Winners Announced: Free Copies of “Pro PHP and jQuery”

Use a framework like CakePHP, Zend, Symfony or CodeIgniter! Less coding and less debugging.

Hmm a tip… Start with an MVC framework early — Codeigniter is easy to pick up and will change your life — Frameworks separate different parts of your code, abstract common functions and create clean, maintainable, Object Oriented code.

You’ll be coding like a pro in no time ;)

Also, PHP has a function for EVERYTHING… it’s my PHP motto, “There’s a function for that!”

Happy Coding :)

if(i % 2 == 0) //Check if i is even

Some developers use the smarty template engine for their php templating but have always wondered how they could go about have one php page but multiple smarty templates used for that page depending on what is being requested in the url.
Code example
—-
index.php in your public directory
—-
function cleanaction($page){
$action = $_GET['page'];
/**
* Code to clean input, verify input from the url request
* Example: http://localhost/index.php?page=news shows the information in news.tpl
* Non existing page http://localhost/index.php?page=noodles will show what is in the index.tpl.
**/
return $mycleanedaction;
}

switch(cleanaction($_GET['$page'])){
case news:
$smarty->assign(‘pagetitle’,'News’);
$smarty->display(‘news.tpl’);
break;
case aboutus:
$smarty->assign(‘pagetitle’,'About Us’);
$smarty->display(‘aboutus.tpl’);
break;
case contactus:
$smarty->assign(‘pagetitle’,'Contact Us’);
$smarty->display(‘contactus.tpl’);
break;
default:
$smarty->assign(‘pagetitle’,'Welcome to website name’);
$smarty->display(‘index.tpl’);

}
—-

This should help cut down on your code and keep it a little more organized so you don’t have to use multiple if statements just to check what is being requested for the page. In your cleaning code you should remove everything except for alphanumeric characters, does not go over a maximum length and anything else you feel will keep things clean.

Use Ctype functions(Available in php 4, php 5) to input validation, it will save your time – see details here – http://www.php.net/manual/en/ref.ctype.php

May be obvious to some, but CakePHP is a fantastic web framework for getting a PHP site up and running quickly. Works great for blogs and community-oriented sites.

Link: http://cakephp.org/

In PHP you may use short or long opening tags for php. <? being the short version, and <?php being the long version. But be wary when using short tags, as some servers may not be configured to recognize short tags. If you are running your own server, be sure to check your php.ini file and set "short_opentag=On"

strlen is slow, instead of:

if(strlen($str) == 32) …

instead try:

if(isset($str{31}) && !isset($str{32})…

isset is a language construct in php and therefore is much much quicker. this can be modified for any strlen condition really.

if(strlen($str) < 33)…

can be changed to:

if(!isset($str{32})…

When using PHP within HTML you can close the PHP tag when you want to output HTML. This makes for speedier processing of your PHP scripts, because you don’t have unnecessary print, echo and other commands. Example:

Hello World!

Hello Mars! You are the planet.

When working with a mysql database, use a pre made database class. I got a great one from http://www.phpclasses.org/. A good one will report errors in a much more meaningful way, and makes writing queries quicker.

I had some functions calculating dates by adding multiples of 86,400 seconds to the start date. However, this caused problems in weeks where there were daylight savings changes (i.e. switching the time in Spring and Autumn).

One solution is to make sure your start time is not around midnight (i.e. the date with no hours, minutes and seconds). However, I found the strtotime function to be easier to work with. I’m guessing it’s a bit slower, but I was happy with the results.

$date = date(“Y-m-d”);// current date

$date = strtotime(date(“Y-m-d”, strtotime($date)) . ” +1 day”);

FirePHP is a great tool to debug your code.. great also for the sql optimization.
And always plan a good structure of your system, before you start… organize everything in folders and avoid long lines and big files with messy code.

try to develope Your own sandbox, with most common functions, helpers, css templates.. etc. either if it’s MVC framework or clear php+mysql.. sandbox will speed things up..

Instead of using &copy; 2010 in your footers in PHP, try using &copy; <?php echo date(‘Y’); ?> This makes a lot more sense since you’ll never have to go back and change the date.

I started learning PHP by hacking around with WordPress. Once I was hooked I came to Nettuts to really learn the language!

http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/php/learn-php-from-scratch-a-training-regimen/

Does kissing butt give me a better chance at winning?

echo ”, var_dump( mixed $expression ), ”;

Especially useful when checking arrays!

When printing a string to the browser you can concatenate variables when using double quotes two ways.

echo “My string ” . $variable . ” has a variable.”;

echo “My string {$variable} has a variable.”;

Logically and programmatically speaking, using single quotes with the ‘ . ‘ method is the fastest.

Read these 12 pages of awesome tips!

I would really like to win this book! :)

I started looking at other people’s work and then modify it and see what happens.

Nowadays websites are more and more international, and multi language may arise on your projects. To prevent many sorts of problems, whenever handling strings, don’t forget to use the multi-byte functions provided by PHP, use the UTF8 internal encoding, and use the utf8 encode and decode functions whenever strings need to be received/sent from sources that provide/are expecting ISO-8859-1 encoding. Finally, if you ever need to transport UTF8 strings into a database, don’t forget to run “SET NAMES utf8″ after every connection (on a side note, some abstraction layers, like PDO, already provide mechanisms to run this command automatically).

Hope you find this useful.