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.
While working with some image functions in PHP I changed the output image from JPEG to PNG (from the ImageJPEG to ImagePNG functions) and got the error message "gd-png: fatal libpng error: zlib error". This post looks at the cause of the error and the solution.
If you have long running batch processes with PHP that are run by cron and you want to ensure there’s only ever one running copy of the script, you can use the functions getmypid() and posix_kill() to check to see if you already have a copy of the process running. This post has a PHP class for checking if the script is already running.
While testing a web service I was creating in PHP using the PHP SoapClient and SoapServer classes I got the error "Unable to parse URL" from a WSDL file generated using Zend Studio. This post looks at the error and how to fix it.
Sometimes phpMyAdmin is inaccessible and gives the error message "Cannot start session without errors". This can be due to either a client-sided issue with cookies, or a server-sided issue relating to permissions of the temporary directory where session files are stored.
A few days ago I posted how to hide the information schema in phpMyAdmin and of course using the advice in that post you can hide any database you want. The hide_db phpMyAdmin configuration option is a regular expression so you can use it to hide several databases, and this post looks at how to do this.
When you log into phpMyAdmin you can only see the databases for which you have access rights, as well as the information_schema database. It is possible to hide this database if you want to. This post looks at how to hide the information_schema database in phpMyAdmin.