Nick Halstead's Blog: Google Gears Caching of WordPress in PHP
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With the launch of the Google Gears offline storage functionality, lots of developers are working on solutions to put this new functionality into practice. Nick Halstead has created his own handy little script to help with caching WordPress content.   I was instantly fascinated by Google Gears so I had to immediately try out the sample code that you can download. The tutorial on the website gives a simple example of how to cache a few files using the Resource Store. It makes it very easy to setup a JSON manifest file that contains which pages you want to have cached. Here is an example manifest.   In his example creates the manifest and a JSON interface to it to grab the content from the WordPress site.
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Over on PHP Magazine's website today, there's a new review of a book that all PEAR users (and even those looking to get into it) will find quite helpful.
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With all of the push to move to PHP5 these days, some people are asking more questions of some of the most common PHP applications as to how they plan to proceed. Nick Halstead asks his question on his blog today - should the community boycott WordPress?   Technology moves forward and PHP will long term lose its dominant position unless it gets everyone to move along with it. [...] Frankly I use WordPress because it has the best plugins but it is no coding wonder and Matt [Mullenweg]'s energies would be better placed helping to move it to PHP 5 only.   The reference there is to a post from Matt (from the WordPress project) going after the community a bit for trying to force a move to PHP5 and that it's "not a big deal" like some are making it out to be. Nick feels that, if it's the case that Matt doesn't even see the move to PHP5 as a big deal, maybe WordPress shouldn't be the one of the blogging tools of choice.
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From the MelonFire community pages comes a new tutorial today talking about caching websites with a pre-existing PEAR package, PEAR_Cache.   More often than not, today's Web sites more closely resemble the big black truck crawling along the freeway than the little red Ferrari zipping through traffic. Fortunately, it's not all doom and gloom. By "caching" certain sections of your Web site, you can reduce the load on your server, significantly improve application response times and make your users happier.    They get down to the basics first, talking about what caching is and what it can do to help you and your application. This is quickly followed by some sample code to get the ball rolling, showing how to cache a simple string automatically. The next obvious step is to cache the contents of an entire dynamically generated file or automatically cache an entire application (without the need to do each file independently).    There's a few other examples they include as well - caching time, partial content, results from XML requests, and how to use a database to store your cached information.
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Based off of a previous article from Mike Willbanks, Stuart Herbert has posted some of his own thoughts on tuning and tweaking your applications for the best performance you can get out of them.   There's some good advice in there, and I thought it'd be a good idea to quickly add a bit more detail about the separate approaches that Mike raises.   He goes over the APC caching, memcache, the "gzip trick", the "Not Modified" header and optimized SQL statements.   He also mentions one thing that Mike didn't mention - a split between static files (no PHP needed) and their dynamic cousins. Having a more pure Apache (no PHP installed) can help give a minute jump in speed that, depending on the size of the site, could really add up from a user's perspective.
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According to this new post on the PHP Security Blog, there's a new META tag the Suhosin extension includes in the output of a phpinfo page to help resolve some of the issues with Google (and buddies) storing the contents of the page, giving a potential attacker information they could exploit.   [The] extra META TAG to the HTML output of phpinfo() that forbids indexing and archiving by robots. For fairness reasons following the embedded links is still allowed to robots, because a lot of projects [...] to get at least a few backlinks for their work, that might result in a better search engine positioning.   The patch can be downloaded from their site.
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Popular posts from PHPDeveloper.org for the past week:RefreshinglyBlue Blog: PHP vs Ruby - Practical Language DifferencesAndreas Gohr's Blog: Determine StumbleUpon RankingsPHP.net: PHP 5.2.4 ReleasedThe Bakery: Five New Posts - Custom Views, CSS, ViewInFile, ActsAs and Email ValidationPHPBuilder.com: File uploads made easyStefan Mischook's Blog: Turning on display_errors in WAMP - Video Tutorialphp|architect: Pro::PHP Podcast - Newscast for August 2007MT-Soft Blog: Creating a secure PHP production environment from Source CodeCommunity News: Andi Gutmans to Present at AjaxWorld 2007HowTo Forge: How To Set Up A Facebook RSS Feed Reader
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Brian Deshong has this new post on his blog today with an alternative method for doing the old standby "who's online" for your website.   Whenever you Google around for things like "Who's Online php", you'll find that a lot of the solutions are centered around using a database. However, is this really necessary? [...] One goal here: get Who's Online functionality off of the database. We'll explore a possible solution with Memcached that I've personally implemented, and thus far, it's been working great.   His alternative, using the memcache functionality that can be enabled in PHP, stores a "user ID" (either a real user ID or just some unique identifier) and their last activity time. This information is stored in a local file that can be queued each time the page it loaded. The other piece is a backend script that goes through this same file and clears out the old values. Depending on the size of the file/traffic of the site, this process could even be integrated into the same script that writes it.
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Aaron Wormus has a new note on his blog today about his presentation at this year's Zend/PHP Conference & Expo and another speaker he's excited to hear.    One of the Zend conference sessions that I'm pretty excited about is Don Samisa Abeysinghe's (of WSO2) "Fully Fletched Web Services with PHP".   I'll be presenting a session on "Moving to PHP5 with Style." This tutorial/case study will be based on experience in transitioning several codebases from PHP4 to PHP5, creating unit tests & started a move towards a service based architecture without a complete platform rewrite.    Aaron's talk fits under the banner of the "PHP Development" talks, including others on topics like hosting PHP applications on Windows, working with PDO, unicoding in PHP6, and using PHPUnit.
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In a new post to his blog today, Stuart Herbert continues the theme he started in a previous post about a business case for PHP. In this new entry, he shares some things he's done to further the effort.   To turn this from an idea into reality, I've setup a Google group where anyone who is interested can join in, and help build this resource. Please come along with your ideas and concerns, and let's see what we can achieve together.   He also suggests some "first steps" to get the ball rolling, namely a list of topics the business case needs to cover.
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Matthew Turland has posted some of his thoughts about a topic that's being tossed around in the programming world these days - that PHP is "on its way out".   I have to vehemently disagree with this, and not just because PHP is my language of preference.   He gives several reasons to back up the claim including the fact that large players use the language in high-profile sites as well as the recent upturn of popularity the language has seen (as people come back from the over-hyped other languages).   He mentions collaborations between PHP companies/divisions as well as components made to more efficiently run PHP applications on other web server types.
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Popular posts from PHPDeveloper.org for the past week:PHPBuilder.com: AJAX and PHP Part 2 - XML Communication/ProcessingCommunity News: Zend Framework 1.0.0 ReleasedMike Potter's Blog: Slides for today's e-seminar on Flex and PHPBlogSecurity.net: Interview with Stefan Esser on WordPressCommunity News: India's First PHP UnconferencePro::PHP Podcast: Newscast for 2007.06.28JSLabs Blog:  How to create Microsoft Office Documents with PHPPEAR Blog: Request for ideas: New developer FAQPHP-Coding-Practices.com: Composing Methods: Split Temporary VariableRob Allen's Blog: Spanish versions too!
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Popular posts from PHPDeveloper.org for the past week:PHP.net: PHP 4 end of life announcementZend Developer Zone: Book Review: Professional Search Engine Optimization with PHPStoyan Stefanov's Blog: phpBB front-end optimization - 1 hour workshopSitePoint PHP Blog: Win Cash for the best Facebook App!Elizabeth Naramore's Blog: July Edition of IPM PublishedJob Posting: ManicMelon.com Seeks Mid-Senior LAMP Web Application Developer (Overland Park, KS)Paul Jones' Blog: Solar Views and LayoutsCodeIgniter Blog: Version 1.5.4 ReleasedPHP-GTK Community Site: MkDevDVD (DVD Manager for Linux)Job Posting: Next Internet Seeks Senior Software Engineer (San Francisco, CA)
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Popular posts from PHPDeveloper.org for the past week:PHP-Coding-Practices.com: How I Turned A Slow Array Sort Into A Quick One Using Quicksort AlgorithmZend Developer Zone: PHP Abstract Podcast Episode 4: Planning ProgrammingWeb Development Blog: Save bandwidth with PHProxy and ip2nationJob Posting: Assembleron Ltd Seeks PHP 5/MySQL/Ajax Developers (Reading, UK)PÃ¡draic Brady's Blog: Complex Views with the Zend Framework - Part 6: Setting The TerminologyThe Bakery: Four New Articles - Load Balancing, Request Info, UUID Behavior & Upload ThumbnailsCommunity News: PEAR Installer version 1.6.0 releasedChristopher Kunz's Blog: Building PHP with cURL and libmysqlclient5DevShed: Working with Prepared Queries with PDO Objects in PHP 5Secunia.com: rPath update for gd, php, php-mysql, and php-pgsql
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PHPClasses.org has reviewed a new book today - "Professional Search Engine Optimization with PHP" from Wrox Publishing by Jaimie Sirovich and Cristian Darie.    This is a topic about which there is a lot to say, starting from the Google page rank algorithm, and what to do, as well what you should not do, to have your sites optimized to attract as many visitors as possible using search engine sites.   That is precisely the main topic of the book "Professional Search Engine Optimization with PHP". Despite the title mentions PHP, most of the knowledge presented in this book applies to all kinds of sites, independently if they are served by PHP code or not.    Manuel notes that the "PHP part" mostly has to do with the creation of dynamic sites and working with current PHP applications (like WordPress) to make them more search engine friendly.   Overall, this is an excellent book search engine optimization - SEO. It is very complete. [...] Whether or not you are familiar with the subject, if you are looking for good a book to learn all you need to know about SEO, this may be an excellent choice.
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As a companion to the podcast version of his review, Matthew Turland has posted his comments in text form over on his blog today.   I received an e-mail recently from a very nice gentleman at Packt Publishing - their representative asked if I would be willing to review one of their books, namely PHP Web 2.0 Mashup Projects by Shu-Wai Chow. Reviewing books is not something I had done before, so I thought I would give it a good old-fashioned college try.   He mentions the size of the book (and how it's not an indication of the quality) and the basic structure of the book, including spotlights on some of the specific topics covered.
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Over on the Zend Developer Zone today, there's a newly posted interview with Chris Hartjes a developer and speaker in the PHP community.   I first met Chris Hartjes at php|works in Toronto where he was giving his What Can PHP Learn From Ruby on Rails talk. As I described him in one of my blogs from php|works, he looks like a biker with a laptop. He's large but he's always got a smile on his face and is always available to help if you've got PHP questions. Chris was kind enough to sit down with me and spend some time talking about PHP and his work at VerticalScope . Here's how our conversation went.   They talk about how Chris got into programming (including his first computer), his work with vBulletin, a little MySQL discussion, and some thoughts on PHP6.