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.
In previous posts I looked at how to optimize a MySQL table from the MySQL command line interface and from phpMyAdmin by using the optimize [tablename] command to free up unused space. In this post I will look at how to do this with a PHP script which could be run periodically to optimise all non-optimal MySQL tables.
I’ve been doing a reasonable amount of PHP CLI (command line interface) programming recently for getting stuff from log files and converting large numbers of images. Some of these processes can some quite a while to run, sometimes as long as several hours, so it can be useful to know roughly how far through the process it is.This post looks at how to output a counter to the command line from PHP which replaces itself on each iteration.
The Zend Framework is a PHP framework with many individual components that do not require you to use the whole framework. In this post I will look at how to send an emailusing the Zend Framework’s Zend_Mail component.
FCKeditor is an in-browser WYSIWYG HTML editor and I use it on a number of websites including in the blog admin for this website. This post looks at how to put FCKeditor into a web page using PHP. In future posts I will look at some of the other functions and features of FCKeditor.
When writing my "Get a list of all available constants with PHP" post I discovered there are a number of usful date format constants in PHP which can be used with the date() function. (Refer to my "Formatting Dates with PHP" post for more details about the PHP date function). This post looks at these constants and how to use them with the date function. Please note that these constants have only been present in PHP since 5.1.1.
When you submit a form using a web browser the script processing the form often redirects after it has done its work to a thank you page (or similar). The response type people usually use when coding with PHP is a 302 redirect because it’s the default used when issuing a Location: header. The problem with this is on a page refresh the browser is likely to submit the form again. Instead you can use a 303 redirect to prevent the form being submitted again. This post looks at what a 303 response code / redirect is and how to send one with PHP.