I’m planning on building a retro themed flash game in the coming weeks. Inspired by the recently released bit trip beat game for the wii, and my love of 80’s video games I’m going to design my own take on a retro puzzle action game. I’m going to be using the five3D engine to add a bit of depth to the look and game play.

I ran across a great collection of retro atari games and ads I suggest checking out, some are pretty cool. Not much just yet, in the next day or two I will be putting up some gameplay concepts as well as some design.

Changing file permissions on a server is usually pretty straight forward, just log in with your favorite ftp client that supports chmod ( a unix command for changing permissions on a file or directory ) and set the permissions on the selected folder or file with 755 or 777 etc.

When doing it via php things can become a little more tricky. This depends on your servers hosting company, most of the time the “safe_mode” is turned on by default. This will in most cases disable the chmod() function within php. The same mode is a feature in php ( no longer exists in php 6 ) that protects against unauthorized system changes like changing permissions on folders to allow anyone to write to them.

With safe mode on you cannot use the function and the script its contained in can fail. There are a number of ways to get around this.

1. You can disable safe mode. Do this by editing your php config file.
2. You can set the owner on the script executing the chmod() function to the same owner as the directory you are preforming the chmod on

I suggest first trying to change the owner of the script that is executing the function, this is a more secure solution then shutting off the safe mode.

A quick way to display separate pieces of information on a page without the need for multiple pages is to use jQuery. I’ll run through the process now.

1 – include jquery.js

You will need to download jQuery in order to use it. They do allow you to link to the latest version of the javascript framework but I only recomend to use it while testing since things change from version to version.

2 – setup your “content divs”

I’m going to use div’s as a way of dividing up my content into sections. You can use other methods but this will work fine for this example.

<div id="cat_a">
<h3>category A</h3>
</div>
 
<div id="cat_b">
<h3>category B</h3>
</div>
 
<div id="cat_c">
<h3>category C</h3>
</div>

Pretty straight forward. Only thing to note here is that we have applied an id to each of the divs, you can use a class instead but make sure you use a unique class for each div.

3 – Setup the buttons

Now I’m going to layout the buttons that will control the sorting of the 3 categories.

<a href="" id="a_button">Category A</a>
<a href="" id="b_button">Category B</a>
<a href="" id="c_button">Category C</a>

Again, note that each link has its own id.

4 – Building the jQuery

All we have to do from here is build the jQuery code to control the categories. Create a document ready function that will be called once the page is fully loaded.

 
<script type="text/javascript">
$(document).ready(function() {
$('#cat_a').toggle();
$('#cat_b').toggle();
 
$('#a_button').click(function () {
	$('#cat_a').toggle("fast");
	$('#cat_b').hide();
	$('#cat_c').hide();
});
 
$('#b_button').click(function () {
	$('#cat_a').hide();
	$('#cat_b').toggle("fast");
	$('#cat_c').hide();
});
 
$('#c_button').click(function () {
 
	$('#cat_a').hide();
	$('#cat_b').hide();
	$('#cat_c').toggle("fast",false);
});
});
</script>

Ok, there is a lot of code here. What this does is this: the first line is the main function that everything else is contained in, this executes when the page is loaded.

Then we hide our other categories that we do not want to display by default.

Next, we add click events with functions for each button. In each click event function we toggle ( show ) the appropriate div and hide the others. This is repeated for all of the buttons.

Thats it! nothing more, with this you will have animated toggling of each div. This is a very basic start into jQuery. I suggest reading up on the jQuery documentation available on their site.