Creating PDF documents with PHP

Step 1 - Install the PDFlib extension PDFlib is not included with the default PHP 5.3 distribution, so you will have to install it. Download the PHP version of the PHPlib library from here. The Windows build of PHP 5 comes in many different varieties. I'll assume that you are using the VC9 non-thread safe build, and that you have installed PHP to the default location. Extract the libpdf_php.dll file from the PDFlib-7.0.4p6-MSWin32-php\bind\php5\php-530-nozts_VS9\ directory in the...

Dispaying your Twitter status with PHP

Step 1 - Define a URL Regular Expression Twitter posts quite often include links. However, the Twitter API will only return a status update as text, without the HTML markup to identify a link. To get around this we will use regular expressions to turn URLs into clickable links. The following is a simple Regular Expression that will match URLs in the Twitter status posts. $url_re = ...

Guestbook tutorial in 3 easy steps

Step #1: creating the database and table. First of all you need to create a database, the process of doing so is fairly simple. To create a database, you will need to use a database management tool. I personally recommend using phpMyAdmin – it is one of the most popular database management tools out there. Local servers: If you are using an web server pack (i.e. xampp), it will most likely be here: http://127.0.0.1/phpmyadmin/ If not, you will have to install it manually. You can...

Simple page hit counter

Part #1: The concept. The concept of making a page hit counter for your website is very simple. It will be based on a text file which will contain a number of page hits. This number will be constantly increased by 1 on each load of the page. This counter will record every single hit, so keep in mind that the number it shows is not the actual number of visitors, but the number of times the main page has been loaded. The first PHP function (file_get_contents()) is used to read data from a...

Installing Wamp Server (Apache+MySQL+PHP)

WampServer, originally called WAMP5, is a compilation of Apache, MySQL and PHP that is really easy to install and use. It come also with PHPMyAdmin, for you to easily manage your local databases. WAMP is the acronym of Windows + Apache + MySQL + PHP. As you can see, this is the most important for you to get ready to programming in your local computer as a server. WampServer install file is about 16MB, and at this time, these are the versions used on WampServer 2.0i: Apache 2.2.11; PHP...

How to write Shorthand PHP if and else assignments

What you don’t hear as a beginner When you are learning a scripting language such as PHP you will get the basics of assignment, evaluating and comparison operators such as == <= and != (equal, less than or equal, not equal). They are all you need to start writing code that can vary it’s behaviour according to what inputs it is given. Before long though you will want quicker ways of doing things. In this blog post I’m going to start with the long way of doing...

PHP Tutorial (File Handling): Scratch Pad

Prerequisite Knowledge of basic PHP syntax. In this tutorial you will learn about File Handling Functions We will be using 3 predefined functions for file handling fopen: To open a file file_get_content: To read a file fclose: To close a file Little theory before we begin Opening a file Predefined function fopen() is used to open a file. It returns a variable which can be used for accessing the file. Returned variable is called as file handler. Syntax: $var =...

Working with RESTful Services in CodeIgniter

Assumptions You have a web server set up, locally or online and known how to manage files on it. You have read a few of the CodeIgniter from Scratch tutorials. You know how to set up CodeIgniter. You know a little about RESTful services. This tutorial is broken down into two parts. We will start by learning how to create a RESTful service, then further down, we will learn how to interact with it in a few different ways. Part 1 – Creating a RESTful API Step 1: Setting up the...

Easy Mod_Rewrite with PHP tutorial

I have been playing around with Apaches mod_rewrite on my other site http://www.2big2send.com and i must admit its a whole lot easier than i first thought.. Here is a quick guide for most general use: Create a new file in your main directory (public_html for cPanel or httpdocs for plesk – not sure about other ones) called .htaccess (Dont forget the ‘.’ dot before the name – you may already have one of these file, thats ok, just edit it and follow the guide...

Building a Simple Monthly Calendar

In this tutorial we are going to learn how to build a simple calendar in PHP. You have seen many of those calendar date pickers mostly in Javascript. This PHP based one has a slightly different purpose - instead of populating an input field, it outputs links for the different dates and can be used for example as a monthly archive in a dynamic DB-driven site. We will build this calendar following good coding practices and keeping the login in one PHP file and the presentation in one...