DEVTRENCH: Web Development from the Front Lines

I didn’t know much about the world of SSL Certificates a few years ago, so it was confusing about where to purchase them. Luckily my host had a deal running at the time that let me in on a little secret for purchasing SSL certs. Basically, ssl is ssl and any certificate, including a self signed one will encrypt your data just fine. However, now that modern browsers have bought into the whole SSL industry, you need to purchase one that works with them. IOW, self signed certs and free certs are kind of a thing of the past, unless you are using them yourself or don’t mind the questions about security from your users. So now that you have to purchase an SSL certificate, the question becomes where and how much should you spend.

There are lots of SSL vendors out there, but you need to know how they operate in order to get the best deal. Most SSL companies work on a dealer or reseller model. That means that they offer the SSL certificates from their site and hugely inflated prices, while their dealers offer the same certs for a huge cost savings. The SSL companies normally have deals with major hosting companies simply to increase their customer base.

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I’ve been pretty frustrated with the way that cPanel notifies (or doesn’t notify) me of bandwidth overages. Seems sometimes I get them and sometimes not. So when I found out that you can do this with the WHM XML api I wanted to get it set up ASAP. This script can be used along with cron and PHPMailer to notify you of the bandwidth usage for all your domains in WHM. I have mine set up to notify me daily so I can keep track of my bandwidth usage.

To get your Access key for WHM, login and select Setup Remote Access Key.

If you need more help with the WHM XML API, you can find it here. You can download PHPMailer here.

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I needed to cache a chunk as a file so that another application (an ecommerce store) could include that file as well. I wrote this plugin that does that:

$chunks = array('StoreMenu'); // array of chunks that need to be cached
foreach($chunks as $v)
{
  $res = $modx->db->select("snippet","modx_site_htmlsnippets","name = '$v'");
  if($modx->db->getRecordCount($res))
  {
    $output = $modx->db->getValue($res);
    $fh = fopen($modx->config['base_path'].$v.'.html','w');
    fwrite($fh,$output);
    fclose($fh);
  }
}

Configure this chunk to have the OnChunkFormSave system event an whenever a chunk is saved it will write the specified chunks to the file system.