iDimensionz » PHP

Let the April Fools Stunts Begin!

iDimensionz Admin — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 13:35:44 +0000

As you are probably aware, today is April 1st a.k.a. April Fools Day. A day when people try to make fools of other people. If you weren’t aware or forgot, you may have already been tricked into believing or doing something crazy and didn’t even realize it. Techie types are stereotyped as being boring, straight-laced, and basically no fun. Today is a day to show a different side. And who else to start the day off than Zend.

Yes, the company in charge of our beloved PHP programming language has bolted out of the gate with today’s first joke. I was verifying the version of PHP on my dev server via the phpinfo() function when I noticed something strange about the PHP logo. At first, I thought my server may have been hacked or infected with a virus. So, I checked where the logo image was coming from and, sure enough, it was coming from the php.net site. So, I went to PHP’s site (http://www.php.net) and the logo doesn’t look quite right there either. Have a look for yourself. I contacted PHP but was told that the logo was supposed to look that way. Yeah…right! Oh, well, that’s only my first fooling of the day. Good one, Zend! If you find any other techie site’s pulling pranks today, let’s hear about ‘em in the comments section.

New Date and Time Functions in PHP 5.3.0

iDimensionz Admin — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 13:09:04 +0000

While browsing through the PHP documentation, I came across some very useful new functions available in PHP 5.3.0 for working with dates and times. One of my current projects requires working with a date range. There are various ways to do this. I was originally going to use MySQL’s DATE_DIFF() function to calculate the number days in the range but connecting to the database for this functionality was obviously not the best solution. I browsed the PHP documentation and found a date_diff() function that is part of PHP 5.3.0. This function is just an alias of the DateTime class’s diff() function and returns a DateInterval instance which can be used to format the result. The DateTime class is part of the ext/date extension. I’m looking forward to the stable 5.3.0 release to be able to take advantage of this functionality.

Zend Framework now available to iDimensionz Web Hosting Customers

iDimensionz Admin — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 13:49:29 +0000

iDimensionz made version 1.5.2 of the Zend Framework available to all of its hosting customers today. According to the Zend Framework web site, “Zend Framework is focused on building more secure, reliable, and modern Web 2.0 applications & web services, and consuming widely available APIs from leading vendors”. To view the current version of Zend Framework available from iDimensionz, visit our Zend Framework page. That page uses the Zend_Version class to display the current default version available. Other versions may be available. Contact iDimensionz Support for more information.

Getting PHP PDT 1.0 to work in Eclipse Europa

iDimensionz Admin — Thu, 05 Jul 2007 02:55:57 +0000

After downloading and installing the full version of the Eclipse PDT (PHP Development Tools), I was ready to start using Eclipse in my SimplyMEPIS (basically Ubuntu) distro to edit PHP code. To my surprise, the PHP perspective was not working. Eclipse seemed to recognize that it was installed, but wouldn’t utilize it. Starting Eclipse with the “-clean” option didn’t make any difference (except that the GUI looked slightly different). I found out that PDT requires Java 5 (or higher). I already had Java 6 installed, but it wasn’t being used. Java 4.2 was still being used. I tracked down the symbolic link for the “java” command, renamed it (in case I messed up and needed it back), and created a new symbolic link to my Java 6 java command. I checked the Java version with “java -version” which verified it was now using Java 6. When I fired up Eclipse it now is able to utilize the PDT.

An interesting side note…when PDT wasn’t working, Eclipse was defaulting to using KWrite as the (external) editor for PHP files. I was impressed with KWrite’s built-in syntax highlighting and code folding capabilities. I will definitely keep KWrite in mind when I need to make a quick change to a PHP file.

Visit http://www.eclipse.org/pdt/ for more information about the Eclipse PDT project.

Creating HTML formatted e-mail in PHP

iDimensionz Admin — Mon, 05 Mar 2007 04:15:21 +0000

Here is some example code for sending HTML formatted e-mail via the PHP mail function:

$from="YourFromAddress@yourdomain.com";
$to="SendThisTo@TheirDomain.com";
$body="Add your HTML code here";
$headers = "MIME-Version: 1.0\r\n";
$headers .= "Content-type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1\r\n";
$headers .= "From: $from <$from>\r\n";
$headers .= "Reply-To: $from <$from>\r\n";
$headers .= "X-Mailer: PHP\r\n";
mail($to,"Put your e-mail subject here!", $body, $headers);