Allthingsdev.com » PHP

CakePhp is Definitely….Cake

Jeff Purcell — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 04:43:49 +0000

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.

Cake is a rapid development framework for PHP which uses commonly known design patterns like ActiveRecord, Association Data Mapping, Front Controller and MVC. Our primary goal is to provide a structured framework that enables PHP users at all levels to rapidly develop robust web applications, without any loss to flexibility.

I only recognize about 12 words in that blockquote. 5 of them have 4 letters or less. Nevertheless, I ran through a few tutorials tonight (out of boredom) and was amazed at how fast “rapid” really is. Check out the blog and the online bookmarks manager I created, both in less then 30 minutes.

I’m currently parting out ideas for my next web project and I definitely will be using CakePhp to speed up the development time.

php, development, cakephp, web development, framework,

Wordpress as A CMS

Jeff Purcell — Tue, 14 Nov 2006 23:05:42 +0000

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. Here’s a few reason’s why I do this:

Rapid Development

Layout design time has been dramatically reduced by utilizing Wordpress’s theme abilities. I now only have to create one html page which I then modularize to fit with wordpress’s theming system. This single html layout is then applied to all of the site’s pages.

Added Functionality

With Wordpress’s simple yet robust administration area, I can give my clients control of certain areas of their website. They can now manage their own content and not be so dependent on me to make changes. This added functionality is a feature that is nonexistent among the other local web designers in my area.

Less Time Equals More Money

With the added functionality that wordpress’s admin area offers, I can charge more while lowering my overall time involved in the project.

Easily Add Additional Features

With the large community following that Wordpress has, chances are someone has developed a plugin for that added feature or functionality that your client needs. For example, WP-ContactForm takes the headache out of programming a contact form. Once again adding that needed functionality while lowering development time.

Tags: wordpress, cms

PHP and Paypal

Jeff Purcell — Wed, 14 Jun 2006 18:00:26 +0000

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!

Tags: php, paypal, programming, IPN, free scripts

Internet Explorer and Forms

Jeff Purcell — Sat, 24 Dec 2005 05:28:48 +0000

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

Tags: Internet Explorer, PHP, forms

preg_replace gotchas

Jeff Purcell — Sun, 20 Nov 2005 01:43:03 +0000

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.

Tags: php, code, coding, programming