Tim Bromhead's Blog: Super friendly URLs - handling spaces with URL Rewrites and PHP
98403
In a new entry today, Tim Bromhead shares his method for creating "super friendly urls" for a site's users using mod_rewrite:   Today we are going to show how to make the URLs with spaces super easy to type for users. bla.st uses dashes in the URLs to represent spaces eg. http//bla.st/web-design/. We chose dashes over underscores because underscores can get lost with underlined links, and we think they look nicer.   He includes the Apache config information for working with the VirtualHost entry and the simple PHP script to handle the requests. It looks in the SERVER superglobal, at the QUERY_STRING to see what the user is requesting and does an append and redirect accordingly. This example is made to take any form of a space in the URL (including underscores and %20), parse it out, and pass the user along correctly to the page they want.
448776
Sara Golemon describes the path she took in a search for an OpenID library to work with in PHP. The trip took her through both PEAR and PECL with no promising results. Heading off to a Yahoo! search she comes up with one good result - Auth_OpenID.   Now, granted, this is the first OpenID system I've looked at, and I haven't really dug into it in depth, but I've got to say, this is some clean, well written code and the author clearly understands the maths involved (or at least fakes it shockingly good).   Knowing this, she asks "why isn't this in PEAR" if it's so well-structured and useful? It works with any version of PHP from 4 up and is smart enough to adapt itself to whatever the structure of your application might be.   There's also some great comments on the post where it's explained why the library isn't in PEAR, another OpenID package for PHP and suggestions for alternate distribution methods (PEAR channel).
674304
Mike Wallner has thrown together some stats for the latest edition of the pecl/http package to test its response performance.   The results surprised me, because it clearly shows that the performance drop for starting the PHP engine and doing the neccessary negotiation to provide caching is not that bad.   There's a chart of the results as well as a full PDF with all of the stats the graph maps out. He includes the legend to make the graph easier to understand.
696609
On his blog, Stoyan Stefanov takes a look at using on of the most popular pieces of PHP forum software out there - phpBB - and optimizing the front-end.   During this short workshop there will be no changes to the phpBB code, we'll create a new template instead, so that in case something bad happens, your board will continue to work normally. As an example, I'll use the bgcanada.com/phpBB2, the board I volunteer to administrate.   The tutorial is broken up into sections:   The plan New subdomains Creating a new template Moving CSS to an external file, merging Copying files to the new subdomains Serving gzipped content Turning ETags off Expires header Sysadmin summary   It looks like a lot of steps, but each section is relatively short and written well so as not to have more information than needed. In the end you'll have a simple template that uses Yahoo's 14 optimization rules to make things work that much faster.
661935
In this new post to his blog, Richard Heyes talks about an example he's come across of PHP being used as backend behind a large marketing project:    I recently read an interesting example at Neil Shearing's internet marketing strategies blog of combining .NET desktop software with a PHP backend.   We all know PHP is often slated by "real programmers" as a scripting language only useful for kiddie's home pages, and its nice to see a serious marketer choosing PHP to power the backend to a serious piece of viral software with the potential to go load-mad.    Richard also points out some of his experience trying to market his software and which of his customers are the ones that would provide the most return (the ones looking for updates) and how he can gather their information more productively to further his project's goals.
388816
Popular posts from PHPDeveloper.org for the past week:Dave Dash's Blog: nginx and symfonyZend Developer Zone: The ZendCon Sessions Episode 6: Project Management Methods to Maintain IT StandSitePoint PHP Blog: Tokenization using regular expression sub patternsIT Jobs Watch: Results for PHP Developers in LondonJob Posting: Digital River Seeks PHP Developer (Eden Prairie, MN)Dan Scott's Blog: Oooh...looks like I've got (even more) work cut out for meLeon Chevalier's Blog: Improve website load time by 500% with 3 lines of codePHPWomen.org: elePHPantsPhil Thompson's Blog: 7 PHP functions that saved my lifeStuart Herbert's Blog: Using suphp To Secure A Shared Server
457664
In this post on the Zend Developer Zone, Cal Evans takes a look at an article published in a recent php|architect issue from Chris Hartjes about how several recent advancements in the PHP community have helped developers think more in "the Rails way" of development.   Chris does a good job of laying out his points. As with any article of this nature, you are going to agree with some of them and you'll disagree with some of them. However, to get to that point you'll have to consider all of them. That's really the point of the article; making developer sit back and think for a minute. It's well worth the read.   Cal also mentions some of the topics presented in the article including more conceptual ideas like "Convention Over Configuration" and "Rapid Should Mean Rapid".
515083
On the SitePoint PHP blog there's a new post from Harry Fuecks talking about a replacement method using token that works a bit better than the typical regular expression method.   Promtped by a real world example, one often-overlooked feature of most regular expressions engines is how subpatterns can useful to whip up tokenizers relatively easily. The problem? I needed to match the word any of the words "Canton", "Region" or "Group" in a string and perform a follow up action depending on which matched.   His ultimate solution used a set of preg_match generated tokens to do the replaces a bit more reliably. It also makes it easy for other scripts (like his Python example) to use them too.
126500
DevShed is starting up another new series today, this time looking at the DirectoryIterator methods out of the Standard PHP Library functionality.   Because this class might be handy to use in projects where handling directories is a must, in this new series I'll be taking a close look at some of its most important methods. We will explore these methods appropriately in conjunction with the corresponding code samples.    They introduce the class, noting why it's handy to use and where's the best place to use it - including an example. They get into a bit more detail, looking at the key() and current() methods as well as using the rewind() method to reset the pointer for the directory.
563255
Harry Fuecks is back today on the SitePoint PHP Blog with part two of his "joy of regular expressions" series, continuing on from this previous entry.   He jumps right in, summarizing the first part in a small section before getting back into the examples:  Hunting for .jp(e)gs Escaping Meta-Characters Search and Replace preg_quote() preg_replace() Word Boundaries, Word Characters...and everything else Sub patterns Spot the XSS Hole eval() is evil! preg_replace_callback()  As you can see, it's crammed with just as much infromation as the first part and covers a wide range of topics to help you get more in tune with your inner regular expression guru.
743840
Chris Shiflett has posted his own recap of the (just passed) php|works conference up in Toronto over on his blog.   I've been traveling non-stop since php|works, so I haven't had a chance to reflect on the conference, what I learned, who I met, and things like that. (Zak has been doing a good job of this lately, and I'd like to follow his lead.) I've probably forgotten more than I remember, but this is my recap.   Included in the things he mentions are:  The people he was able to meet (like Joshua Eichorn and Sebastian Bergmann) The talks he gave ("Truth about XSS" and "Agile PHP Testing") His interview with Cal Evans of the Zend Developer Zone The PHP 5 Certification and Wez Furlong's "Not PDO" talk
632254
Harry Fuecks has gotten busy and posted the third part of his "Joy of Regular Expressions" series over on the SitePoint PHP Blog today.   Following on from the last part, this one is more of an intermission-a round up of regex syntax seen so far and a couple of links following feedback.   He looks at two different topics:  A "must reads" section of resources for getting the most out of regular expressions A comprehensive "cheat sheet" with tips on expression delimiters, literals, pattern modifiers, character classes, quantifiers, assertions, sub-patterns, and working with the blackslash.
396236
This month's issue of php|architect has been released and includes articles such as:  PHP5: Beyond the Objects The Ultimate PHP 5 Shopping Cart PHP and Databases Error Handling with PHP 5 and PEAR
291476
Matthew Turland, like many in the PHP community these days, has been pondering PHP6 and what it might mean to both the developers and to the language itself:   Be that as it may, as a user with about five years under his belt as of now who has seen all qualities of PHP code ranging from pristine to pedantic, a thought or two has crossed my mind on the subject of the latest upcoming incarnation of the language.   Specifically, he talks about some of the hot topics like namespaces, the mysqlnd driver, Unicode support, and named parameters. Overall, though, his comments are positive, looking toward a brighter future for PHP with this upcoming edition.
288007
After long discussions and much opinion being thrown around, Andrei Zmievski points outintegration of namespaces into the upcoming PHP6 release.   Ladies and gentlemen, we have namespaces.   According to the post from  \
654370
Pierre-Alain Joye has a little reminder posted to his blog today about two posts from planet-debian and Apache that refer to clones/references in PHP4 and PHP5 and some of the misconceptions presented there.   Reading planet-debian and Apache (from Sven and David), I catched two posts about clones and references in php4 and php5. I do not think it is worth to explain again everything here as Sara wrote a very good post already, check it out here.   He mentions his annoyance with articles/posts like these and the impact that it has on PHP as well as the person posting.   I wonder when the OS community in general will be mature enough to stop bitching at each other. And that's valid for PHP developers, gnome-kde and other well established wars.
647305
Popular posts from PHPDeveloper.org for the past week:Ian Selby's Blog: Uploading Large Files With PHPONLamp.com: Quick and Clean PHP FormsDotVoid.com: Reordering nested sets using PHP and JavascriptRob Allen's Blog: Zend Framework Book Coming SoonCommunity News: php|works Daily Summaries (Day 2)Community News: Sara Golemon & Christopher Jones - First Day Summaries of php|worksJob Posting: University of Wisconsin, Department of Medicine Seeks Web Developer (Madison, WI)Zend Developer Zone: PHP Abstract Podcast Episode 19: Glue Frameworks vs. Full Stack FrameworksStefan Mischook's Blog: Installing PHP and MySQL on the Mac with MAMPSecurityReason: Three Advisories for PHP 5.2.4 (dl, iconv_substr & setlocale)