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Today a user on one of my web servers asked me why .phps files would only download and not show the highlighted PHP code as expected.

This is usually done by adding the following to your “httpd.conf”…

AddType ‘application/x-httpd-php-source’ .phps

We use the cPanel web hosting control panel and to improve security cPanel recommend using suPHP, which allows PHP scripts to run as a user rather than “nobody”.

This means that adding the above line to “httpd.conf” does not work with suPHP.

So what can be done?

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OpenCart is an open source PHP-based e-commerce online shop website solution. Ideal for new or existing stores to start selling online.

OpenCart all began because (at the time) the leading open source e-commerce solution out there was not very good, to say the least.

The first notable release was OpenCart v0.5 back in late 2006 and has been gaining momentum ever since.

The project is lead by Daniel Kerr, and I have also recently joined the team.

Download OpenCart v0.7.8

If you need any assistance with OpenCart, you can find me on the OpenCart Community Forums, and on the OpenCart Google Code project site.

Enjoy!

Turn dynamic URLs into friendly URLs

I’m sure we’re all familiar with URLs that look like this:

http://www.example.com/?nav=page

These type of URLs aren’t particularly “friendly”, inf act they are so ugly that even Google doesn’t like them!

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With the on-going abuse to email based systems, we are in need of ways to validate the email addresses we’re handling.

We all know what an email address looks like, we see them and use them every single day. But how do you know if it’s valid or not? The next obvious question should be, what defines a valid email address?

This is what I intend on investigating.

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After reading an article some time ago entitled “40 Tips for optimizing your php Code” (and some others that are suspiciously similar), I decided to redo it, but properly this time with more accurate tips, providing references and citations for each and every one.

The result is this list of over 50 PHP optimisation tips…

Enjoy!

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I wanted to prepare my wordpress powered blog for an influx of traffic from social media sites such as digg.com, in case one of my articles got big, so I decided to investigate what could be done to optimise the performance my blog.

This is the result…

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I’ve been using phpBBv2 for a long while now, on quite a few sites for one reason and another. I like phpBB because it’s simple to use, for both users and admin. Things like the “ego search” are features I wouldn’t want to live without.

phpBBv2 was great, things like the templates, and installing mods was much to be desired, however workarounds appeared and we got used to dealing with them.

Upon the announcement that phpBB3 was coming out I got excited. Now usually I wait until the first bug fix release comes out before I start using the product, however I wanted to start a new forum, so instead of installing phpBB2 I decided to try phpBB3

This is what I found…

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So you’ve got a shop, or perhaps a new product range and you want to build a website so you can sell online.

What you need is some kind of web based eCommerce shopping cart system, the question is which?

I decided to build a short list of web based eCommerce shopping cart software out there.

The scenario is this, you have a client who wants an eCommerce solution, they are paying you, but not nearly enough, you’re doing this as more of a favour. You started to develop a solution for them, but felt their feedback wasn’t sufficient which would ultimately lead to missing things out, and it probably wasn’t worth it anyway. What is needed is a base platform to build upon.

The rules are this, it must be open source, and it must work out of the box.

Please remember, this is based purely on my options, by all means, take them on board, and form your own options.

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I have a situation where there’s two scripts.

1. The main core of the code which is PHP based.
2. A perl script which is called by the mail server for parsing incoming mail.

Both of these scripts require database access to the same database.

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What is the PHPbase web framework?

PHPbase web framework (also known as PHPBase 0.0.1) is a PHP based frame work library for building websites, originally written in 2003.

Note: This framework is old, very old, dating back to 2003, however it does work in php4, for php5 I recommend ezcomponents, also take a look at symfony, however this is not as highly rated, also check pear.

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