PHP Classes blog

70. A better package rating system

Posted on: 2007-09-30

The PHP Classes site package rating system was improved to let the users provide better feedback to the package authors.

This post also covers several news of interest like: PHPEdit now available as prize for the innovation award winners; I will be speaking about PHP at Borland/CodeGear Borcon 2007; a new aggregator site about PHP podcasts; and a new wiki about installing applications in PHP and other languages.


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69. 13 rules to optimize your Web site performance

Posted on: 2007-08-31

Everybody wants to squeeze as much performance of their Web applications as possible. Usually this requires skilled professionals to achieve. Fortunately, several performance evaluation tools are now available to make Web site performance tuning a much easier task.

This post discusses tools like YSlow and other techniques to tune your Web servers performance, as well the results of using such tools and techniques in a busy site like PHPClasses.

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68. Launched premium services for PHP developers

Posted on: 2007-07-05

The PHP Classes site is launching premium services for PHP developers that use the site.

If you noticed some changes in the site design, that is related with the premium subscriptions.

This article tells all about what are these premium services, what they provide, how you can obtain access to the services and even how you can get free premium subscriptions.

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67. PHP security exploit with GIF images

Posted on: 2007-06-20

This post talks about a PHP security exploit that can be performed using specially crafted GIF images that embed malicious PHP code. Advice is given on what to do and to not do to avoid the problem.

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66. More defensive programming practices to survive Web site traffic peaks

Posted on: 2007-05-29

This is a follow-up of last months post about defensive programming practices. This time the article focus on practices to survive Web site traffic peaks, just like what happened to the PHPClasses site last month when the previous post was approved to Digg's front page.

This article also announces a new Web hosting comparison service available to the PHPClasses site users.

The participation of Borland/Codegear as sponsor of the PHP Programming Innovation Award is also covered on this article.

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65. 8 defensive programming best practices to prevent breaking your sites

Posted on: 2007-04-25

This article describes software development practices that have been used to prevent problems that can break Web sites.

This message also explains recent changes that were made to the site newsletter user options to reduce the site bandwidth usage to keep the hosting costs on budget.

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64. Searchonomy, folksonomy based on search keyword tags

Posted on: 2007-03-28

The PHPClasses site is introducing a new feature that will help the users find what they are looking for.

The site is now able to automatically tag its pages with keywords entered by the users in the site searches.

The top rated class packages are listed in the pages associated to each keyword tag, so the users can easily find the most appreciated packages for the topics they are interested.

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63. Make money with your tutorial videos

Posted on: 2007-02-15

This posts lets you know how to keep track of the latest tutorial videos published in the PHPClasses site.

Now the site users can rate class packages and show their appreciation about the tutorial videos provided by package authors.

It is also explained how class package authors and users can make money producing tutorial videos, and present them in the PHPClasses site. Now the site can also present tutorial videos hosted in sites that share revenue with video producers, like from Revver, for instance.

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62. A video is worth a million words

Posted on: 2007-01-31

The PHPClasses site is launching a new feature that allows class authors to submit tutorial videos about their packages, in order to provide greater interest to the package users.

This post also explains how to use screencasting programs to produce and distribute videos that capture slide presentations and live demonstration of class packages or other software running in a desktop machine, without the need to use video cameras or expensive hardware.

It is also explained how to submit tutorial screencast videos to the PHPClasses site, and use video section links to provide good navigation to browse each section of a tutorial video.

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61. File upload progress meter for PHP 4, at last!

Posted on: 2006-12-21

This post explains how to implement a upload progress meter for PHP sites, including those that still run PHP 4.

It also explains how to use a new plug-in of the Form Generation and Validation class to show an upload progress bar and live upload statistics using AJAX COMET requests.

The Forms Generation and Validation class is very important to the PHPClasses site since its beginning. This post tells about the story of the site and how this class motivated its creation.

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