PHP Blog

Webgrind is a web-based Xdebug profiling frontend for PHP similar to kcachegrind. Webgrind provides a simple PHP-powered interface for examining the output of XDebug’s profiling reports, for a quick and simply overview of the performance costs in various areas of your PHP application.
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After I recently upgraded to Zend Studio for Eclipse, I noticed one troubling feature of my setup - I couldn’t debug applications with “pretty urls”. Zend Studio for Eclipse has a great debugging platform setup, even with a dedicated IDE layout for debugging, and the Zend Studio Debugger backend on the server is quite powerful in itself. In this tutorial, I’ll show you how to make use of that power and debug your Cake applications with Zend Studio for Eclipse. (more…)

One question I hear people asking a lot is how to style the comment section in Wordpress. I didn’t have time to go in depth in my tutorial Designing and Coding a Wordpress Theme from Scratch but here are a few links from my del.icio.us to some blogs that break it down in far more detail.

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When it comes to making your site important, platforms trounce software hands down. Facebook learned this the easy way; today, the myriad of Facebook applications available make the social networking site a typical destination for a significant proportion of internet users. Indeed, many users now browse new content on their favourite sites via their respective Facebook apps. Platform wins. Yahoo! is about to accomplish the same, this time in web search, and has opted for PHP.

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Scheduled tasks are a fairly common feature in modern web applications. From cleaning out caches every 24 hours to checking subscription periods and even generating reports, more web applications live by the clock than ever before. But how do we schedule the execution of a PHP script on the server side?

The answer, for Linux-based servers, is crontab. The crontab utility on UNIX systems allows commands to be executed and predefined intervals. These commands are essentially the same commands as you would run from any local console. For example, you could create a new cron “job” to run a bash script, and set it to run once per day at 12:00 midnight.

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When it comes to trying out a snippet of PHP, the process can often be time consuming and tedious. Loading up your editor, saving a new file in your http docs folder, firing up a webserver, running some tests and then clearing the files off - it’s generally more trouble than its worth. Thankfully, PHP provides the interactive shell, allowing you to test out PHP interactively with immediate feedback. Here’s how to take advantage of this mature feature of PHP. (more…)

Every major website seems to have a tag cloud. Users love tag clouds; they help navigate masses of content quickly and easily. When used appropriately, they help us sort filter through information stores, reduce the signal-to-noise ratio. Providing a tag cloud is also relatively painless for the server - after all, it’s just some HTML. But how do we actually build a tag cloud at application level? In this tutorial, I’ll take you through putting together a full-blown, calculated web 2.0 tag cloud in PHP. (more…)

In my ten part series “Designing and Coding a Wordpress Theme From Scratch” we made our own Wordpress theme starting with a design in Photoshop. But now that you’ve made a theme, what about releasing it to the public?

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Part 3 - “Photoshop to XHTML in 24 Hours”
Part 4 - “Cleaning Up Your XHTML”
Part 5 - “Preloading Images with Javascript and CSS”
Part 6 - “Marking Up is Hard to Do” and “The Anatomy of a Wordpress Theme”
Part 7 - “Beginning with PHP for Wordpress”
Part 8 - “Putting the Press in Wordpress with PHP”
Part 9 - “Marking Up Header.php, Footer.php and Sidebar.php”

So far we’ve made a ton of progress with our theme design. We designed it in Photoshop, we converted to XHTML and then we began the somewhat tedious task of adding PHP. Now that we’ve created index.php, header.php, footer.php and sidebar.php, we can move on to creating the rest of the theme.

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Part 2 - “Layout And Structure” and “Designing Wordpress Themes in Photoshop”
Part 3 - “Photoshop to XHTML in 24 Hours”
Part 4 - “Cleaning Up Your XHTML”
Part 5 - “Preloading Images with Javascript and CSS”
Part 6 - “Marking Up is Hard to Do” and “The Anatomy of a Wordpress Theme”
Part 7 - “Beginning with PHP for Wordpress”
Part 8 - “Putting the Press in Wordpress with PHP”

Because Wordpress is fundamentally a PHP system we can add a few snippets of code to make our header, footer and sidebar files dynamic.

Marking Up Header.php

Your blog header file usually contains the title of your site linked to the homepage. In an HTML page we would simply add text or place an image and link to the homepage using <a href=”"></a>. The key to making our Wordpress theme, however, is we need to make all our links relative so that the end user can install the theme and use it with their own unique site with as little fuss as possible. It should just work.

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