSource .

Is there a Catch?

You bet there is! But it is a clever one. Mike has started up a “Developers Network” which costs $200USD one time payment.

The reason behind this is simple, Mike will be building a community of developers and I’m guessing, any improvements will be available to the members.

For me, I’m going to sit back on that offer. First of all I’ve got to take a good look at this code.

But if you have a spare $200USD and want to join in on this community I’d strongly suggest that you do. As you’ll be getting fresh updates, to what was already an effective script, for a lot less than the >$1200 price tag it once had and you are looking for a good solid membership script. Then it’s a bargain.

Being able to be a part of a Community of a Software project that will greatly benefit you is a golden opportunity.

The Downside!

The downside is, if you do choose to resell the Free  script that is available, all support etc falls upon your shoulders.

Which is only fair. You get it for Free, it becomes your baby along with everything you need to do to support it.

You’d have to make your own changes or hire a programmer to do them. There are a few gremlins in the Free Version but it’s still quite useable.

This is another clever example of list building by giving away a very neat script with the aim of getting people to join the Developers Network.

So there is a lesson to be learned from all this. It’s a great way to get folk in front of his Developers Network and be inside where all the action is.

What’s Next?

Well I’m going to show this to the gang at Internet Niche Lab and see if we should persure using this script for what we want to do. And if you join us at Internet Niche Lab as a paid member, you’ll get the changes / modes we will be making,  plus you’ll have access to all the other useful scripts we develop.

In my PHP Classes, that is  what we do. We find a problem and write a script to solve it. The membership script being one of those. Now we have access to use the ButterFlyOpenSource script as a basis to solve this issue.

I’ll have a follow up to this as soon as I delve further into this amazing script!

Till then, happy marketing and website building etc.

Cheers

Tim Brownlaw

[Update - 6 Feb 2011]

I’m now using the Butterfly Marketing Script on a new membership site I am creating.
It’s still in it’s early days but you can see what’s going on over at LookingOverMyShoulder.com

[Update - 20 May 2011]

I’ve been making some changes to the script which I’m posting on the forum at LookingOverMyShoulder.com.

You can read the Forum , but to be able to post and get access to the members only area, you will need to “Sign Up“. It’s Free!

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[ If you read this and feel you are getting a bit  lost in the small technical Mumbo Jumbo sections - don't fret - There is a story in this...So keep reading ]

Well it’s certainly been an exciting Easter Break!

I had all the intentions of getting a huge chunk of my new website up and running but that sort of came unstuck.

The site is coded up to the point of accepting registrations and being able to edit/update your profile.

It is all working wonderfully well on my development box…

[Oh, I like to write my own projects for a bit of fun just in case you haven't caught on yet.]

But then…

I decided I’d throw it up on my webhosting and see how it flies and to show some folk my upcoming masterpiece.

So I did just that, I created my hosting account – changed the DNS settings and it instantly popped up on the webpage.  So things were looking grand.

But then…

I got that very sad error message that I didn’t have execute script permissions on my database!!!!

Just to enlighten you if you are sitting thinking….”What does executing things have to do with this…”.

Well all my database “stuff” is written as Stored Procedures, which means – the functions that talk to the database are actually a part of the database itself.  Not to worry if that’s confusing… It’s something I will be showing you later if you are interested…

Apart from it being a very useful programming feature,  it does give you some added security. In short, it’s how it should be done.

So getting back to my dismay when I saw that hosting company had it disabled!!!!!!!!!!! What The!!!!! I promptly contacted support and they said “Yes, you can’t”. Most helpful.

After asking Why, I promptly joined up with another hosting company. And it all worked like a treat!

But then…

After I had successfully registered, I decided I had better update my profile. That’s what the instructions suggested I do. But this was the part where some new technique was being used. And… well a bit of it didn’t work!

By the way, remember that the script works flawlessy on my system.

Going back a week in time!

I’m using a PHP Framework called Codeigniter which I quite like even if it does have a few shortcomings.  Hey nothing is perfect but it is good to know what those imperfections are and how to fix/cope with them…

I knew it wasn’t going to do what I wanted it to with returning multiple data sets from the stored procedure. Which in another language means – I ask the Database two questions and should get back two answers.

In it’s current state, CodeIgniter only liked to deal with one answer at a time.

So I modified it to work. How I did that was to go right back to basics and so I wrote an installation script to create a new table and stored procedures based upon what I was using. Then I created a number of sample php scripts so I had a known starting point. It all worked nicely…

From that I created the changes needed in CodeIgniter to make it all happy and it was. It uses the same function calls deep down in it’s database class…

Back to now.

So having encountered this “Database deafness” on the second question, I loaded my original test scripts up on the same hosting account using the same Database etc.

Guess What???

Everything Worked!

Head scratching time.

I contacted the new webhosting company explaining my dilemma and they asked to see some code to replicate the problem. Of course they would! So I created a new page up on the site explaining everything…

So why am I smiling?

I still don’t have it working, but I did end up creating a wonderful script that works like a little framework of it’s own allowing you to create your code snippets with an accompanying HMTL file with some blurb and it creates the webpage display the “instructions: then it shows the actual PHP Code cause it reads in the actual file and then it executes and displays the results.

Now that has major applications for so many things. It’s a great tool to use to demonstrate some of the finer points of PHP and how you can make it work for you. Actually some of it came from another script we are working on in our PHP Class. That was good timing!

So what started out as some rough knockup code only I could love and appreciate, turned into something anyone can read it and follow along all built with a nice modular system.

You can see the results…

The result of all that is viewable up on the new website. Well the site itself is still under construction..

It’s located at Demonstration of Stored Procedures using MySQLi

So I’ve now got a lovely way to demonstrate my code, allowing the world to see it. There is link at the bottom regarding the Forum I’ve posted on about this so the conversation can continue there.

I’m still stuck though.

Everything works except for the CodeIgniter script on the webhosting account, where it has to work!

It’ll be a simple problem but I have gone to all the trouble to “write it out” and see what falls out.  It’s just this time I would appreciate some other eyes to view the problem and see what they can see that I cannot! It does happen sometimes!

So while I got stopped dead in my tracks on what I wanted to do, I’ve actually created something nice and useful.

If you do want to see/hear how I made the script, just come along to one of my classes. I am meant to have the details up on the webatories.com site.  So I had best go and fix that bit up.

Webatories.com

There is a LOT planned for this website – so feel free to register and you’ll be kept notified on it’s progress.
http://www.webatories.com

[Update]

It’s fixed – The problem was I had made some changes to the members database table which were being installed with a separate SQL file through phpmyadmin. And guess what – I hadn’t run it in this particular installation.

Long story short – when the Stored procedure was attempting to read back the results from the members table it encountered an error due to the table missing some fields. But the error is “silent”.

The affect is it never returns anything… which is exactly what was happening. So there you go…. It was simple and writing it out finally led to the solution. Also a good rest helped as well.

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