The PHP Grind

Well, alright, it hasn’t completely killed the business yet….  But, since taking on this new client, their membership site has lost a threatening number of subscribers.  And, if allowed to continue, it would certainly bring the company to it’s knees.
What am I talking about?  My new client came to me with major performance issues on [...]

I remember the first time I tried PHP checkbox handling when I was first learning. Here are a couple ways to get around the missing values.

I’m a big fan of ExtJs, and my current project is using a lot of it to enhance the user’s experience.  But, today I received an email listing a number of small issues with the code currently in production.  The one that struck me the most was how the “Back” button doesn’t work sometimes.
Unfortunately, there [...]

This looks like a very interesting PHP conference in Washington DC, October 19-20th. Many topics:
http://www.dcphpconference.com/
Integrating PHP with the Federal Operations and the Enterprise

Developing, Deploying, and Managing Large Scale PHP Applications
Ease of Use & Making the Most of the Training Budget
Interoperability, Support from a Wide Range of Vendors
Scalability & Performance Issues
PHP in the Federal Enterprise Architecture

Security [...]

Anyone who’s read my previous rant about PHP4 vs. PHP5 knows how much I like PHP5. So, I decided to hunt down some shared web hosting services that provide PHP5. Here is my small, but growing PHP5 Hosting & Comparison chart

Last year I was up in Boston at the SD Best Practices Conference and Expo. One of the vendors was MetaCase. They have a suite of tools that allow you use UML tools to model your logic and then generate it’s code. Apparently the tool has a scripting language that allows you [...]

What do you look for in a PHP Framework? I was about to write an article to explain some of the characteristics I look for in a framework. But, first I’d like to broaden my horizons and hear what other people think. Here is just a high-level start:

Database abstraction
Caching
Configuration management
Error handling
Logging
User authentication and permissions
Sessions
Templates
Code generation [...]

I am repeatedly frustrated by seemingly reputable people in the PHP industry marginalizing and downplaying PHP5 in favor of the ever aging and antiquated PHP4. 
Recently I visited the community forums of the osCommerce project to help me out with some issues I was having with a new installation.  The first thing I discovered was that [...]