One of PHP's greatest strengths can also be a great weakness in the wrong hands. I'm talking about its forgiving nature. One of the reasons why PHP has become so wildly popular is because it lets very inexperienced web developers build powerful applications without much planning, consistency, or documentation. Unfortunately, that means an awful lot of PHP code out there is sloppy, hard to read and impossible to maintain. I know because I've written a lot of it ;-). To address this and a lot of other issues, a number of the core PHP developers and community members got together and started the PEAR Project, which stands for PHP Extension and Add-on Repository. To date, the docs and other fruit from the PEAR project have been pretty sparse and difficult to follow, so this article is an attempt to shed some light on what they're doing. A pretty huge part of maintainability of code is how it is formatted and commented. All code throughout a given project should be formatted the same way. I'm a pretty big stickler about this in the SourceForge codebase and you should be too.

Trust is everything in this day and age. You have to trust a lot of people, from the guy who gives you directions to your local plumber. After all, you're not always the authority. However, when developing applications for the web, you must assume the role of authority. Otherwise, the user will assume the role, which is a big gamble: total data integrity, data corruption, or diversion of data -- if the user is the authority, you don't know what the results will be. We blame a lot of problems on "bad code". However, bad code isn't necessarily written with malicious intent; good code can go bad through simple misunderstandings and misuse of technologies. Three basic steps can be taken to avoid creating bad code. The first step is ensuring that you can trust your input. The next step is manipulating that input data carefully. The final step is providing the appropriate people with secure, reliable access to that data.

In this article, we are going to learn one of possible ways of developing PHP applications in a team.

This tutorial guides you through step-by-step how to pass arrays and using checkboxes/select boxes in PHP.

In this chapter, we explain why optimizing PHP involves many factors which are not code related, and why tuning PHP requires an understanding of how PHP performs in relation to all the other subsystems on your server, and then identifying bottlenecks caused by these subsystems and fixing them. We also cover how to tune and optimize your PHP scripts so they run even faster.

No web programming is possible without somw way of interaction between the visitor of the web page and the server-side program, be it in PHP or anything else. Flexibility of HTML is enhanced with various 'form' elements thru which wide variety of user input can be accomodated. Majority of server-side tools now offer easy ways for fetching that 'request' data. PHP used to put those in 'global' scope which posed security problems but now it comes with that option disabled and latest recommentation advises to use the $_GET and $_POST global variables to fetch the data. In fact it is the last approach which I've assumed when I developed code for "database table handlers" described in an aricles here. For simple input controls like text fields, writing down the HTML code for the control is enough but in some cases the raw data should be pre-processed. Imagine a drop-down list control where values should be fetched from the database. In those cases for the sake of clarity and to spare you as a programmer chore of writing and maintaining the code, implementing some functionality for showing such controls can come handy.