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...

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...

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...

Creating Email Templates in PHP

The technique is simple The template text (including variables and html tags) will be stored in database. We will create a table with 2 fields i.e name and text. Each template will be give a unique name. A sample entry is shown in the image below A PHP script will read template text from the database, update varlues of variables and will send the email For this tutorial, i haved created a table to store all the templates a webiste needs. See a snapshot of this table below Every...

Displaying Records in Multiple Columns Using PHP

For this article, i have selected a table members, containing each member's pic and some other text detail. The members will be shown in multiple columns as shown in the picture below. The technique is to use 2 loops (one nested inside the other). The outter loop creates rows and the inner loop creates columns. The only thing we have to take care of is the inner loop creates equal number of columns for each row. If there are no more records the inner loop should print a blank column....

Creating a Basic Template System in PHP

After implmenting this template system in your webistes, you will achieve the following benefits If you have a lot of pages that use the same design. If you want to make a layout change in the header, menu, footer or right section then you don't have to update numerous files. You will have to edit a single php file You will have less vertical scrolling when typing PHP code as the whole section will be replaced by a single line of php (i.e we will use php include function to include...

Camera tool in Excel

The Camera tool allows you to select a range of cells and literally insert a live picture into a spreadsheet. Any change to the range of cells will automatically update the image. The Camera tool allows you to select a range of cells and literally insert a live picture into a spreadsheet.  Any change to the range of cells will automatically update the image. In order to use the Camera tool, we must first add it to the Command Bar.  There is a well documented tutorial on...

Create a KVM-based virtual server in 3 steps

The Linux Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) is free, open source virtualization software for Linux based on the Intel VT-X and AMD-V hardware virtualization extensions and a modified version of QEMU (work is underway to get the required changes upstream). KVM—in the form of kvm.ko, a loadable kernel module that provides the core virtualization infrastructure and processor-specific modules kvm-intel.ko...