CakePhp is Definitely….Cake

I’ve been playing around with this PHP framework called CakePhp. CakePhp is designed for super fast php development, and I must say, fast is an undestatement. Read more

Wordpress as A CMS

Yes, I know this isn’t anything new, but I’m quickly becoming a big advocate of using wordpress as a CMS for client websites. Read more

PHP and Paypal

I consider myself fairly versed in the programming language PHP. I prefer it over M$ languages because its free and open source, also because the majority of shared web hosting servers available are linux based. PHP and Linux play very nice together. Although you can run PHP on Windows-based servers.

When developing a new site, if I need a php script that I don’t already have in my library, I try to find a free one online that requires minimal alteration to suit my needs. I find this cuts my development time considerably. As it stands, there is an abundance of free php scripts available for just about anything one could possibly need. Most of them are fairly easy to understand and alter to your liking. This is not the case with paypal IPN scripts.

I’ve been looking for a PHP Paypal IPN script for a very long time. There are many of them out there, but until yesterday I couldn’t find one that worked first time AND didn’t require server alteration to run. Then I found Paypal Web Services over at Sourceforge. Paypal Web Services is a collection of paypal scripts that cover all your paypal payment needs. After configuring the config.inc.php file, I was accepting Paypal payments in less than 20 minutes. This beats trying to read Paypal’s 122 page PDF explaining how Paypal payments work. Yes, I’m not linking to the PDF for spite!
php, paypal, programming, IPN, free scripts

Internet Explorer and Forms

I ran across this little quirk with Internet Explorer the other day. It appears that when a form is submitted by actually clicking the submit button, an element in the PHP array $_POST is created for the button. Simple enough, right? Well I noticed that when the form was submitted by pressing the Enter key instead of clicking the submit button, an element in the $_POST array was not created for the button. It’s not an exceptionally large quirk, but definitely caused me to rethink my form submission checking. Firefox and Safari created the array element for the button regardless of how the form was submitted.. This occured with Internet Explorer 6.0 and PHP version 5.0.3
Internet Explorer, PHP, forms

preg_replace gotchas

I’ve been reading Professional PHP for a few weeks now and I’m really enjoying it. It is one of the few blogs out there that actually writes about code and coding in general. For example, their latest post gives a quick overview of some gotchas with the php function preg_replace. Professional PHP gives some good pointers about how to remove those unwanted extra slashes and things of that nature.

Check out Professional PHP here.

php, code, coding, programming