PHP is a powerful open source server-sided scripting language that can be used on a wide variety of operating systems and webservers, including Apache on UNIX and IIS on Windows.
PHP contains numerous extensions which enable you to dynamically create images and flash files, parse xml, connect to remote servers using pop, imap, ftp, http and raw sockets, natively access many database servers including PostgreSql, MySQL and Microsoft SQL Server, compress and decompress files, lookup domain names and and much more.
PHP has an excellent manual and online documentation which covers every function for every extension available.
PHP's error_reporting() function allows a script to check what the current error reporting level is and/or modify it. I wouldn't normally recommend changing the error reporting level programatically, but there may be times when it's needed. The nice thing is it's easily possible to get the current level, change it, and then set it back to what it was previously.
The PHP CURL functions use the libcurl library to allow you to connect to various servers and different protocols. If the user agent string is not explicitly defined then nothing will be sent to the web server. If you are scraping a website with CURL for whatever reason, there may be times you need to specify the useragent string and this post shows how to do it.
The PHP CURL functions use the libcurl library to allow you to connect to various servers and different protocols. This post shows how to make an HTTP POST with PHP and CURL passing several form fields. This can be useful for testing your own web forms, connecting to APIs that require POST data and so on.
The first MVC framework I used was Code Igniter but I’ve decided to give the Zend Framwork a go because I like their approach to use what you need, and after some studying of the controllers and view functionality those parts do more or less exactly what I want. There are ways to add additional routes to the controllers but I couldn’t work out initially how to inject them into the controller from the Zend Framwork documentation. This post shows the original example from the Zend Framework documentation and then a more full example which I constructed using other sources.
The Google Analytics API has a filters feature which allows you to filter the data in a variety of ways, including filtering by URL. This means that you can get specific metrics (e.g. pageviews etc) for a single page from the GA API.
My last PHP post looked at how to do email validation with filter_var() which is available from PHP 5.2.0. However if the server your website is being hosted on has an earlier version of PHP then you can’t use filter_var(). This post looks at how to use the Zend Framework to validate email addresses instead, if you are using the Zend Framework.