A introduction to using Regular Expressions in PHP.

This document's goal is to present the basic tNG features. We'll create a simple site that will be used to manage a company's departments and employees. Users will be able to display the existing departments, to add a new department, to edit or to delete an existing one. The same will apply for the employees.

This tutorial teaches you how to write and use classes, to make your PHP code more flexible and easier to manage. The tutorial guides you through the construction of a simple, security-related class that performs some basic security functions for a web site: checking user logons. The class implements security features that answer some needs for a number of current security models and could be easily implemented at most dynamic Web sites. Note that this class does not provide a full security solution. The example presented in this tutorial addresses a rudimentary yet effective form of web hacking: manually modifying the URL in the browser window. Among the many ways to hack, this is one of the easiest, but still a difficult one to defend against. Someone with the wrong intentions can potentially change prices or gain access to areas of the site where they aren't authorized; either by modifying the query string after the URL, or by saving the HTML somewhere and modifying hidden variables in the code. Prevention of this type of hacking is particularly important in straight-line applications. A straight-line application is one where pages must be filled out and followed in order, such as e-commerce order forms, registration, and private areas such as web mail.

To serve even a simple, static HTML Web page you need to rely on your Web server, which in turn relies on your operating system, and so on. While you can't create all these programs yourself, most of the ones that you rely on—your Web server. PHP—or more properly the PHP Hypertext Preprocessor—lets you easily create dynamic Web sites by embedding code into the Web page (HTML) itself. This open-source software is very popular on the Web where open-source products like Apache and Perl predominate. While PHP offers considerable power as a scripting language, its true power lies in the fact that if it doesn't offer what you need, you can easily extend it with either C or C++. To extend PHP 4, you need to understand the PHP API (more specifically the Zend API, since PHP 4 is powered by the Zend Engine).

Learn one technique used for creating a complete, albeit, basic site in PHP. Also a good way for implementing templates.

Unlike PHP 3, PHP 4.0 has built-in capabilities to handle session management. The session management functionality in PHP 4.0 is easy to use, powerful and open for custom modifications. Creating sessions allows you to keep track of the actions of a particular user over the period of time she is viewing your web site. To associate session data with a user, you need a session identity number, that is, a key that ties the user to his data. This tutorial discusses how to open sessions, track session data, and clear the data when you no longer need it. In this tutorial you can learn the following: What a session is How to use persistent variables How session IDs are passed from page to page How to end a session and handle clearing of data (garbage collection) How to register variables to refer to during user sessions How to use the PHP 4.0 session management functions, including: session_register() session_start() session_destroy() gc_probability() gc_maxlifetime serialize() deserialize() session_save_path() How PHP stores session data.

This article is intended for the PHP programmer interested in avoiding some of the most common mistakes when applying PHP. The reader is expected to at least be familiar with PHP syntax, but should have a working knowledge of PHP functionality.

This article is intended for the PHP programmer interested in creating a static HTML cache of dynamic PHP scripts. The article has been written specifically for an Apache server running PHP scripts, but the ideas described here are applicable to almost any Web environment.

The series Develop rock-solid code in PHP is about solving practical, real-life problems in medium- to large-scale applications. In this article, PHP veteran Amol Hatwar discusses how to use variables effectively. He also shows how to make script configuration easy by constructing a configuration file parser using variable variable names in PHP. Variables and functions are essential features of any computer language. With variables, you can abstract data; with functions, you can abstract several lines of code. As Bruce Eckel puts it in his book Thinking in C++, all programming languages provide abstractions. Assembly language is a small abstraction of the underlying machine. Many so-called imperative languages that followed (such as Fortran, BASIC, and C) are abstractions of assembly language.

People are different and they use different PHP configurations so if you want to run a script on your system you have two choices: 1) set your global configuration to something that allows the code to run 2) set a configuration specific to the program If you go for the first one you’re in trouble if you try to run two programs which require completely different setups. So the only choice seems to be the second one. There's a lot of PHP code available for free on the net but also not all of it can run on your system as it is. This article shows you how to distribute a setup required by your program to run.