A lot of functionality is shared among applications – like sending emails or preventing spam. In the spirit of reusing the wheel instead of reinventing it, here are nine free web libraries that you can use in your next program which will dramatically increase your efficiency.

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Automattic, the company behind WordPress, has recently acquired and will be releasing social networking software called BuddyPress. The software, built on top of WordPress, was created by Andy Peatling as way to start your very own social network similar to Facebook. Today, we will take a look at installing BuddyPress.

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PHP is one of the most popular programming languages for the web. Sometimes a feature-friendly language can help the programmer too much, and security holes can creep in, creating roadblocks in the development path. In this tutorial, we will take a look at 5 tips to help you avoid some common PHP security pitfalls and development glitches.

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In our last CakePHP tutorial we looked at setting up the CakePHP framework and introduced some of the framework’s basic concepts and terminology. Now we turn to illustrating more of CakePHP’s rapid development capabilities using a personal blog application as an example. In the next set of tutorials we will build the blog application incrementally so that the basic CakePHP development process is laid out clearly instead of briefly mentioned as in other similar tutorials. In this tutorial we start with a basic authoring authentication component for the example blog application.

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CakePHP is an open-source framework for PHP intended to make developing, deploying and maintaining applications much easier. CakePHP offers many useful design patterns, such as the Model-View-Controller pattern, seen in other popular frameworks like Ruby On Rails. The CakePHP framework also provides a slew of valuable reusable libraries for dealing with common tasks. An example is “Inflector” (a routine that takes a string and handles pluralization).

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Spam is one of the major pitfalls of the social web. According to sites such as Postini, 10 out of 12 email messages are spam. As if that weren’t already enough to make you cringe, 1 in 39 emails contain a virus. Spam is penetrating into other regions of the Internet as well. The creators of the blogging software Wordpress report that nearly 87% of all blog comments are also spam. As messaging and communication applications proliferate throughout the web, developers and site owners have to get creative in the fight against the thousands upon thousands of unwanted messages streaming in every day. Deciding on the best method of spam prevention on your blogs, forums, or even contact forms can be difficult. In this article we will take a look at a service called Akismet and how it can help. We will also look at why some other methods of fighting spam fail.

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