Posts filed under 'PHP'
Waiting for the first reviews of a new book is always a tense time for an author, so I was delighted to visit Amazon.com today and see not only one, but two reviews that give PHP Solutions five stars. It’s as though Christmas has come early. All I need now is for lots of people to take notice of what one of the reviews says: “this book is a must have”. Although I enjoy writing books, it’s hard work, and the author gets only a tiny portion of the cover price in royalties. Buying through the Amazon links on my site can actually double the amount that I receive for a single copy.
December 9th, 2006
For years, one of the big complaints from newcomers to PHP has been the lack of a decent way of automating the installation of PHP on Windows. The Windows installer on the official PHP site was totally inadequate to meet the needs of non-experts. It installed a severely restricted CGI version of PHP that included no extensions and required IIS. The lack of extensions meant that support for MySQL was no longer automatically built into PHP 5, and the requirement for IIS excluded anyone using XP Home. All that has changed with the release of PHP 5.2.0. The Windows installer now offers the full range of extensions and automates most of the configuration on a wide range of web servers.
I suppose you could argue that, if you plan to use a programming language like PHP, you should be capable of digging around in a few configuration files and setting everything up manually. That’s true, but it’s been a case of chicken and egg for many people. If you’re completely new to programming, it’s very off-putting to have to struggle for days trying to get everything installed and working correctly. The configuration instructions in the PHP documentation do contain all the necessary information, but they’re very intimidating for a beginner. In fact, it was because I found so many readers stumbling at the first hurdle that I devoted so much space to detailed step-by-step instructions in all my PHP-related books. Yes, I could have told people to use XAMMP or one of the other all-in-one packages, but I have always preferred to stick with the official version. Too many people were left in the lurch when a very popular package stopped development overnight several years ago.
First impressions of the new Windows installer are very favourable. The interface is very familiar to Windows users and the steps are easy to follow. However, in order to make the necessary choices, you need to have a basic idea of the various features offered by PHP. You also need to install a web server first. Otherwise, the installer can’t do the necessary configuration, thereby removing one of its main advantages in the first place. I tested the installer by completely removing all traces of PHP from my computer, and it performed a successful install on top of Apache 2.2.3 with the minimum of fuss. You can see full instructions, complete with screenshots in the Tutorials section of my site.
I would be interested to hear the experiences of others, particular anyone trying it out with IIS.
November 3rd, 2006
I have created revised instructions for pages 420-421 of Foundation PHP for Dreamweaver 8 in the Tutorials section of this site. The change was necessitated by the withdrawal of MX Looper as a standalone extension following Adobe’s takeover of InterAKT. The new instructions make use of the very handy PHP Horizontal Looper extension created by Tom Muck. The extension is free, but if you find it useful, you might want to buy the more sophisticated commercial version.
November 2nd, 2006
Adobe’s acquisition of InterAKT on 6 September means that the 30-day free trial of MX Kollection 3 is no longer available. In fact, MX Kollection 3 itself is no longer available. A whole raft of InterAKT products, including the recently released AJAX Toolbox, have been discontinued. MX Kollection 3 and a handful of other products have been repackaged as Kollection, which retails for $399.
As far as readers of Foundation PHP for Dreamweaver 8 are concerned, this affects the final section of Chapter 10 and a couple of pages in Chapter 11. I’ll post more details on the book’s update page when I get chance to write the necessary instructions.
September 15th, 2006
I agree wholeheartedly with the comments about the painful and bureaucratic process Adobe is using to distribute the PHP hotfix for Dreamweaver 8.0.2. While I can do nothing to stop anyone from passing a copy to other people, please do not post links to unofficial downloads on this site. Distributing the hotfix privately is a technical breach of the Adobe licence. More importantly, anyone with a small amount of technical knowhow could doctor the code in such a way as to corrupt your Dreamweaver configuration.
I have already deleted a link posted to an unofficial version. What you post on your own site is your own affair, but please don’t expect me to host links to something that I cannot guarantee is the genuine article.
September 12th, 2006
A lot of people have come to grief trying to install PHP with the Apache 2.2 series on Windows. They go to the Apache download page, see that Apache 2.2.3 is described as “the best available version”, and naturally assume that it’s the one they should use. Unfortunately, the Apache dynamic link libraries distributed with the Windows version of PHP (up to and including PHP 5.1.6) support only Apache 2.0 or Apache 1.3.
That’s finally about to change with the release of PHP 5.2.0, which is currently in the release candidate stage. I have been running PHP 5.2.0RC3 for the past few days with Apache 2.2.3, and everything seems to be working smoothly. There are appear to be no conflicts with Dreamweaver 8 or phpMyAdmin 2.8.2.4.
If you already have a testing environment that’s working satisfactorily, I don’t think there’s any point upgrading from Apache 2.0 to Apache 2.2 just to get the latest version. However, if you’re installing Apache for the first time (or on a new machine), it does mean you will soon be able to choose whichever version takes your fancy. The only difference in the configuration is that you need to use php5apache2_2.dll instead of php5apache2.dll. Assuming that you have installed PHP in C:\php5, the appropriate line in httpd.conf looks like this:
LoadModule php5_module C:/php5/php5apache2_2.dll
If you’re absolutely desperate to use Apache 2.2 and PHP 5.2.0, you can download the Windows zip file for PHP 5.2.0RC3 now. The PHP team stopped linking to release candidates on the PHP download site a couple of years ago, but there are plans to resume this practice soon in the interests of getting more people to test them before releasing the final version. There have been a couple of embarrassing cases of a “stable” version needing to be updated after only a couple of days when a small, but vital part of the code was discovered to have introduced a new bug.
September 3rd, 2006
At long last, Adobe has released a hotfix for a number of serious issues affecting the PHP MySQL server model in Dreamweaver 8.0.2. Unfortunately, you can’t just go to the Adobe site and download it. You need to contact Adobe support and ask for it. Officially, the reason is because Adobe wants to know how many people have been affected by the problems that it solves, and it wants to check that the solution “works for them”.
Anybody using my book Foundation PHP for Dreamweaver 8 should get the hotfix pronto, as it solves two problems affecting Chapters 9 and 12:
- Without the hotfix, Dreamweaver 8.0.2 strips CONCAT() out of SQL queries.
- Changes in the way PHP 5.1.4 and above handles XML resulted in the XSL Transformatiion server behavior reporting incorrectly that the source was not a valid XML document.
The hotfix also solves a couple of other important problems, so if you have Dreamweaver 8.0.2 or have been putting off updating to 8.0.2, I strongly urge you to get in touch with Adobe support and get the hotfix. You can find full details in this technote on the Adobe site.
August 28th, 2006
My author’s copies of Blog Design Solutions finally arrived this morning, and very nice it looks, too. I wrote only one chapter, so I’m looking forward to what my fellow partners in crime have to say about the world of blogging. I must admit that when I was first asked to contribute the chapter on setting up a local PHP and Perl testing environment, I wondered what the rest of the book would contain.
Well, now I know. I feel quite honoured to be with such a celebrated galaxy of web illuminati. My chapter follows a nice round-up of the blog scene by Phil Sherry. Then Andy Budd introduces Movable Type, Simon Collison waxes lyrical about ExpressionEngine, Chris J Davis and Michael Heilemann deconstruct WordPress, and John Oxton shows you how to get to grips with TextPattern. As if all that weren’t enough Richard Rutter has contributed a step-by-step tutorial on how to build your own blog tool from scratch with PHP and MySQL.
Although I’ve developed database-driven sites for several years, I’ve never bothered with a blog of my own, and the hype has always been that blogs are so easy to set up, a child could do it. Surely there couldn’t be enough to fill a whole book? How wrong I was.
Since I knew there was going to be a chapter on WordPress, I decided that was what I would use as the basis for the screenshots in my section. The Famous 5-minute Install really lived up to its name. Creating the database and setting everything up was ridiculously simple. Nor did it take me very long to work out how to change the design by downloading and installing one of the themes. How simple does it get?
I needed to get my chapter written, and then it was back to the grindstone finishing Foundation PHP for Dreamweaver 8. Once that was out of the door, I was rushed off my feet again with Foundation ActionScript for Flash 8. Consequently, I set the blog aside for several months.
When I finally got round to creating this site, I quickly realized that the 5-minute install is only the beginning of the story. Of course, if you’re happy with one of the pre-packaged themes, you can just get on with the blather. But if you want to incorporate something like WordPress into a website and making it look an integral part, there’s a huge amount of work to be done, and for me, that’s just as much fun as the blogging.
I’ve already dipped into the WordPress chapter, and only wished it had been to hand before I started digging into the all the code. The beauty of WordPress is that it’s highly configurable. But you need a good knowledge of CSS, as well as feeling comfortable crawling around inside PHP code. Fortunately, you don’t need a degree in computer science to do it, and I certainly found out more about WordPress from skimming through their chapter than I did from trying to read the online documentation.
Call me old-fashioned, but I still find it easier to read a book that I can hold in my own two hands than to absorb the same information from a website. Maybe that’s why I ended up writing books…
February 23rd, 2006
Great news from friends of ED. A second printing of Foundation PHP for Dreamweaver 8 has been ordered just two months after the book was first released. It’s great to know the book is doing well, but I’m also delighted they’ve agreed to replace the installation instructions for phpMyAdmin. I was caught in one of those dreadful situations when changes to a key open source application changed just as the book was due to hit the bookstores. It affected only two pages in a 500-page book, but what really hurt was the fact that the change took place exactly one day before the book left the printers.
Reaction to Foundation PHP for Dreamweaver 8 has been very encouraging so far. Let’s hope it sells well enough to run into many more printings!
February 19th, 2006
Next Posts