So, what is Ringside, exactly? From a developer perspective, it’s a social networking application server built on PHP and MySQL, designed to be integrated into your existing applications. If you’ve already got a web application, just add Ringside to manage the social networking side of things. It’s thoroughly documented - just check out the seven page developer setup guide detailing everything you need to setup your LAMP stack and your Eclipse+PDT development environment. You can even install Ringside via PEAR: they’re serious about their PHP.

But what does Ringside mean for social networking? For a start, it could seriously break apart the market for social networking websites. Facebook application development? Forget it. Sure, there’s a big audience with Facebook, but OpenSocial will bring users away from specific providers, while Ringside will give them somewhere else to go. Thanks to Ringside, building a custom social networking application is now much easier, and while it still doesn’t have the simplicity of an online-DIY hosted solution like Ning, it will make it a lot easier to integrate social networking.

On a more general scale, this will also help immensely in bringing LAMP closer to the corporate world. Sure, many corporations are already on it, and if LAMP can handle Yahoo!, no challenge is too great. Still, formally-backed proprietary solutions such as Microsoft’s Windows Server and Small Business Server are highly effective for many areas of a business networ, and with those in place, IIS and ASP.net are the obvious next step. (And there’s always Community Server.) With Ringside, and the ease of building on open source platforms in general, there’s now a much stronger use case for corporations, and these high-end corporate LAMP jobs will no doubt raise the profile of our section of the industry in general.

So, as a LAMP developer, you now have this proposition before you: do you want to learn about the Facebook API, when you could start reading up on the Ringside manual?

There are, however, some pointers you can follow, and if lady luck should smile upon you, your content may just spread like wildfire. So before you click that “Publish” button, check if you have done your due diligence on the following:

Quality
Content will not go viral if it isn’t special. Your topic should be unique, and your grammar near flawless. If it has pictures or videos included, a bit of polishing may be in order. Also, make sure you do thorough research on the subject, which should be relevant to your niche.

Quantity
Lists are some of the perennial fixtures in the viral content sphere. It’s been proven that people love “Top 10” and “Best of” listings. If you can extend that to “Top 100”, better - as long as you don’t sacrifice the overall quality of the article, of course.

Originality
With the sheer volume of content flying around, you’ve got be quite unusual to get noticed. Either that, or you’re the first to announce something huge that will blow people away. The point is, viral content must be something that jolts people and makes them go, “OMG!”

Controversy
It’s true what they say: “Bad publicity is still publicity.” Don’t be afraid to publish unpopular opinions. Debate and controversy make people engaged in a discussion. If they get emotionally invested in your story, they’ll be more likely to tell other people about it.

Study
Learn what other people are doing. Go to Digg, Delicious, Stumble Upon, and all the other leading social bookmarking sites. Find out what’s hot and analyze what makes them click. Get some tips on how to write a proper viral headline, and see if there’s a common denominator in terms of writing styles.

Local development server

Now, when developing your applications, you can’t simply keep uploading to your web host’s server for testing. Having a local development server with PHP and MySQL is invaluable; whether it’s on your local machine or a seperate box (I use an old P4). Configuring all the applications under Windows can be a real pain, but luckily there are some all-in-one installers that make it easy:

WampServer
WampServer is by far the best option for Windows; it comes with Apache, PHP, MySQL and phpMyAdmin all ready and configured. Best of all, you can manage multiple versions of Apache, PHP and MySQL, and it supports easy switching out of the box, to closely replicate your production environment.

XAMPP Lite
While WampServer is certainly very powerful and effective, I personally use XAMPP Lite, as it offers the usual Apache/PHP/MySQL, phpMyAdmin, and best of all, it’s entirely portable - I can pop it on a USB stick and take it to another machine if needed. The XAMPP control panel is also simple and effective.

DIY
Thanks to the wide availability of online tutorials in this area, setting up your own Apache/PHP/MySQL server isn’t as hard as it used to be. If you really want to roll your own WAMP, take a look at one of these tutorials.

If you’re on a Linux box, you can probably just install Apache, PHP and MySQL from your package manager. If you’re running Ubuntu, try this guide.

PHP Configuration

Seeing as you won’t be running a production web server from your local development setup, you might as well configure it to best suit development. With a few of these simple changes, you can tweak your PHP setup to best suit you. Load up your PHP.ini file and have a read through these suggestions.

short_open_tag = On
If you’re working with view files written for a PHP framework, or just generally open source PHP applications, chances are you’ll need to enable this directive. When it comes to PHP tags, <?php is the standard, and <? is widely accepted but not always available. Save yourself a lot of hassle by enabling this directive.

implicit_flush = On
When you make a call to echo() or print(), or put a HTML block between PHP code blocks, PHP doesn’t always output it automatically. Setting implicit_flush to On forces it to do so. This is a great help for debugging; the moment something happens, you’ll see it in your browser/console window. (I believe PHP-CLI enables this by default.) However, by no means enable this on a production server, as it has serious performance implications.

docref_root = “/phpmanual/” and docref_ext = .html
Do yourself a favour and grab a copy of the PHP manual, pop it on your local development server and point docref_root to it. Enable docref_ext as .html as well; whenever you see a PHP error, it’ll link to your readily-accessible local copy of the manual. An invaluable debugging tool.

memory_limit
Depending on how you want to manage your resource usage on your local machine, set memory_limit to either 16M or some reasonably high amount (a quarter of RAM is appropriate; mine is set to 128M on a 512mb RAM box). If you have fairly resource intensive scripts, setting memory_limit to a high value should help avoid problems later on; if you’re on a constrained shared host and need to get used to not being able to use a lot of memory, set it fairly low - 16M or maybe 32M at the most. Remember that you can usually override this within your scripts using ini_set(’memory_limit’, ‘xxxM’);

Linux IDEs/editors

When it comes to php editors on Linux, there aren’t too many real Linux options. Luckily, however, some of the best cross platform editors work far better on Linux than on Windows (quite possibly as a result of Linux OSes being typically more efficient than Windows on the same hardware). Here are some of the best options.

Eclipse

Eclipse is pretty much the gold standard for IDEs. It’s entirely open source and heavily customisable, so much so that some professional IDEs are built on top of Eclipse, as we’ll see in a moment. Eclipse was built with Java in mind, but thanks to its powerful plugin system, Zend provides the PHP Development Tools (PDT) for Eclipse, which can transform your Eclipse IDE into a fully-fledged PHP development environment.

Zend Studio for Eclipse

Well, bring on the Eclipse derivatives. Next up is Zend Studio for Eclipse, the successor to the old Zend Studio (which was actually rather powerful, albeit terribly underperforming). With ZSE, the IDE is almost managable for Windows, and certainly an option for developers on Linux boxes. Zend advertises it as the most powerful IDE for PHP, and they’re probably right; the feature set is more or less unmatched from any other general cross-platform PHP IDE, although interestingly PhpED on Windows does come close. To identify the differences between ZSE and just PDT on Eclipse, Zend provides a comparison table.

Aptana

Aptana PHP Development Environment is yet another Eclipse derivative; the Aptana-provided PHP plugin has one of the best editing systems for PHP, and is very helpful when bashing out code and identifying syntax errors. Interestingly, it’s a general plugin for Aptana’s derivative of Eclipse, and you can also install their RadRails plugin alongside to quickly switch between PHP and RoR. If you don’t want to download Aptana’s editor and already have Eclipse, you can install Aptana itself as a plugin on top of Eclipse.

General editors

Of course, for quick hacks you can’t go past a simple text editor. I usually work with Gnome, so I always keep gedit handy, and gphpedit is useful; for KDE, there’s Quanta and a few alternatives. You don’t really need autocomplete and other code intelligence in your spare editor; syntax highlighting will help you put together hacks quickly and effectively.

That’s all, folks!

And that’s all for part two of our series on the ultimate php web development environment. In part 3, we’ll take a look at setting up a linux server to help with your PHP web development, from the usual LAMP to samba shares, a local SVN server to webmin for web-based server administration. If you liked this part of the series, please subscribe to our PHP RSS feed to keep up to date on our latest PHP articles.

Hard habit to break. Not everyone is clamoring for change. Some news people are content with traditional press releases. It’s an art that’s over 100 years old. Change will take some getting used to. As for how long, that remains to be seen. The format of traditional PRs is easily adaptable for publishing. Just a few tweaks here and there, and it’s ready, if you don’t mind all the embellishments. It’s a convenience more than a few will miss.

Bend it as you please. Social media releases are being shaped to be more factual and straight-forward than traditional press releases. For the companies and other agencies, this severely limits their influence on how the news will be delivered to the readers. The journalists/bloggers will have to interpret the data for themselves. They may neglect parts which companies want to highlight, or focus on things that are not very flattering.

Best of both worlds. Most PR outfits nowadays distribute both kinds of releases. Though SMRs have its advantages, there are still a lot to learn, and there’s also the distribution factor to be considered (the Internet is not the primary news source for everyone). A working group has been formed to create a standard for social media releases, but until that’s finished, approved, and tested, it’s best to be on the safe side. For now, both ships still sail.

Fortunately, the answer is yes, and here’s how:
1. Name that tune – Think of a good keyword-rich title for your show.

2. Future-proof today - MP3 files have ID3 tags which you can embed with relevant keywords. These include title, artist/author, comments and URL fields. Only a few search engines can read the ID3 tags now, but in the future, this will likely be a standard search parameter.

3. Summarize – Write a synopsis of each podcast show and blog about it. As with basic SEO practice, important keywords should be as high up in the blog post as possible.

4. Transcribe – While we wait for the ideal future when search engines can understand audio, right now the work has to be done manually. Find a good transcription service provider. Divide the transcript up into sections, and give each of them related keyword-rich titles. If it’s a long interview, you can put each section on a separate page.

5. Directories - Submit your podcast site to specialized podcast directories and search engines such as audio.weblogs.com.

6. Publicize – Be sure to let people know that you have a podcast. Not everybody has one, which makes you especially linkworthy than a run-of-the-mill blog.

7. Reach out – You may love hearing your voice, but it’s always best to give your show some variety. From time to time, it wouldn’t hurt to do an interview, particularly if you can convince people who already some street cred in your niche. Don’t worry, though, they would usually jump at the opportunity to be featured. It’s mutually beneficial.

Try these out. Once you get going, I’m sure you’ll come up with your own creative strategies.

1. Have a thorough project spec
Don’t code anything until both you and the client have agreed on a projert outline or specification, and it covers every area of the application. A thorough spec written now can save hours of wasted development hours due to misunderstanding later on. For example, if building a website, your project spec should outline all the pages of the website, roughly what they will look like and any special functionality on them (such as viewing records in a database).

2. Agree on conditions for changing the project spec

Chances are your client doesn’t know the web. They have a general idea of what they want you to build, but they don’t really know what it’s going to look like, what it can look like, what features you can build. Essentially, they don’t know what is possible - but as the project progresses, they’ll figure it out. And when they do, they’ll have all sorts of little features they want you to add.

Now, this is all very well - client satisfaction is critical for succesful freelancing - but make sure you agree on some terms for changing the project spec from the beginning. For example, “I will give you an estimate for additional hours required to add a feature and add it to the bill.” (This works especially well on hourly rates; clients like to raise issue with adding to a flat rate for the project)

3. Help the client think out their application
I recently had a client wanting to build a simple database-driven application. The emphasis was heavily on the data, and while they’d done some basic design mockups, they didn’t really know what the application should look like - or, for that matter, what it should do. While planning, frequently contacted the client and made suggestions that I knew would improve the effectiveness of the application. It isn’t quite finished yet, but the client already loves the beta.

4. Explain the problems of detrimental design decisions
I mentioned before that your client doesn’t know what is possible with the web - they also don’t know what isn’t possible. Ever had a request from a client, and thought, “Why the heck would they want THAT?” In these situations, don’t just accept the request and move on. Explain to the client that it isn’t a good idea, and why. You’ll save everyone’s time, and if the design decision the client has made is particularly obscure, you’ll probably save yourself a lot of hair pulling trying to implement it later.

5. Maintain after sales support
Make sure the client is happy with the product, and keep it that way. After sales support is an area most freelancers fail on. Your project doesn’t end when you provide the code to your client. Make sure your client knows that they should come to you for support, and provide bug fixes at no cost - often they may feel inclined to hire someone else to fix bugs.

This is all very well, but the client will probably want a few extra features added or maintenance conducted, and with another provider working on bug fixes, your winning this additional business isn’t something you can take for granted anymore. Conversely, if you’ve been called in to rework an existing application, encourage the client to task you with additional development, as opposed to the original provider. Repeat business is highly profitable - no overheads, just get in there and do what you do best.

Follow these tips, and your projects will be more predictable - and better managed within budget. Happy freelancing!

Now you can make your Meebo using the code of soashable. You can download the source code of soashable fom it’s project page on google code, by clicking here

But wait, there are some good people over there who already feel the pain and developed a facebook like dialog component for you. This component comes as a plugin of jQuery and works really cool. You can display static HTML contents as well as load external content via AJAX. You can find this component named “Facebox” by clicking here

Integrating Facebox with your site is easy. Just include the javascript file of jquery and facebox. And add the following script at the end of your page.

<script>
$(document).ready(function(){
$('a[@rel*=facebox]‘).facebox();
});
</script>


Lets have a look at the following example

1. To load an external page

<a href="http://www.google.com/logos/spring08.gif" rel="facebox">text</a>


2. To display static content

jquery.facebox("Here is some <b>static content</b>");

$.facebox("Here is some <b>static content</b>");


Thats it! you got a nice dialog component for your web application.

However, many of these packages are bloated, slow and full of specialised features that you may never want to use. Sifting through the repository is also a challenge; a basic category system is in place, but it’s hard to tell what you want when you don’t know what’s available. Here are some gems from the PEAR repository that you could really find useful.

1. Services_Akismet: Deal with spam once and for all
When it comes to dealing with comment spam, you can’t go past Akismet. It powers just about every Wordpress blog out there, including this one; it also has an API web service that allow it to be used in any other web application, and Services_Akismet takes advantage of this. Best of all, it’s free for personal or commercial use.

2. HTTP_Request: Perform complex HTTP requests
Sure, there are many web services to hook into and web pages to download, but how do you access them all? Some times you need to go a little beyond basic file_get_contents; make HTTP requests with sessions attached, upload files, do some basic authentication, maybe even work with a proxy. HTTP_Request will help you do all this and more in a matter of a few lines of code.

3. Archive_Tar
When maintaining a big web application, you’ll often find your server filling up with cache files, archives and data dumps. Storing these effectively is very important to maintaining the performance of your server; if you don’t access them frequently, the best way to achieve this is with Archive_Tar. Similar to creating a .tar tarball and compressing it with GZip on your machine, Archive_Tar will allow your web server to compress large files quickly and effectively.

4. Spreadsheet_Excel_Writer
When creating MS Office files programmaticaly, you often have to rely on having a Windows server with the actual Office products installed to generate your files. However, COM isn’t the best approach if performance is a concern, and more often than not you’ll be deploying on a Windows server. If you need to generate Excel files, no matter what platform you’re working with, Spreadsheet_Excel_Writer is your best bet for pure PHP.

5. XML_Parser
XML is becoming more and more prominent in web applications. From configuration files to meta information and even page data. XML_Parser provides a consistent, reliable, effective way to parse XML files, and is reasonably fast as well.

Have a look through these PEAR packages; remember you can easily install them just by running `pear install PACKAGE_NAME` at a command line/terminal. If this isn’t an option, you can still download them and include them as usual (although you may need to slightly rewrite file paths within the PEAR packages, as they include each other).

3) Expect comparisons with traditional advertising
“So why should we avail of SEO services when we have ______ advertising? What would this increase in traffic do to us?” Now here is where it gets tricky. When we asked you earlier to dispel the wrong notions about SEO, it’s because SEO isn’t really an exact science. No SEO expert can really predict the increase in sales being on the top of search engines bring. So how is SEO different from the traditional advertising? With traditional advertising, the potential for generating revenue lasts only as long as the advertising does. In SEO, the effect on revenues goes on and on.

4) Know your audience
Your audience may not be knowledgeable about SEO, but they may be an expert on another field. The key here is to understand that SEO may be filled with jargons and terms, but at its core, it relies on tried and tested principles, the same principles used by traditional marketing. So research and find out what language they use. Try to find out how you can explain SEO using their language and before long, you’d be seeing them bobbing their heads, understanding the things you are talking about. And once they do understand what you are talking about, you are now ready to start talking about the services that you offer.

5) Provide Additional Resources
Create an SEO 101 primer that you’ll give out to new clients. It could be an ebook, video, or printed pamphlet. Make sure to include the following: what the clients should expect, a simplified overview of the working process, as well as additional services you provide. It also helps to provide the client with progress reports throughout the course of the SEO work as this lets them know how far the project has come. When presenting information, try to use easy-to-understand visuals rather than numbers. If you can, present case studies of previous work so that the client has a better idea of what to expect.