From the category archives:

PHP

How to edit remote files in Microsoft Expression Web 3

December 2, 2009
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I’m just starting to experiment with Expression Web 3 as a site editor (specifically for editing PHP, CSS and Javascript files) and the first stumbling block was how to set it up so that I can edit my remote files directly without having to create a local version. This is necessary because I don’t have [...]

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First steps in object oriented PHP

October 27, 2009

PHP gets a bad press from time to time, largely because its very flexibility is seen as laxness by the tight sphincter brigade. However, just because PHP doesn’t force “best practice” on programmers doesn’t mean you can’t adopt said best practice.
Object oriented programming is much talked about and has many advantages over the old-school line-based [...]

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VisiBone

April 7, 2009

If you’re a web developer or designer you should get yourself over to www.visibone.com. VisiBone sell paper-based, cut down references for designers and developers including everything from colour charts to MySQL commands.
I ordered the “Everything Book” on the 1st April, it arrived (from the US) 2 working days later and it’s one of those products [...]

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How to create a basic PHP template

February 9, 2009

When you’re creating a website with lots of pages all using the same look and feel, headers, CSS etc, it obviously makes sense to create a simple template.
Begin by creating a page in XHTML/HTML that looks and works exactly as you wish. Now cut and paste the header into a new file and put it [...]

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Apache

October 16, 2008

Let’s say that you want to add a file upload facility to your website via PHP. The key to this is to ensure that the permissions on the folder you are copying up to allow PHP to do the copying. This is a classic Gotcha that can waste a whole load of time.
The first thing [...]

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Let’s hear it for HEREDOC

September 8, 2008

I’ve been using PHP seriously for a while now, and overall I think it’s the most productive programming language I’ve ever encountered. However, one of the things, as a PHP programmer, you need to do on a regular basis is to output HTML to the browser in order to draw web pages.
The problem is that [...]

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PHPDesigner 2008

June 4, 2008

It seems that my endless search for the ideal PHP IDE has finally…er…ended. phpDesigner 2008 is the most promising environment I’ve seen and even though I’ve only just started using it, it’s already seen Zend Studio Pro and the treacle-like Zend Studio Eclipse confined to the recycle bin.

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Chartdirector

April 14, 2008

Chart Director is the tool I’ve used for the past year or so for displaying charts and graphs. It can be a little fiddly to get to grips with but the documentation is extensive and you can usually get started by adapting an example. Shown here is a Radar Chart I’ve used for my latest [...]

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Stripping HTML tags using PHP

March 26, 2008

If you create registration forms and the like, you’ll often need to make sure that HTML tags are removed from anything your user types in just in case they’re attempting to be naughty.
What’s needed is a simple way to iterate through all the POSTed values and strip these tags out. It would be even better [...]

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MySQL Crash Course

March 4, 2008

Short and sweet, just like this review, if you want to learn MySQL you need “MySQL Crash Course” by Ben Forta. A little gem. Its ISBN is 0-672-32712-0 or click the image to order.

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