Dynamic Shipping Schedule?

subminimal

I was just hired on to a major .com company as an artistic director/webmaster. I was hired on with "basic" PHP experience, thier words. I have experience with CMS design. mySQL PHP integration, etc. But the problem they have hit me with has stumped me a bit, just asking for advice.

They have a shipping schedule which at the moment is done by hand. At the top of the page, are two calanders, last month and this month. Below is a view last month link. Below that is orders. All orders are shipped on the friday of the week ordered. So the lines read:

december 1: Your order will be shipped on Friday december 10 (Est. arrival date is: december 11-14)

On down the line until the friday, then the date moves to the following friday. The problem is its all done by hand now, and they want to make it either a) "really easy to update" or b) never touch it again. I think b is possible, I just have very little experience with the PHP date funtions. Basically, I need the calanders up top to be dynamic, as well as the schedule text below. The calanders will then have each date link to an anchor on the page (this is easy I know just describing.) Hope I explained that right, any thoughts?

vaaaska

It's not really that hard...

With php you can determine which day and week you are currently in/on and then you could figure out what day is Friday from there. If the day WAS Friday then you could defer it to the next weeks Friday.

There are some really handy calendar classes out there that you can work with...just do a search.

I'm a print designer too...if I could deal with I'm sure you can. 😉

subminimal

Yes I found a Calendar class or two, but thier functionallity seems very limited and the syntax a bit complex for my newbie taste. All these classes seem to just generate a text calendar?

subminimal

Through Google and hacking away I have gotten this far:

<?php
$tomorrow  = mktime(0, 0, 0, date("m") , date("d")+1, date("Y")); 
$lastmonth = mktime(0, 0, 0, date("m")-1, date("d"), date("Y")); 
$nextyear = mktime(0, 0, 0, date("m"), date("d"), date("Y")+1); 
$today = mktime(0, 0, 0, date("m"), date("d"), date("Y"));
$firstday=01;
$td=date("d");
echo "<b>Today is ",date("l M.d",$today),"</b><br /><br />";
echo "<b>Tomorrow = ",date("l M.d",$tomorrow),"</b><br />";
echo "<b>Last Month = ",date("l M.d",$lastmonth),"</b><br />";
echo "<b>Next Year = ",date("l M.d, Y",$nextyear),"</b><br /><br />";

if (date ('l') == 'Friday')
{
   echo "Today is Friday<br>n";
}
$time = time ();
for ($i = 0; $i < 7; $i++)
{
   if (date ('l', $time += (60*60*24)) == 'Friday')
   {
       echo "Next Friday is on the ".date ("jS of F", $time), "<br/><br />";
       break;
   }
}  

for ($x = 0; $x <30; $x++)
{
	$newday=$td + $x;
	if($newday < 30){
echo "Date:", date("l M.$newday",$today),"<br />";
}
}
?>

Can anybody point me in the right direction? I still ned to generate the right text date, and its making me nuts.

rehfeld

ps, you may find strtotime() handy 🙂

$timestamp = strtotime('next friday');
$timestamp = strtotime('now +1 day');

etc...

i recomend you read through all the different time related functions, espescially the user comments. you will likely find many things which will help you.

Roger_Ramjet

Originally posted by rehfeld
ps, you may find strtotime() handy 🙂

$timestamp = strtotime('next friday');
$timestamp = strtotime('now +1 day');

etc...

i recomend you read through all the different time related functions, espescially the user comments. you will likely find many things which will help you.

And take a few hours to PLAY with them all. Stick in a date and run a script with every possible date function just to see the different outputs they give. Then keep it for referance. Then try it out with different regional and locale settings, you'll be amazed at just how messed up things can get when you try to use US date format (mm/dd/yyyy) with Europeans (dd/mm/yyyy).

subminimal

Thank you guys. This is some good stuff. I have the weekend to figure this out, but I also have a show tomorrow lol. But I'm in the process of testing all the date functions now. Thanks again, youve all been quite helpful.

rehfeld

Originally posted by Roger Ramjet
And take a few hours to PLAY with them all. Stick in a date and run a script with every possible date function just to see the different outputs they give. Then keep it for referance. Then try it out with different regional and locale settings, you'll be amazed at just how messed up things can get when you try to use US date format (mm/dd/yyyy) with Europeans (dd/mm/yyyy).

yeah, damn euro format. they got everything backwards. j/k 😃

Weedpacket

And THAT's why the international standard is yyyy-mm-dd - because Americans think months are shorter than days 🙂