Building Ning Apps
PHP + Ning = Your Own Social Application In Minutes

By David Sklar

Ning is a free online playground for building and sharing social apps. Use PHP to write a Ning app and spend your time on what’s interesting about your app, such as sharing photos, trading restaurant reviews, or displaying interactive maps. Ning takes care of everything behind the scenes – hosting, security, tagging and search services, user registration, and all of the other bits that you’d otherwise have to build yourself. Plus, you don’t have to start from scratch. There are lots of apps on Ning for everything from noting movie star sightings to collaboratively reviewing neurobiology papers. You can clone one of these apps to jumpstart your own.[Read More]

Elements
Building a Task Application with PHP 5 and SimpleXML

By Thomas Myer

This edition eyes the updated and much improved XML interface provided with PHP 5. The PHP 5 SimpleXML interface delivers – it offers the programmer an easy to use set of methods for creating and parsing XML data. In this article, you’ll see how to use SimpleXML methods to build a simple Task List – one that will allow you to add, edit, delete, and list out Task items. Along the way, you’ll learn how to use SimpleXML to build XML applications.[Read More]

PHP From the Shop Floor
Bringing Together People In Need With People Who Care

By Elizabeth Naramore

The second installment of the series focuses on a very real world scenario. What happens when you suddenly face a family crisis such as the death of a loved one or the diagnosis of a deadly disease? Not only do you try to pick up the pieces, but you are also, undoubtedly, inundated with well-meaning Samaritans. Sometimes this outpouring of help can be too much for someone already dealing with a lot of other stuff. What can they do? Simple. Visit the CollaborCare web site, that conveniently uses PHP to coordinate, organize, and connect people who are in need of help with people who are willing to offer that help, thus making lives easier for all involved.[Read More]

PHP Casts Its Charms
Exploring Magic Methods in PHP 5

By Peter Lavin

Learning the magic methods of PHP is essential if you want to make full use of the object oriented capabilities of PHP. Magic methods were first introduced in PHP 5. Some are methods of convenience that help speed up development. However, it is absolutely essential for the object-oriented programmer to understand magic methods such as __clone. Additionally, the release of PHP 5.1 has introduced a number of new magic methods. The author waves his wand to deconstruct the magic behind these charming new methods in PHP 5.[Read More]

Best Practices In Enterprise Engagements
Nailing Down Your First Big Enterprise Project

By Thomas Myer

Congratulations – you’ve landed your first big enterprise client. Now you need to do what you said you’d do, and make everyone happy in the process. This article will show you how to use techniques for visibility and verification to do most things – setting up processes and systems, doing QA and acceptance testing, and requirements gathering.[Read More]

The Generation Game
Code Generation and PHP

By Jon Ramsey

Code generation can provide a useful and efficient approach to solving many problems that crop up during application development. It can cut down the amount of repetitious work you do. It can also help you to avoid the kind of duplication that leads to real maintenance nightmares. This article will give you a vital headstart in implementing code generation solutions that dramatically cut down on your workload and improve your coding life.[Read More]

Peering Into Phorum
An Inside Look at Modifying Phorum Code

By Brent Knigge, Boulos Mansour, Andy Cachia

Tinkering with open source applications can be quite daunting, especially when there are dozens of directories, files and database tables to contend with. Throw in some Smarty templating and code techniques you’ve never seen before and you’ll soon find yourself lost. This article looks at navigating the complex maze that makes up the Phorum software, and in the process transforms a standard forum into one that allows viewers to see the state of a thread (Answered or Unanswered). So if you’re looking at modifying the Phorum software, need to understand the maze, or are already using a forum in a question-answer type scenario, this article is definitely for you.[Read More]

KINKY Language, Data Access and Forms
Producing Multilingual Output, Accessing KINKY Data and Rendering KINKY Output

By Derek W. Keats

The KINKY application framework now has over three hundred modules that are currently available, up from just over a hundred in the last article, making it one of the most comprehensive PHP application frameworks around. In this article, the project founder looks at multilingualization, data access, and creating input forms.[Read More]