CategoryPHP

July 19, 2009 — A lot of traffic between users and your site comes from the static content you’re using to set up the user interface, namely layout graphics, Stylesheets and Javascript files. Read more…

July 2, 2009 — With its latest releases, WordPress has extended its potential well beyond blogging, moving toward an advanced, robust and very powerful content management solution. By default, WordPress delivers a very lightweight, minimal system that offers only basic functionalities. But where the WordPress core falls short, there are a wealth of plug-ins that extend its limitations. Plug-ins often offer simple solutions, but they are not always elegant solutions: in particular, they can add a noticable overhead, e.g. if they offer more functionality than needed. In fact, some general and frequently needed WordPress-functionalities can be added to the engine without bloated plugins, using the software itself. This article presents 8 tips for WordPress template developers that address common CMS implementation challenges, with little to no plug-in dependence. These examples are written for WordPress 2.7+ and should also work in the latest WordPress-version. Read more…

March 24, 2009 — Here, on the Smashing Editorial team, we always try to meet the expectations of our readers. We do our best to avoid misunderstandings, and we try to spread knowedge and present only the best design practices and development techniques. However, sometimes we do make mistakes. And when we do, we apologize and do our best to correct what we’ve done. In November 2008 we published the article 10 Advanced PHP Tips To Improve Your Programming. Apparently, according to negative comments to the post, it contained some errors and some statements that are just wrong. We sincerely apologize for our mistake, and we are truly sorry for any inconvenience we caused by it. However, this simple apology is not good enough. To solve the problem, we asked Chris Shiflett and Sean Coates, two PHP gurus, to take a closer look at the article, explain its errors and make it perfectly clear what is actually right and wrong in the theory and practice. This article is a professional response to our article published a couple of months ago. Read more…

February 12, 2009 — Everyone wants to be more productive, make fewer mistakes and write good code. Of course, that all depends on you, but in most cases integrated development environments (IDEs) can help you achieve those goals more easily. Unfortunately, choosing the right IDE is very difficult because a lot needs to be considered. And the website of almost every IDE tells us it is the best one. Read more…

January 21, 2009 — PHP is one of the most widely used open-source server-side scripting languages that exist today. With over 20 million indexed domains using PHP, including major websites like Facebook, Digg and WordPress, there are good reasons why many Web developers prefer it to other server-side scripting languages, such as Python and Ruby. PHP is faster (updated), and it is the most used scripting language in practice; it has detailed documentation, a huge community, numerous ready-to-use scripts and well-supported frameworks; and most importantly, it’s much easier to get started with PHP than with other scripting languages (Python, for example). That’s why it makes perfect sense to provide the huge community of PHP developers with an overview of useful tools and resources that can make their development process easier and more effective. This post presents 50 useful PHP tools that can significantly improve your programming workflow. Among other things, you’ll find a plethora of libraries and classes that aid in debugging, testing, profiling and code-authoring in PHP. You may also want to take a look at the following related posts: * 50 Extremely Useful And Powerful CSS Tools * 15 Helpful In-Browser Web-Development Tools Read more…