Adams Manor Consulting

Zend Framework 1.6 Release Candidate 1 now available!

Fire up the download clients, Zend Framework 1.6 RC 1 is now available. There’s nothing better than fresh code!

Generating PDF Forms From a Flex Application With PHP

For end-users, the ability to output a PDF from your application is expected as a standard feature. But as a developer, implementing PDF output can be a major expense and headache, especially when developing for the web. You could just instruct the user to print the necessary pages from a browser to a PDF virtual printer, but that requires extra software on the client, and the browser will add information to the printed page. Traditional programmatic PDF creation can be painstaking, often requiring the developer to do very complex calculations just to place text on the page. PDF generation on the web usually requires root access and complicated installations on the server. But all that is about to change. Leveraging the power of PHP and a PDF generation library called dompdf, you can create a simple, seamless user experience in Adobe Flex.

Upcoming Zend Webinars

Every week, my good friend Nili arranges a free Webinar for anyone who wants to learn more about PHP. These webinars are always interesting and if they didn’t keep me so busy attending conferences (or planning them) I’d be at more of them. Here’s a list of the ones that are coming in the next couple of months. Since she works so hard putting these together, I know you are going to want to spare an hour every week or so and attend.

Zend_Acl and MVC Integration Part II (Advanced Use)

In the previous article we saw how to setup our Zend_Acl instance and how to attach it to the MVC environment (by using the Front Controller Plugin), but what about setting another action for the denied access, or how does an article be edited only by its owner?, this, and some more is what we are going to see in the following examples.

Why Should I Care What Server My Application is Running On?

Imagine this – you develop an application on your machine and then, when you come to deploy it to the production server, all of a sudden, you encounter various errors and failures. Or maybe, when you decide to switch your hosting provider, your application stops behaving the way it should. How about this – one day, out of the blue (well, out of your IT manager’s whim) your application just misbehaves. Sounds familiar?

Mastering phpMyAdmin for Effective MySQL Management - Marc Delisle

Ivo Jansch of Ibuildings fame took the time recently to review Packt Publishing’s latest offering, Mastering phpMyAdmin for Effective MySQL Management written by Marc Delisle.

Erwin Earley writes on PHP and the Zend Framework

If you are in the i5 community then you know the name Erwin Earley. Recently Erwin published an article on itjungle.com on using the Zend Framework. Click on inside and let’s take a look.

Zend to Host the Fourth Annual Zend/PHP Conference and Expo

Zend Technologies, The PHP Company, announced today that registration is open for the fourth annual Zend/PHP Conference and Expo, the world’s largest gathering of the PHP community. Leading PHP experts, professional PHP developers, and business managers will convene September 15 – 18 at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, California.

phpwomen.org holding a PHP Best Practice article contest in July

For the month of July, phpwomen.org is holding an article contest! They are accepting articles posted in their Best Practices forum for judging. Their prize lists includes…well, why tell you here, click on inside and I’ll give you the whole scoop.

Desktop Image Uploaders Using Adobe AIR and JavaScript

What makes the web fun? Is it the cool applications like Google Maps, which are neat but not particularly fun? Is it social networks like Facebook? Sure, that’s a little fun. But what really gets passed around the web? Viral video. Nothing catches our interest like video and images, which is ironic, as the HTML technology for uploading media to web sites is one of the worst parts of browsers.

Creating Template-Based Applications with HTML_Template_Flexy

If you’ve been programming for a while, you probably already know the basic function of a template engine: to separate presentation and layout information from program code in an application. This separation lets designers and developers work independently on the form and function of an application, and it can substantially reduce the time and effort required in the maintenance phase of a project.

PHP Community on Twitter

UPDATED!
The PHP community has an active twitter presence. If you use twitter, come and join us. Here I’ve listed all of the community memeber’s accounts that I have and that have given me permission to.

Lorna Mitchell of PHPWomen interviewed at DPC

Lorna Mitchell, Senior Developer at Ibuildings, the senior member of phpwomen.org in Europe, podcaster for PHP Abstract and all around swell person, was recently interviewed at the Dutch PHP Conference. Here’s the interview plus a link to all the DPC videos.

Three Quick Tips To Make Your PHP Understandable

Producing code that clearly conveys a developer’s intent is key to any well written application. That not only applies to PHP, but every programming language. Developers who emphasize the creation of legible code tend to create applications which are easier to both maintain and expand upon. After seven years of programming in PHP I’ve worked on a variety of projects where well organized and legible code were set aside for numerous reasons. Some of those reasons include time constraints, lack of experience, lost enthusiasm, misdirected pre-optimizing, and the list goes on. Today we’ll look at three simple methods which are commonly ignored by developers for some, if not all of the reasons described above.

Zend_Acl and MVC Integration Part I (Basic Use)

So, what is wrong with Zend_Acl and the current MVC implementation in the Zend Framework? there is nothing wrong, it is just that it gets not too obvious for developers how to achieve an optimal integration between these two important parts of the framework.

Book Review: Object-Oriented Programming with PHP5

"Object-Oriented Programming with PHP5" is aimed at beginning or mid-level programmers that want to expand their knowledge of object-oriented features in PHP. Although basic OOP support was present in version 4 of PHP, it wasn't until the introduction of version 5 that they caught up with object-oriented implementations of other popular languages, such as Java or Python. The book does a decent job of covering the main OOP topics in PHP; as well as, touching upon some of the peripheral ones. Hayder devotes whole chapters to such topics as unit testing, design patterns, XML, SPL, and working with databases.

Zend Framework DB Access Webinar

Zend sponsors Webinars every Wednesday covering a wide variety of topics of interest to PHP programmers. If you look over on your left, you’ll see the last five that have been published. If you’ve not had the opportunity to watch one, here is one done a while back by Bill Karwin.

Zend Platform Event Debugging

Here’s a screencast put together by Zend to show how easy it is to debug PHP scripts using the Zend Debugger.

Getting Started with OpenID and PHP

According to the official OpenID Web site, OpenID is “a free and easy way to use a single digital identity across the Internet”. Fundamentally, an OpenID is a customized URL, chosen by you as your online identity and registered with an OpenID service provider. Whenever an external site needs to verify your identity for login purposes, you supply this URL instead of your username; the site then contacts your OpenID service provider for authentication.

[SECURITY] HTML Purifier 3.1.0 released

HTML Purifier 3.1.0 has been released. This release fixes a security vulnerability, and thus users should upgrade as soon as possible.

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