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.
After doing an upgrade on my Debian virtual server, which upgraded PHP and Nginx, I got a "502 Bad Gateway" error when browsing websites on that server. This post shows how to fix this problem, and the configuration option to prevent it occurring again on reboot.
Pandora is a music streaming service which can be accessed via a web browser, smartphone/tablet app or desktop app. There is a closed API which can be used to extract some information from Pandora (and edit radio stations etc). This post looks at using a PHP API by Alex Dallaway to access radio stations and bookmarks from Pandora.
PHP has a Reflection API adds the ability to reverse-engineer classes, interfaces, functions, methods and extensions. I needed to use it to get all the publicly accessible properties for a class that aren’t static, but there doesn’t seem to be a way to get this "out of the box".
I’ve recently set up a new server with PHP & Nginx using packages from dotdeb. The default upload_max_filesize and post_max_size for this setup with php-fpm is 2M. To adjust it, the Nginx config also needs a configuration change, otherwise you’re still stuck with a 2MB limit.
I use phpMyAdmin as a PHP web based manager for MySQL, but find a few of the default configuration options "out of the box" a little annoying. This post shows some useful modifications to the defaults to make phpMyAdmin more usable, in my opinion.
I've done a bit of work in the past extracting attachments from email with PHP and posted a few articles here showing how to do it. None of them have really been all that satisfactory and so a little earlier this year I started again from scratch. I've posted here what is a work-in-progress due to requests from several people. It's not complete but it does work.