PHP Code Optimization Tips

Decent list of PHP optimization tips:
http://phptutorial.bizhat.com/...

10 PHP functions you (probably) never use

When scripting in PHP, we often restrict ourselves to a limited number of API functions: the common ones, like print(), header(), define(), isset(), htmlspecialchars(), etc. If some needed functionality doesn’t exist, we often write it making use of these basic components which we have in mind. The PHP API actually offers a lot of functionality, some useless and some useful; often seldom used. I have been looking through the available functions and was interested to find some really cool functions that I should have known about. Here, I share my findings.

Link:
http://infinity-infinity.com/...

10 Puzzle Websites to Sharpen Your Programming Skills

Solving programming puzzles is a fun way to develop your logical and problem solving abilities. Also, when you’re familiarizing yourself with a new programming language, solving puzzles for that language can help speed up the learning process.

Here are the top 10 popular programming puzzle sites that will help test your thinking and improve your programming, problem solving, and logical thinking skills.

Link:
http://sixrevisions.com/resources/...

Retrieve Google Analytics Visits and PageViews with PHP

Google Analytics is an outstanding website analytics tool that gives you way more information about your website than you probably need. Better to get more than you want than not enough, right? Anyways I check my website statistics more often than I should and it ends up taking a few minutes to get logged in, select the right site, select the current day, etc. I found a great Google Analytics PHP API that allows me to get just the statistics I’m looking for.

Link:
http://davidwalsh.name/...

Swift Mailer for PHP

Swift Mailer integrates into any web app written in PHP 5, offering a flexible and elegant object-oriented approach to sending emails with a multitude of features.

Link:
http://swiftmailer.org/

Free PHP obfuscator

Our PHP obfuscator application encodes and obfuscates PHP code to make the output difficult to reverse engineer. The application requires no pre-modifications to your code and no additional components on your server. This product allows for encoding of functions, variables and the removal of whitespace.

Link:
http://www.raizlabs.com/software/phpobfuscator/

5 Steps to securing your php scripts

Unfortunately there will always be some one out there on the world wide web who will attempt to break any thing they can find on the internet so you owe it to your visitors/ members to ensure nothing malicious is being hidden on your site and there info isn’t being stolen. In this article i will cover 5 important steps you need to take to make sure your web site’s secure.

Talks about:

1. MySql Injection
2. CSRF Attacks
3. XSS
4. Script functionality
5. Error reporting

Link:
http://www.tutdepot.com/tutorials/...

Create PDFs from HTML

Quick link since I don't know too much about this PHP component.

mPDF is a PHP class which generates PDF files from UTF-8 encoded HTML. It is based on FPDF, HTML2FPDF, and UFPDF, with a number of enhancements.

If anyone gives this a test drive stop back and let me know what you think. How well it worked and how close was the PDF to the rendered HTML.

Link:
http://mpdf.bpm1.com/

5 Easy ways to get an eCommerce website

1. Getting an eCommerce site in Wordpress running in 5 minutes - Using WP e-commerce you can setup a simple, but effective in some cases, ecommerce solution in Wordpress. If you have a blog and are looking to test the waters of selling some products than this plugin will get you going faster than any other solution.

2. How to Create an Online Store with Google Checkout in 5 Minutes - With the recent release of the Google Checkout store widget Google has made it easier to add Google Checkout into your website. This means you can get a Google based store up and running in minutes, or 5 minutes, as the title states.

3. VirtueMart for Joomla or Mamabo - I don't know too much about this shopping cart but at first look it definitely is an option I will consider for anyone running Joomla. The only downside I can see is that the resulting interface is *very* Joomla like and not the prettiest thing I have seen. Still it's an option.

4. Magento - An up and coming leader in the open-source, PHP based, full-features, shopping cart solution. A little tricky to install but the feature rich application makes it something worth the effort. Add to that all the great information on Magento that's around and you won't be left alone to struggle through it. warning: Read the Magento requirements as some hosts will not meet them.

5. Paypal - Probably one of the most common names in payment gateways. PayPal's Website Payment Pro gives you a payment gateway and merchant account all-in-one. This makes it one of the easiest methods to take credit cards on your website.

Make Your Own URL Shortening Service

a basic installation of Yourls, a server-based webapp that can run pretty much anywhere a WordPress installation can. There are lots of other options, which we'll get to as well, but Yourls is a fairly smart and fast way to get up and running with your own URL shortener.

Link:
http://lifehacker.com/5335216/...

Data scraping in PHP

In this tutorial you will learn how to build a PHP script that scrapes links from any web page.

Link:
http://www.merchantos.com/...

Magento - A helpful list

Magento is the eCommerce software platform for growth that promises to revolutionize the industry. Its modular architecture and unprecedented flexibility

Magento:
http://www.magentocommerce.com/

Magento Demo:
http://www.magentocommerce.com/demo

Magento Wiki:
http://www.magentocommerce.com/wiki/

Getting Started with Magento
http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/...

Easy E-Commerce With Magento:
http://net.tutsplus.com/videos/...

Magento: Beginner's Guide (Paperback) - Amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1847195946/...

25+ Magento Templates For Your E-Commerce Business:
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/...

30 High Quality Magento Templates To Spice Up Your E-commerce Projects:
http://www.webdesignbooth.com/...

Knowledge Base Software with 68KB

68KB is an open source PHP MySQL driven knowledge base script. Built with you in mind to make it easy to configure and setup.

Link:
http://68kb.com/

Video: Create a newsletter in Joomla - Easy

Using htaccess Files for Pretty URLS

A quick overview before we dive into code, in today's tutorial we will go over two slightly different methods of creating pretty URLs using HTACCESS. The difference between the methods is whether Apache or PHP is doing the heavy lifting to break the URL apart for parsing. I want to point out that mod_rewrite tutorials are almost as old as the internet itself and this is not the first. At the end I will use one of the methods to create a simple application to show how these solutions would look in a real-live website (well not 100% production quality).

Link:
http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/...

15 PHP regular expressions for web developers

Regular expressions are a very useful tool for developers. They allow to find, identify or replace text, words or any kind of characters. In this article, I have compiled 15+ extremely useful regular expressions that any web developer should have in his toolkit.

Link:
http://www.catswhocode.com/...

Easy Drag and Drop with jQuery

Drag’n drop generally looks hard-to-apply but it is definitely not by using JavaScript frameworks. Here is, how it is done by using jQuery & jQuery UI

Too easy!

Link:
http://www.webresourcesdepot.com/...

How to Debug PHP Using Firefox with FirePHP

Typically, there are two main ways of debugging server-side code: you can utilize an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) with a built-in debugger or log and perform your debugging processes in a web browser.

This article shares an elegant, simple, and more maintainable way of debugging Ajax apps via the web browser (more specifically for the Mozilla Firefox browser). You’ll learn the basics of leveraging Firefox in conjunction with Firebug and FirePHP to implement FirePHP libraries on web apps and logging messages in the Firebug console.

Link:
http://sixrevisions.com/web-development/...

Convert Audio and Video from a website

FFmpeg is a complete, cross-platform solution to record, convert and stream audio and video. It includes libavcodec - the leading audio/video codec library.

This is how websites setup tools for performing audio and video conversions. Want to have users upload video that is then converted to a Flash video? FFmpeg can handle it.

Link:
http://ffmpeg.mplayerhq.hu/index.html

Easily add Flash charts to your website with Open Flash Chart

Open Flash Chart is a dead simple way to add featrure rich Flash charts to your website, with your data through one of many technologies (like PHP).

Open Flash Chart offers:

• Tooltips
• Re-size the charts
• Save the chart as an image
• Highlight or emphasize one (or many) points
• Can be used with technologies like PHP, Perl, Python, Ruby, .NET, Google Web Toolkit and JAVA
  

Link:
http://teethgrinder.co.uk/open-flash-chart-2

Count lines of code in a project with CLOC

cloc counts blank lines, comment lines, and physical lines of source code in many programming languages. It is written entirely in Perl with no dependencies outside the standard distribution of Perl v5.6 and higher (code from some external modules is embedded within cloc) and so is quite portable.

Works great for comparing two projects. Recently I went through a code refactor on a project and I needed to give some information back to the client. CLOC made it simple to give a report as to the before and after counts. The before was approx 240K lines of code and the after was about 81K with zero changes to functionality.

Link:
http://cloc.sourceforge.net/

Symfony PHP framework

It provides an architecture, components and tools for developers to build complex web applications faster. Choosing symfony allows you to release your applications earlier, host and scale them without problem, and maintain them over time with no surprise.

Symfony is based on experience. It does not reinvent the wheel: it uses most of the best practices of web development and integrates some great third-party libraries.

Link:
http://www.symfony-project.org/

50 Extremely Useful PHP Tools

This post presents 50 useful PHP tools that can significantly improve your programming workflow. Among other things, you’ll find a plethora of libraries and classes that aid in debugging, testing, profiling and code-authoring in PHP.

Link:
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/...

Looking to clone a popular website?

Then check out the large collection of PHP clones of popular websites. This is a great collection of some of the best clones around mixed in with some of the worst so make sure you read up before installing and going live.

Link:
http://www.scriptcopy.com/

Joomla Developer’s Toolbox

Joomla is a popular free and open-source content management system (CMS) that can be used to power all kinds of websites. After we published developer’s toolboxes for a variety of other CMS’, many readers requested a collection of resources for Joomla users and developers, so here it is. Joomla grew out of the Mambo CMS and has since built a large and loyal group of users, much like the other popular open-source options. What this means for users and developers is that there is a wealth of information and resources available, and in this post we’ll take a look at many of the best.

Link:
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/...

10 Advanced PHP Tips To Improve Your Programming

This tutorial is aimed at people who are just past the beginning stages of learning PHP and are ready to roll up their sleeves and get their hands dirty with the language. Listed below are 10 excellent techniques that PHP developers should learn and use every time they program. These tips will speed up proficiency and make the code much more responsive, cleaner and more optimized for performance.

Link:
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/...

Video: Hacking PHP Mail

Reddit goes open source

We've always strived to be as open and transparent with our users as possible, and this is the next logical step. When we say 'open-source' we mean specifically that the code behind reddit is available to the public for download, and we're inviting the public to submit code to help improve the site.

Get the code here:
http://code.reddit.com/

Asp2Php

asp2php will take web pages written for Microsoft's ASP and convert them to PHP. asp2php works mostly on VBScript, but some JScript support has been added.

Better than nothing for your PHP start. If you are still using ASP to develop websites then you really need to check out the many advantages of PHP.

Link:
http://asp2php.naken.cc/

MachForm is only getting better

MachForm is a form building application that you can run on your own servers, totally under your control. What is does is take all the work out of creating, styling, processing and collecting forms and form results. After reviewing many like services, I must say MachForm is above them all and with the release of version 2 its only getting better.

Whats new:

• Email Autoresponder
• Better, Prettier Email Design
• Fully Customizable Email
• Revamped Entry Manager
• Columns Display Preference
• Entry Viewer
• Printer Friendly
• Forward an Entry
• Submission Review
• Full PHP Embed Code
• New CAPTCHA option
• SSL Support

(read more)

Another thing that I use to judge an application is developer interaction. The developer for MachForm is a super nice guy that is highly responsive to his users and their issues and ideas.

Link:
http://www.appnitro.com/

Also, check out the demo's:
http://www.appnitro.com/demo/

Magento seems to be a promising eCommerce package

Magento is a new professional open-source eCommerce solution offering unprecedented flexibility and control.

Magento was designed with the notion that each eCommerce implementation has to be unique since no two businesses are alike. Magento's modular architecture puts the control back in the hands of the online merchant and places no constraints on business processes and flow.

This application looks extremely promising. The resulting interface is nothing short of professional. I was working with Zen Cart but really need to sit down with Magento to see if its mature enough to replace it.

Link:
http://www.magentocommerce.com/

IE fails with a download in PHP (seen when generating a CSV file)

Instead of prompting me with a dialog box to determine if I wanted to open the file or save, IE simply came back and indicated that it couldn’t save the file and presented with me with one option, ‘OK’. Of course ‘OK’ isn’t really ‘OK’, because it terminated the download and dropped me back into the website.

Very strange issue that happens on some systems but not others. The above blog post offers the most comprehensive discussion of this issue.

Link:
http://.../making-ie-accept-file-downloads/

JobberBase - Open source job board software

Feature:

• Post jobs without an account.
• Search for jobs.
• Apply to interesting jobs.
• RSS feeds.
• Site-widget to show jobs on other sites

Link:
http://www.jobberbase.com/

Know your hosting server with phpSysInfo

phpSysInfo is a PHP script that displays information about the host being accessed. It will displays things like Uptime, CPU, Memory, SCSI, IDE, PCI, Ethernet, Floppy, and Video Information.

Link:
http://phpsysinfo.sourceforge.net/

Free newsletter manager for your website

phplist is an open-source newsletter manager. phplist is free to download, install and use, and is easy to integrate with any website.

Link:
http://www.phplist.com/

MachForm is the best form creator around

I blogged about pForm last week saying how great it was for creating some very stylish forms on an easy to use, free, online service. It would seem that there is a commercial version available that takes pForm to the next level, called MachForm (same company).

From the dev:

MachForm is an intuitive, browser based, self-hosted HTML form builder program. Designed as a modern HTML form builder, it makes use of the latest web technologies like AJAX, CSS, and Javascript to provide a fluid browser based experience

What does MachForm do:

• Drag and drop interface
• Numerous field type selections
• Ultimate Spam Protection
• Easy form manager
• Email integration
• MySQL database integration
• Form validation
• Export data to Excel or CSV
• Password protected form
• Limit one entry per IP address

Some things that could be better:

• The tooltip could be a floating tooltip. The current one could widen your page if you pull the form into your design - happened to me.
• Give the ability to create your own groups of fields (like the address block). What I was looking for was to create a block for Phone numbers (phone, mobile, fax) under a single block. If/When this gets added it will make this tool extremely customizable.

Basically, I will be using MachForm to create all forms in the future. I may provide the plumbing but having the interface done is a huge savings for me.

Good Job!

Link:
http://www.appnitro.com/

Codes for the Representation of Names of Languages

If you're doing any kind of internationalization in your project stick with the ISO 639 approved language codes.

Link:
http://www.loc.gov/standards/iso639-2/php/code_list.php

Apache, MySQL, PHP on Windows with WAMP

Easy as 1-2-3

• 1. Download the latest release of Wampserver 2
• 2. Optionally add as much Apache, PHP and MySQL releases as you want
• 3. Work with a development environment that reproduces exactly your production server

Link:
http://www.wampserver.com/en/

How To Configure the CGI Script Timeout Value in IIS 5.0 and 6.0

One of the most common questions people seem to ask when attempting to run some form of CGI application or script (such as PHP or Perl) on an IIS 6.0 server is “How do I change the default CGI script timeout value ?“ Quite often this is because they are trying to execute a relatively long-running script in an application and they are seeing the following error message.

Link:
http://www.iisadmin.co.uk/?p=7

Mantis Bug Tracker

Mantis is a free popular web-based bugtracking system.

Link:
http://www.mantisbt.org/

FastCGI Extension for IIS 6.0

The FastCGI Extension for Internet Information Services (IIS) 6.0 enables popular application frameworks (such as PHP) to be hosted on the IIS web server in a high-performance and reliable way.

Link:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx...

Open Source CMS

OpenSourceCMS was created with one goal in mind. To give you the opportunity to "try out" some of the best php/mysql based free and open source software systems in the world. You are welcome to be the administrator of any CMS system here, allowing you to decide which system best suits your needs.

What a great idea. A single centralized location to give some of the more popular open source PHP projects a test drive.

Link:
http://www.opensourcecms.com/

What Software Powers Nine of the Largest Sites?

Have you ever wondered what software powers sites like YouTube, Flickr, and MySpace? Wonder no more because Pingdom has the scoop! The results are located in the table above, and as you can see Linux, Apache, and MySQL are among the most popular tools. In the end this is how the stats play out:

Link:
http://.../what-software-powers-nine-of-the-largest-sites/

Add a survey or poll to your website

Poll:
Easy-Poll.com let you quickly and easily add a poll to your website. They store the results and you manage the poll through your account with them. Although you lose some control over the poll having all information passed to them, this is a drop-dead easy solution for the non-developers out there.
http://www.easy-poll.com

Survey:
LimeSurvey is probably the best open-source, PHP, survey script I have found. Its highly customizable and can handle most kinds of surveys you want to put up with ease. The down side, and there is always a down side, the admin area is kinda confusing and non-intuitive to use. Once you get past the admin area you will probably find that LimeSurvey works great. (oh and they have a very nicely designed website)
http://www.limesurvey.org/

List of more surveys:
http://.../Onlinesurveys/software.htm#freesoftware

Top 15+ MySQL Managers and Tools

Aqua
A management tool for the MySQL relational database w/ administration capabilities and a database query tool. The visual administration features provide users the ability to browse and modify database structures, including schema objects, database storage and maintain database security. An integrated query tool allows users to quickly create, edit and execute SQL queries and scripts.


MySQL Quick Admin
A kinda of clone of phpMyAdmin. Has full support for managing databases and tables online through its clean interface (from what I can tell). This might be a good solution for someone not wanting the often complex and overwhelming interface of phpMyAdmin.

phpMyAdmin
phpMyAdmin is a tool written in PHP intended to handle the administration of MySQL over the Web. Currently it can create and drop databases, create/drop/alter tables, delete/edit/add fields, execute any SQL statement, manage keys on fields, manage privileges,export data into various formats and is available in 54 languages. This is the standard for managing MySQL database online.

MySQL Query Browser
The easiest visual tool for creating, executing, and optimizing SQL queries for your MySQL Database Server. The MySQL Query Browser gives you a complete set of drag-and-drop tools to visually build, analyze and manage your queries.


MySQL Administrator
A powerful visual administration tool that makes it easy to administer and monitor your MySQL environment and gain significantly better visibility into how your databases are operating. MySQL Administrator now integrates database management and maintenance into a single, seamless environment, with a clear and intuitive graphical user interface.


MySQL Workbench
a database modeling tool for MySQL. You can use it to design and create new database schemas, document existing databases and even perform complex migrations to MySQL. Not a lot of movement with this project in a very long time and the reason why DB Designer Fork should be checked out first.


DB Designer Fork
DB Designer Fork is a fork of the fabFORCE DBDesigner 4. DBDesigner is a visual database design system that integrates entity relationship design and database creation. DB Designer Fork generates SQL scripts for Oracle, SQL Server, MySQL and FireBird.


Navicat
A powerful MySQL database administration and development tool that is not only sophisticated enough for professional developers, but also easy to learn for new users.


EMS SQL Manager for MySQL
A high performance tool for MySQL Database Server administration and development with a state-of-the-art graphical user interface with well-described wizard system.


Zmanda Recovery Manager for MySQL
Simplifies the life of a Database Administrator who needs an easy-to-use yet flexible and robust backup and recovery solution for MySQL server.


TurboDbAdmin
A single-page solution for exploring and editing databases from a browser. Edit data just like you would in a desktop application, without submit buttons or page refreshes.

Toad for MySQL
A database development and administration tool that provides productivity features for rapidly creating and executing queries and managing complex database systems.


SQLyog
An advanced GUI frontend to MySQL. Includes Visual Query Builder, Visual Schema Designer, Smart Autocomplete, Intelligent Code Completion, Scheduled Data Synchronization, Powerful Migration Toolkit and much more.


WinSQL
WinSQL can talk to any database for which you have an ODBC driver and be the one interface to manage them all.

Applications Manager's MySQL
Applications Manager's MySQL monitoring feature has the ability to connect to the database source & monitor various system table column values, collect data, etc. and also notify through alerts, if the database system properties are beyond a given threshold. Applications Manager provides a web client that allows you to visualize MySQL monitoring data from your database tier alongside your application tiers.


HeidiSQL
An easy-to-use interface and a "working-horse" for web-developers using the popular MySQL-Database. It allows you to manage and browse your databases and tables from an intuitive Windows interface.

Digg It

40 Tips for optimizing your php Code

1. If a method can be static, declare it static. Speed improvement is by a factor of 4.
2. echo is faster than print.
3. Use echo's multiple parameters instead of string concatenation.
4. Set the maxvalue for your for-loops before and not in the loop.
5. Unset your variables to free memory, especially large arrays.
6. Avoid magic like __get, __set, __autoload

Plus 34 more at:
http://reinholdweber.com/?p=3

Microsoft and Zend juice PHP for Windows

Zend Technologies, the industry's PHP steward, today delivers the first fruits of its collaboration with Microsoft while expanding the companies' relationship.

FastCGI is an alternative to the Common Gateway Interface (CGI) and follows work by Zend in turning the PHP engine to boost the performance on Windows servers of web applications written using PHP. In the past, Microsoft has claimed a performance boost for PHP of up to 20 per cent using FastCGI.

Link:
http://.../microsoft_zend_server_core/

The Standard PHP Library

The goal of the Standard PHP Library-or SPL, for short-is to provide a standard library of interfaces that allows developers to take full advantage of object-oriented programming in PHP 5. This library of interfaces creates a standard API for certain kinds of built-in functionality, allowing your classes to interact with the PHP engine in a much more seamless manner.

Link:
http://.../2565-The-Standard-PHP-Library-SPL

HowTo: Run a website or blog on a USB flash drive

Of all the good things we can do with a USB (Universal Serial Bus) flash drive, I think running a website is one of them. This is a perfect solution for web designers who need to cart along a whole bunch of designs to show potential clients.

Link:
http://.../running-a-website-or-blog-on-a-usb-flash-drive/

Webserver On Stick (WOS)

WOS Portable: "WOS stands for the three letter abbreviation Webserver On Stick and makes it possible, to run a webserver based on Apache, MySQL and PHP from an USB Stick or any other writable media (harddrive, flash cards etc.) without installation under Windows (98 to Vista). There are three different versions of WOS:"

This is a great way to showcase a PHP website when you have no control over the location. Simply place the website on a USB drive, carry to the location, showcase your work and accept pat on the back.

Link:
http://www.chsoftware.net/en/useware/wos/wos.htm

PHP Link Directory

phpLD is now the most widely used directory script on the internet. Our customers have tested the script on over 25,000 websites, and we have been able to produce a script that works in nearly all PHP hosting environments.

Link:
http://www.phplinkdirectory.com/

Need a quick and easy file manager for PHP?

Then check out File Thingie (great name).

File Thingie is a small web-based file manager written in PHP. It is intended for those who need to give others access to a part of their server's file system when FTP is not practical. Through File Thingie you and your users get access to the most common functions

Link:
http://www.solitude.dk/filethingie/

URL Shrtn lets you create a TinyUrl site

URL Shrtn is a free URL shortening and forwarding service - this script allows you to run your own site similar to tinyurl.com and other URL shortening services.

Not sure you will be able to compete with a site the magnitude of TinyUrl but who knows if you have an idea missing from TinyUrl.

Link:
{removed}

UPDATED: Seems like URL Shrtn is no longer available.

Easy PHP Calendar

The Easy PHP Calendar is a powerful PHP calendar script that is easily integrated into web sites and is simple to customize. This attractive, full-featured calendar is suitable for display on a calendar of events page, home page, or any other page that needs a calendar.

Clean, powerful and professional looking. All that and only $20. What more could you ask for.

Link:
http://www.easyphpcalendar.com/

BigDump: Staggered MySQL Dump Importer

Staggered import of large and very large MySQL Dumps (like phpMyAdmin 2.x Dumps) even through the web-servers with hard runtime limit and those in safe mode. The script executes only a small part of the huge dump and restarts itself. The next session starts where the last was stopped.

OMG, this has saved me so much time and hassle. I have a local MySQL database that is around 50Meg and getting online to Pad Database has always been tricky. PhpMyAdmin just can't handle files of that size through their importer. In comes BigDump to the rescue and made this process literally a 10min process and that included the time to get the BigDump file setup and pushed to the server.

BigDump:
http://www.ozerov.de/bigdump.php

Book: Web APIs with PHP

I got a chance to read through and review the Web APIs with PHP book from Wrox Press and was quite impressed with the structure and presentation of the information. Its just the way I like, direct and straight to the point with easy to follow examples. Just show me the code and tell me what its supposed to do and I'm a happy camper.

My main is reason for getting the book was to do some work with the API from Flickr and Google. I have some clients that wanted to pull in Flickr images into their website so the bandwidth on galleries was on Flickr's server and not theirs.

Finally a book thats fun to play around with...

Site I developed using the Flickr API:
http://thatsmyhorse.com/

Link:
http://www.amazon.com/Professional-Web-APIs-PHP-Google...

PHP script to manage online surveys

The Unit Command Climate Assessment and Survey System (UCCASS) (pronounced yoo-kas) is a PHP based survey script that allows you to create online surveys. Originally designed for organizations to administer Command Climate Assessments (annual surveys), the program can be used to create any type of online survey or questionnaire.

Link:
http://www.bigredspark.com/survey.html

TaskFreak and PHProjekt: Two of a kind

TaskFreak is an open source task management application written in PHP. I like the simple and clean interface and may use this at some point in the future.

Link:
http://www.taskfreak.com/


PHProjekt is an open source groupware suite. Basically its more of a complete project management solution. A little to busy for my liking and the interface design needs some work. This is one to check back on after a few more releases - just not ready for prime time yet.

Link:
http://www.phprojekt.com/...

PHPEdit: Great product, even better support

PHPEdit is one of the better PHP IDE's that I could find. After numerous downloads and hours of testing, I determined that PHPEdit really offered the complete solution for me. There was a problem though.

The mouse movement would slow down when the IDE had focus. I was able to deal with if for a while but it got to be too much as I need a really fast mouse because of a wrist problem. I finally submitted a trouble ticket to WaterProof Software, the company that makes PHPEdit. They contacted me several hours later and contacted me continously over the course of a couple of days until the problem was solved. They went so far out of there way to make sure my problem was resolved and I could keep using the program. What they found out was that the Logitech drivers were identifying the application as a game, and the setting 'disable acceleration in games' caused the mouse to perform sluggish. Uncheck the setting and its working flawless.

A big thanx to Bastien Hofmann of WaterProof Software. Keep up the great work on an excellent product.

...and life is good again...

Vertical Bar Graphs with CSS and PHP

Ahhh PHP and CSS:
http://www.terrill.ca/design/vertical_bar_graphs/

phpFlickr

phpFlickr is a PHP interface to the Flickr API. Very easy to use and kinda of fun. Here's a site I put together in a couple of hours using phpFlickr and Lightbox.

phpFlickr:
http://phpflickr.com/

Sample usage:
http://thatsmyhorse.com/