PHP Archive
Getting Started with PHPUnit
I haven't written here for ages. Things have been slightly quiet on the interesting work front and life has also got in the way. Anyway, I recently started work on some larger projects and have a few ideas on what to blog about from that. One of the projects is...
Read More Creative Switching
The switch statement is one of the basic control structures in PHP and many other languages. At its simplest it can be used to quickly 'choose' between a series of different values but with a little imagination it can do much more than that. I find it extremely easy to...
Read More Some tricks with Autoloaders
Autoloaders are a great feature of PHP5. Used properly they can help to really 'clean up' your code, negating the need for include or require statements. They can also lead to a real increase in performance as class files are only loaded and parsed when needed (lazy loading) instead of...
Read More Using Zend_Service_Twitter and OAuth
I've just spent all afternoon trying to update a very simple Twitter client to post status updates to Twitter. The code has been using BASIC authentication to post Tweets until now but seeing as that's about to be discontinued in favour of OAuth I thought I'd better update things. I...
Read More Recursive Closures in PHP 5.3
With the release of PHP 5.3.3 the other day and the announcement of the end of active support for the PHP 5.2 branch I thought it would be a good time to do a bit more experimenting with the new features in PHP 5.3. I would have done this sooner...
Read More Creating 50,000 unique values
A client at work wants to run a promotion where a customer will receive a card with a unique 8 digit code on it when they buy something. They will then be able to visit the website to find out if they are a winner or to get a chance...
Read More Google Custom Search Engine
I recently published my first class on PHPClasses and thought I would write a brief post about it here. The class allows a developer to send a query to a Google Site Search custom search engine, using the XML API.
Google Site Search
Google Site Search can be used to create a...
Read More Installing Imagick under Apache on Windows
After a few weeks of experimenting on and off I've just managed to get the Imagick extension installed under Apache on Windows (my development environment). While discovering how to make it work was not at all simple the final process of getting all the pieces to...
Read More Creating Professional Documents the Easy Way
Have you ever tried to create a professional quality document programmatically from within PHP? It's a real pain and surprisingly tricky to do. There are limited options for PHP developers to produce files in the formats most often used in business. There are libraries for producing PDF files in PHP...
Read More A Quick Tip
I haven't written anything here for ages due to illness, work and life getting in the way. I've got a longer post brewing that I'll hopefully add in the next couple of days but for now here's a quick tip that I hope someone will find useful.
I recently had a...
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