Guru PHP

There are a number (perhaps too many) of good PHP frameworks.  Symfony is one of them.  I like to study their features to see what I can adopt in my own work.  Partly because the best ideas are worth copying and partly because it is a pity to create conflicting standards where there is already [...]

Semantic markup is a very healthy development.  But it’s giving me some headaches figuring out how best to handle its ramifications for something like a Content Management System (CMS) or any other system that integrates web material from multiple sources.
semantic markup is intended to clarify the meaning of the document
To recap the basic principle, semantic [...]

It isn’t new to have doubts about helpers.  One provocative blog by Nick Malik grabbed attention with the title “Are Helper Classes Evil?“.  That talked about helper classes, defined as classes consisting entirely of static methods.  I wanted to broaden the scope and also give my own reasons for trying to avoid helpers.
Why broaden the [...]

At the end of 2007, I placed a subscription for the Linux Journal with magazinecity.com.  It looks as if that was a mistake.  No magazines have arrived, emails went unanswered.  A phone call elicited the promise of an email.  All the email said was that I should wait a couple of months.  Further emails have [...]

Much of my time is spent as a developer of web related software.  But recently I’ve found it impossible to avoid being drawn into some quite complex hosting issues - for handling my own sites and those of clients.  Experts in internet related software will be familiar with the problems I have found; many software [...]

After nearly a year’s work, my book on the building of a Content Management System using PHP was finally published in June 2008. Although when I started working on new code for a CMS, most hosting used PHP 4, it seemed clear that such a substantial development should be done in the more advanced [...]

Mambo is a powerful and popular piece of software, but it does have problems that it shares with many other open source products. Part of the attraction of Mambo is its flexibility, but a critical factor is the richness of the features that are offered. But this owes a lot to some of the skilled [...]