PHP Programming Tips

Galileo - Soon to Grace PHP

Galileo, an open-source framework that was developed by the Eclipse Foundation and sponsored by IBM is set for launch tomorrow. Hailed as one of the newest innovations to the development and deployment of open-sourced projects that is becoming more and more prominent with the internet of today. Eclipse is a non-profit organization that manages and maintains the many projects they are involved in, making them one of the biggest supporters of the open-source community. Read the rest of this entry »

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The Alarming Security Gaps

PHP being the most used scripting language for deploying web pages is under a lot of scrutiny as well as the many projects that used it as framework. One of these is Wordpress which has suffered a lot of malicious attacks in the form of code insertion and comments spamming which is intended to influence adSense ratings or ranking to promote malicious sites to boost rankings. This promotes them without the owner’s knowledge which is more the norm for blogs seldom get administered properly. Read the rest of this entry »

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Smarty - Template Easy

Formatting is one of the hardest tasks to do with respect to cross-platform and scripting programs/pages. Smarty, one of the many PHP advocates has a complete line of products, from community-based ones to those aimed at more commercial purposes enabling the development of enterprise applications over the internet that are secure and powerful. Below, we see a sample of the use of their formatting, using their libraries that have been released to the many PHP users as their contribution to the community. Read the rest of this entry »

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PHP - Patching up the Mess

The world’s most used scripting language for web page development is constantly under attack from many threats that continue to wage war against the many security holes that have been left by developers and programmers the world over. Programmers and developers are being blamed for most of the many security holes that have since been addressed yet not applied to existing deployments/projects in terms of updating codes and other plug-ins and scripts. Many problems have indeed been addressed with the release of new and improved versions of the scripting language and the many tools that are now available for use. Read the rest of this entry »

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Of image and file sizes

One of the things that annoy many people are pages that load slowly. A lot of times, this happens simply because the PHP programmer did not pay enough attention to the file sizes and image sizes he or she put into the page. It naturally follows that larger files and larger images WILL definitely load slower.

We’re not telling you to reduce your file and image sizes to oblivion, but just enough so that it doesn’t weigh down you page when you or somebody else loads it. And remember, not everyone has a fast internet connection, and while your lightning speed connection might be able to handle the load, others’ might not be the same. You might as well put a big disclaimer on your page that says “Visitors with slow internet connections are NOT welcome.”

It’s a very small thing, but it goes a long way.

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PHP Development Tools Released

The PHP community has again gotten a boost with the announcement that Eclipse is set to release their much loved PHP Development tools later this month. The developer tools included in the release is set to again make the lives of PHP developers a whole lot easier and has been since they released the last version (1.0) in 2007. The new release features a new and improved dynamic language toolkit that gives PHP more bite compared to its older counterpart. It is also designed to work with Java so any developed projects can easily be imported into the dynamic language toolkit. Better code testing tools allows faster error checking making development faster and testing is a breeze with better functionality making PHP easier to use and deploy. With this, the PHP community is set to get a boost and life would be a little bit easier in the wild that is the internet where all is supposed to work.

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Change your PHP to 5.2.8. now

As the year 2008 is about to go to 2009, so should be the ever-updating PHP versions:

Due to a security bug found in the PHP 5.2.7 release, it has been removed from distribution. The bug affects configurations where magic_quotes_gpc is enabled, because it remains off even when set to on. In the meantime, use PHP 5.2.6 until PHP 5.2.8 is later released.

The PHP Development Team would like to announce the immediate availability of PHP 5.2.8. This release addresses a regression introduced by 5.2.7 in regard to the magic_quotes functionality, which was broken by an incorrect fix to the filter extension. All users who have upgraded to 5.2.7 are encouraged to upgrade to this release. Alternatively you can apply a work-around for the bug by changing “filter.default_flags=0″ in php.ini.

Time to update it and update it soon!

Source

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Get Your Tools

Image Source: moonsdesigns.com

Before you can start with your PHP programming, you will surely need some few things handy. To be able to create a PHP page, you will need to have a simple text editor. A text editor is a small program that enables you to edit files in plain text. Usually these files are those that have extensions like .php, .html, .cgi and many others. This is an essential tool because your file , when saved should not be formatted, it should be saved in plain text. Notepad is a simple text editor that works only on Windows and Text Edit is another plain text editor that solely works on Mac OS. Next thing you should have is an FTP. This will be used to transfer files to and fro to a remote server. When you already got them, you can now start creating your PHP pages.

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Write secured PHP

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PHP programming was written to be an easy language to program. Completely opposite to being very security oriented. It was so until the 4.1 version. Undeniably, Php has grown to be popular in the short term. But it also created many, many, very badly written scripts. And it gave a very big number of programmers a mindset which is not inclined to the security aspect of programming. Maybe, the main reason behind it, is the automation of conversion by PHP of inputted data to script variables using or enabling though php.ini setting register globals. In the 4.1 version of PHP, this type of behavior was left enabled but was not recommended to be used. With PHP 4.2, this type of behaviour was disabled by default. It broke thousands and thousands of scripts worldwide. This dilemma led to forcing the coders to write more secure codes. They made scripts break. This was opposed stongly before but somehow they saw that the move was a smart one.

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Flow Control and Iteration

Image Source:theopensourcery.com

Flow control and iteration are two useful features in most programming languages. Without them, programs would be linear.Flow control means exactly what it sounds like. Control the flow. When using flow control, you are regulating the order in which the code is executed, the number of times it is to be executed or if it is executed at all. Flow control can be classified into three primary categories.

• Conditionals - specifies whether or not to run a selected piece of code based on some conditions.
• Iteration - also known as looping, it specifies that a piece of code be run a number of times.
• Functions - allows you to create named blocks of code to be called by name in the script. This runs a piece of code multiple times from multiple places in the script.

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