Choosing The Best PHP Host For Your Website Or Blog
By [http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=Darren_Lambert]Darren Lambert
Choosing the right PHP web hosting company for your website or blog is critical. The downtime and lack of configuration offered by the low-end hosting providers can be severely detrimental to the performance and success of your website.
With so many PHP hosting companies advertising their services on the internet it can be difficult to chose which is the right one for your website or blog. If you chose the wrong host, and subsequently suffer problems, moving your website to a new host can be a painful and time consuming task.
I'll discuss the key features to look at when assessing a potential hosting company:
Bandwidth
Bandwidth is the total amount of data that your website can deliver in a single month. If you exceed the bandwidth limit your account may be suspended until you buy more bandwidth, or upgrade your account. Ensure you select a hosting package that allows you enough bandwidth for your current traffic, and for the foreseeable future.
Disk space
This is the amount of space you are allocated on the web server to store all of your files. Media rich websites can often use up disk space quickly. Ensure your potential PHP hosting package offers enough disk space for your current website, and its future growth.
Domains
Most people use one domain on a single hosting account. However, some people like to run several websites, or domains, from a single hosting account. If you intend to do this ensure the hosting package allows add-on and parked domains.
Databases
PHP hosts set a limit on the number of database you can use. If you are using a Web 2.0 application, or any other type of PHP application than uses MySql databases, ensure the hosting package has sufficient databases for your needs.
Uptime
This is the amount of time that the web server will be able to deliver your website to readers. 99% is ideal, cheaper hosting often offers less.
Fantastico
Fantastico is a system that quickly and easily installs popular Web2.0 applications into your hosting package. Most hosts include Fantastico, which allows you to easily install WordPress, Drupal and other blog and CMS systems.
Taking the time to chose the correct PHP web hosting company and package can save you a great deal of time and money as your website or blog grows.
Compare the [http://www.ascenddirectory.com/best-php-hosting ]best PHP hosting companies and packages. Darren is an experienced webmaster and PHP developer, and has worked with many PHP hosting companies.
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Darren_Lambert http://EzineArticles.com/?Choosing-The-Best-PHP-Host-For-Your-Website-Or-Blog&id=812052
Posted By: Illusion Technologies
http://www.illusiontechnologies.com
Friday, November 16, 2007
Thursday, November 15, 2007
PHP Developers
How to Learn PHP and MySQL as Quickly as Possible
By [http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=Clint_Lenard]Clint Lenard
Learning Programming is a tough subject, no matter which language you choose.
It took me months to figure out php and MySQL enough to build real, quality, Websites that were "good enough".
Eventually I figured out the easiest way to learn. It took me MONTHS to figure it out... but I did.
So what does it take to learn a Programming Language such as PHP?
"Doing" is what it takes. 90% of the people who try to take on such a task end up feeling "dumb" or "slow". This usually is NOT the case. I've found that, like myself, most people try to learn PHP from reading and going through code to "understand" what it means.
I was the same way until I was told "just do it". My mentor must have been the most patient man on the face of this earth - because I was constantly telling him I could not do it. But he kept on me telling me the same line I'm telling you: "just do it".
What does this mean? It means trying to create your very own scripts, whether small or of decent size. Start out with printing out the date to the browser. Continue with Loops. Create scripts that create mathematical equations. Print out your name, last name, etc.
Once you figure out the basics, make sure you continue to learn by doing! You will never be able to take your skills to the next level just by reading.
I also stress to other newbies that they need to learn by watching as well. Writing code can become quite a task and it's better to see someone else do that, if possible (which it is by watching videos).
It's quite easy to get caught up in bad practices while writing code if you do not follow good programming standards. Sloppy (spaghetti) code seems to be the evil of the programming world that occurs from newbies who read online tutorials by so called "programmers". Most of these "programmers" are NOT what they claim to be. So be careful of whom you choose to learn from.
PHP and MySQL (database) go together like peanut butter and jelly. I cannot tell you how important it is to learn these two languages together. MySQL may not be the "best" Database in the world but it is very easy to learn and very capable of building large scale applications.
So remember: if you're not "doing", you're not learning. Start learning PHP basics and make sure you're following along and trying to code your own small scripts when starting out. I know, I know... it LOOKS like it's too hard. It's not. This is not something you're going to learn overnight, but it's quite possible that you can learn enough to do what you need to do in just a matter of weeks!
Keep learning and continue doing.
Want to learn PHP at rapid speed? [http://learnbyvideo.blogspot.com/2007/11/learn-php-by-video.html]Check out these awesome Video Tutorials I've found!
If you're looking to become a PHP programmer - you need to see [http://learnbyvideo.blogspot.com/2007/11/learn-php-by-video.html]these videos!
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Clint_Lenard http://EzineArticles.com/?How-to-Learn-PHP-and-MySQL-as-Quickly-as-Possible&id=819035
By [http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=Clint_Lenard]Clint Lenard
Learning Programming is a tough subject, no matter which language you choose.
It took me months to figure out php and MySQL enough to build real, quality, Websites that were "good enough".
Eventually I figured out the easiest way to learn. It took me MONTHS to figure it out... but I did.
So what does it take to learn a Programming Language such as PHP?
"Doing" is what it takes. 90% of the people who try to take on such a task end up feeling "dumb" or "slow". This usually is NOT the case. I've found that, like myself, most people try to learn PHP from reading and going through code to "understand" what it means.
I was the same way until I was told "just do it". My mentor must have been the most patient man on the face of this earth - because I was constantly telling him I could not do it. But he kept on me telling me the same line I'm telling you: "just do it".
What does this mean? It means trying to create your very own scripts, whether small or of decent size. Start out with printing out the date to the browser. Continue with Loops. Create scripts that create mathematical equations. Print out your name, last name, etc.
Once you figure out the basics, make sure you continue to learn by doing! You will never be able to take your skills to the next level just by reading.
I also stress to other newbies that they need to learn by watching as well. Writing code can become quite a task and it's better to see someone else do that, if possible (which it is by watching videos).
It's quite easy to get caught up in bad practices while writing code if you do not follow good programming standards. Sloppy (spaghetti) code seems to be the evil of the programming world that occurs from newbies who read online tutorials by so called "programmers". Most of these "programmers" are NOT what they claim to be. So be careful of whom you choose to learn from.
PHP and MySQL (database) go together like peanut butter and jelly. I cannot tell you how important it is to learn these two languages together. MySQL may not be the "best" Database in the world but it is very easy to learn and very capable of building large scale applications.
So remember: if you're not "doing", you're not learning. Start learning PHP basics and make sure you're following along and trying to code your own small scripts when starting out. I know, I know... it LOOKS like it's too hard. It's not. This is not something you're going to learn overnight, but it's quite possible that you can learn enough to do what you need to do in just a matter of weeks!
Keep learning and continue doing.
Want to learn PHP at rapid speed? [http://learnbyvideo.blogspot.com/2007/11/learn-php-by-video.html]Check out these awesome Video Tutorials I've found!
If you're looking to become a PHP programmer - you need to see [http://learnbyvideo.blogspot.com/2007/11/learn-php-by-video.html]these videos!
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Clint_Lenard http://EzineArticles.com/?How-to-Learn-PHP-and-MySQL-as-Quickly-as-Possible&id=819035
Wednesday, November 14, 2007
Introduction to PHP
Introduction to PHP
By [http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=Gagandeep_Singh_Tathgar]Gagandeep Singh Tathgar
What is PHP?
PHP stands for "PHP: HyperText Preprocessor". PHP is a server side scripting language for making dynamically driven websites. PHP written scripts can be used to keep track of your visitor’s activities on your site, send out emails to your subscribers, let your users upload files or images to your site, and drive the content on your site dynamically using databases. The possibilities are endless. Most of the social networking websites you visit are writing in PHP. Yep! PHP is that powerful.
What are PHP benefits?
PHP is a free open source language. That means you don't have to pay thousands of dollars in licensing fee to acquire PHP. Best of all, it is easy to install. The most striking feature of it is that it is easy to learn. PHP is used by millions of people and developers around the world. There are thousands of websites on the internet which are written using PHP. One primary example is Yahoo! Bookmarks.
What PHP can do for me?
PHP can greatly enhance the functionality of your website. It allows you to write scripts which let your visitors interact with you through your website. If you run a small business website, you can use PHP to let your users send you feed back to you on your products ad services or create a form which will allow your customers to send you emails, etc, etc.
Is PHP easy to learn?
Thou PHP will allow you to almost do anything complicated on your website. But you can implement simple forms or logic on your site very easily. At [http://php-learn-it.com]PHP-Learn-It.com, i explain some of those techniques with examples.
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Gagandeep_Singh_Tathgar http://EzineArticles.com/?Introduction-to-PHP&id=556967
Posted By: Illusion Technologies
http://www.illusiontechnologies.com
By [http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=Gagandeep_Singh_Tathgar]Gagandeep Singh Tathgar
What is PHP?
PHP stands for "PHP: HyperText Preprocessor". PHP is a server side scripting language for making dynamically driven websites. PHP written scripts can be used to keep track of your visitor’s activities on your site, send out emails to your subscribers, let your users upload files or images to your site, and drive the content on your site dynamically using databases. The possibilities are endless. Most of the social networking websites you visit are writing in PHP. Yep! PHP is that powerful.
What are PHP benefits?
PHP is a free open source language. That means you don't have to pay thousands of dollars in licensing fee to acquire PHP. Best of all, it is easy to install. The most striking feature of it is that it is easy to learn. PHP is used by millions of people and developers around the world. There are thousands of websites on the internet which are written using PHP. One primary example is Yahoo! Bookmarks.
What PHP can do for me?
PHP can greatly enhance the functionality of your website. It allows you to write scripts which let your visitors interact with you through your website. If you run a small business website, you can use PHP to let your users send you feed back to you on your products ad services or create a form which will allow your customers to send you emails, etc, etc.
Is PHP easy to learn?
Thou PHP will allow you to almost do anything complicated on your website. But you can implement simple forms or logic on your site very easily. At [http://php-learn-it.com]PHP-Learn-It.com, i explain some of those techniques with examples.
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Gagandeep_Singh_Tathgar http://EzineArticles.com/?Introduction-to-PHP&id=556967
Posted By: Illusion Technologies
http://www.illusiontechnologies.com
Friday, November 2, 2007
PHP Developers
Speeding PHP using APC PHP Cache
By [http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=Jon_Murray]Jon Murray
If you look at a PHP source file you will notice one thing. It's a source file. Not particularly surprising, but think about when you deploy a PHP application, what do you deploy? PHP source files. Now for many other languages; Java, C, etc when you deploy an application you deploy the compiled file. So, the question that you want to ask yourself is this, how much time does a PHP application spend compiling source files vs running the code? I'll answer that for you, a lot.
There are advantages to being able to deploy source files though. It makes it easy to do on the fly modifications or bug fixes to a program, much like we used to do in the early BASIC languages. Just change the file and the next time it's accessed your change is reflected. So, how do we keep the dynamic nature of PHP, but not recompile our files every time they are accessed?
A PHP cache. It's surprising to me that this concept isn't built into the base PHP engine, but perhaps that's because some company's can sell this add on to speed up PHP. Luckily for us, some companies/open source projects provide this plug in to PHP at no charge. These plug ins are generally known as PHP accelerators, some of them do some optimization and then caching and some only do caching. I'm not going to pass judgement on which one is the best, any of them are better than nothing, but I decided to use APC, the Alternative PHP Cache. I chose this one because it is still in active development and is open source and free.
Alternative php cache can be found at php.net, just look down the left column for APC. It comes in source form, so you will need to compile it before installing it, don't worry about that part. If you're using Red Hat 4 or CentOS4 I'll tell you exactly how to do it. If you're using something else, you'll need the same tools, but getting the tools might be a bit different.
1. The Tools
Do you know how many web sites, forums and blogs I went to with my error messages before I found the answers as to what I was missing when I was trying to install APC - Alternative PHP Cache? Two days worth, but I finally found the correct combination and it's really quite obvious as is everything once you know the answer. There are three sets of dev tools that you will need.
1a. You'll need a package called "Development Tools" this will include all the important dev tools like the GCC compiler, etc.
1b. You'll need a package called php-devel which as you might guess are development tools for PHP
1c. You'll need a package called httpd-devel which of course are dev tools for Apache web server.
On Red Hat or CentOS getting these should be as easy as the following 3 commands:
yum groupinstall "Development Tools"
yum install php-devel
yum install httpd-devel
You'll do these three one at a time and follow any instructions (usually just saying yes).
Now it's time to follow the instructions contained in the APC package. Since these may change over time I'm not going to go through them. They are very complete. If you follow the instructions and get an apc.so file out of it, then you're all set, just modify your php.ini file and you're good to go.
There are two problems that I encountered that you may encounter too. The first is an error when running phpize. I ignored this error and everything succeeded okay, but not before I spent hours looking for the solution to this error. Here is the error.
configure.in:9: warning: underquoted definition of PHP_WITH_PHP_CONFIG
run info '(automake)Extending aclocal'
or see http://sources.redhat.com/automake/automake.html#Extending-aclocal
configure.in:32: warning: underquoted definition of PHP_EXT_BUILDDIR
configure.in:33: warning: underquoted definition of PHP_EXT_DIR
configure.in:34: warning: underquoted definition of PHP_EXT_SRCDIR
configure.in:35: warning: underquoted definition of PHP_ALWAYS_SHARED
acinclude.m4:19: warning: underquoted definition of PHP_PROG_RE2C
People would have had me updating my PHP version from 4.3.9 and everything else under the sun to get rid of this error, but in the end it didn't matter. My APC compiled and installed nicely and I am good to go.
The other slight problem that I ran into was the location of php-config. The install instructions wanted me to do the following:
./configure --enable-apc-mmap --with-apxs --with-php-config=/usr/local/php/bin/php-config
However my php-config is in /usr/bin/php-config. Making that change allowed this part to work.
So, have at it, once it's done you can expect to see huge improvements in your web site response times and reductions on your CPU load. One more quick note, My server hosts about 20 web sites, but only 3 or 4 are really busy. To reduce the memory footprint of caching everything for all 20 sites I used the apc.filters property. Although this property is slightly flawed for non qualified includes, it worked nicely for my Serendipity blogs. Your mileage with this property will vary according to the software you are using and how it does it's includes.
Jon runs UFC fan site [http://www.ufcresultslive.com/categories/39-UFC-Results/]UFC Results come to UFC Results at http://www.ufcresultslive.com for UFC Results, Predictions, News and of course Fighter Rankings.
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Jon_Murray http://EzineArticles.com/?Speeding-PHP-using-APC-PHP-Cache&id=800655
Posted By: Illusion Technologies
http://www.illusiontechnologies.com
By [http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=Jon_Murray]Jon Murray
If you look at a PHP source file you will notice one thing. It's a source file. Not particularly surprising, but think about when you deploy a PHP application, what do you deploy? PHP source files. Now for many other languages; Java, C, etc when you deploy an application you deploy the compiled file. So, the question that you want to ask yourself is this, how much time does a PHP application spend compiling source files vs running the code? I'll answer that for you, a lot.
There are advantages to being able to deploy source files though. It makes it easy to do on the fly modifications or bug fixes to a program, much like we used to do in the early BASIC languages. Just change the file and the next time it's accessed your change is reflected. So, how do we keep the dynamic nature of PHP, but not recompile our files every time they are accessed?
A PHP cache. It's surprising to me that this concept isn't built into the base PHP engine, but perhaps that's because some company's can sell this add on to speed up PHP. Luckily for us, some companies/open source projects provide this plug in to PHP at no charge. These plug ins are generally known as PHP accelerators, some of them do some optimization and then caching and some only do caching. I'm not going to pass judgement on which one is the best, any of them are better than nothing, but I decided to use APC, the Alternative PHP Cache. I chose this one because it is still in active development and is open source and free.
Alternative php cache can be found at php.net, just look down the left column for APC. It comes in source form, so you will need to compile it before installing it, don't worry about that part. If you're using Red Hat 4 or CentOS4 I'll tell you exactly how to do it. If you're using something else, you'll need the same tools, but getting the tools might be a bit different.
1. The Tools
Do you know how many web sites, forums and blogs I went to with my error messages before I found the answers as to what I was missing when I was trying to install APC - Alternative PHP Cache? Two days worth, but I finally found the correct combination and it's really quite obvious as is everything once you know the answer. There are three sets of dev tools that you will need.
1a. You'll need a package called "Development Tools" this will include all the important dev tools like the GCC compiler, etc.
1b. You'll need a package called php-devel which as you might guess are development tools for PHP
1c. You'll need a package called httpd-devel which of course are dev tools for Apache web server.
On Red Hat or CentOS getting these should be as easy as the following 3 commands:
yum groupinstall "Development Tools"
yum install php-devel
yum install httpd-devel
You'll do these three one at a time and follow any instructions (usually just saying yes).
Now it's time to follow the instructions contained in the APC package. Since these may change over time I'm not going to go through them. They are very complete. If you follow the instructions and get an apc.so file out of it, then you're all set, just modify your php.ini file and you're good to go.
There are two problems that I encountered that you may encounter too. The first is an error when running phpize. I ignored this error and everything succeeded okay, but not before I spent hours looking for the solution to this error. Here is the error.
configure.in:9: warning: underquoted definition of PHP_WITH_PHP_CONFIG
run info '(automake)Extending aclocal'
or see http://sources.redhat.com/automake/automake.html#Extending-aclocal
configure.in:32: warning: underquoted definition of PHP_EXT_BUILDDIR
configure.in:33: warning: underquoted definition of PHP_EXT_DIR
configure.in:34: warning: underquoted definition of PHP_EXT_SRCDIR
configure.in:35: warning: underquoted definition of PHP_ALWAYS_SHARED
acinclude.m4:19: warning: underquoted definition of PHP_PROG_RE2C
People would have had me updating my PHP version from 4.3.9 and everything else under the sun to get rid of this error, but in the end it didn't matter. My APC compiled and installed nicely and I am good to go.
The other slight problem that I ran into was the location of php-config. The install instructions wanted me to do the following:
./configure --enable-apc-mmap --with-apxs --with-php-config=/usr/local/php/bin/php-config
However my php-config is in /usr/bin/php-config. Making that change allowed this part to work.
So, have at it, once it's done you can expect to see huge improvements in your web site response times and reductions on your CPU load. One more quick note, My server hosts about 20 web sites, but only 3 or 4 are really busy. To reduce the memory footprint of caching everything for all 20 sites I used the apc.filters property. Although this property is slightly flawed for non qualified includes, it worked nicely for my Serendipity blogs. Your mileage with this property will vary according to the software you are using and how it does it's includes.
Jon runs UFC fan site [http://www.ufcresultslive.com/categories/39-UFC-Results/]UFC Results come to UFC Results at http://www.ufcresultslive.com for UFC Results, Predictions, News and of course Fighter Rankings.
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Jon_Murray http://EzineArticles.com/?Speeding-PHP-using-APC-PHP-Cache&id=800655
Posted By: Illusion Technologies
http://www.illusiontechnologies.com
Wednesday, October 31, 2007
PHP Developers
How to Implement CAPTCHA With PHP and GD
By [http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=Andrew_Ivanov]Andrew Ivanov
So, you have a public submission form on your website (contact page, forum submission,blogs comment form) and need to prevent spam by auto-submitters. Common way to do this is to implement CAPTCHA - an image with randomly generated string
(quote from Wikipedia, free online enciclopedia: “A CAPTCHA is a type of challenge-response test used in computing to determine whether the user is human. "CAPTCHA" is an acronym for "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart", trademarked by Carnegie Mellon University.”)
Simple, quick and efficient PHP solution for implemet CAPTCHA:
the advantage of this solution: it is easy to read symbols by human and automated captcha processor software, but hard to process the image by computer because common CAPTCHA processors can't understand which one of the outputted symbols it must ignore!
obviously you need PHP engine enabled for your webserver, for execute PHP scripts, and GD (PHP graphics library) for generate the image. Webserver, PHP and GD versions are no matter, the solution below is tested for Apache(Windows and Unix), IIS(Windows), PHP-4, PHP-5, GD, GD2
1) Make a PHP script (separate file captcha.php) which will generate the CAPTCHA image:
[?php
session_start();
header("Expires: Mon, 26 Jul 1997 05:00:00 GMT");
header("Last-Modified: " . gmdate("D, d M Y H:i:s") . " GMT");
header("Cache-Control: no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate");
header("Cache-Control: post-check=0, pre-check=0", false);
header("Pragma: no-cache");
function _generateRandom($length=6){
$_rand_src = array(
array(48,57) //digits
, array(97,122) //lowercase chars
// , array(65,90) //uppercase chars
);
srand ((double) microtime() * 1000000);
$random_string = "";
for($i=0;$i
By [http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=Andrew_Ivanov]Andrew Ivanov
So, you have a public submission form on your website (contact page, forum submission,blogs comment form) and need to prevent spam by auto-submitters. Common way to do this is to implement CAPTCHA - an image with randomly generated string
(quote from Wikipedia, free online enciclopedia: “A CAPTCHA is a type of challenge-response test used in computing to determine whether the user is human. "CAPTCHA" is an acronym for "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart", trademarked by Carnegie Mellon University.”)
Simple, quick and efficient PHP solution for implemet CAPTCHA:
the advantage of this solution: it is easy to read symbols by human and automated captcha processor software, but hard to process the image by computer because common CAPTCHA processors can't understand which one of the outputted symbols it must ignore!
obviously you need PHP engine enabled for your webserver, for execute PHP scripts, and GD (PHP graphics library) for generate the image. Webserver, PHP and GD versions are no matter, the solution below is tested for Apache(Windows and Unix), IIS(Windows), PHP-4, PHP-5, GD, GD2
1) Make a PHP script (separate file captcha.php) which will generate the CAPTCHA image:
[?php
session_start();
header("Expires: Mon, 26 Jul 1997 05:00:00 GMT");
header("Last-Modified: " . gmdate("D, d M Y H:i:s") . " GMT");
header("Cache-Control: no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate");
header("Cache-Control: post-check=0, pre-check=0", false);
header("Pragma: no-cache");
function _generateRandom($length=6){
$_rand_src = array(
array(48,57) //digits
, array(97,122) //lowercase chars
// , array(65,90) //uppercase chars
);
srand ((double) microtime() * 1000000);
$random_string = "";
for($i=0;$i
Monday, October 29, 2007
PHP Developers
Choose Wisely: PHP Templates and Search Engine Rank
By [http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=Jacob_Filipp]Jacob Filipp
This article is intended for PHP web developers who create template systems for consistently presenting website content. PHP designers who create their own template systems should be concerned about how their choices affect the website's position in search engines. Below is a discussion of three types of systems, their impact on search ranking and a recommendation for the best approach.
Webpage as a CGI Argument
In this architecture one PHP script contains the entire template, and plugs in content from a file it reads in - getting the file name from a CGI parameter. These types of systems are not only prone to security problems (as users can modify the path argument to retrieve arbitrary files) but are also ineffective for search engine optimization.
This particular design does not allow for titles and keyword/description meta-tags to be associated with individual pages. This is because the header portion of the template includes the section within it, and only allows for one site-wide title and set of meta-tags. Titles are one of the most important page elements, and having one title - unrelated to the actual content retrieved - results in a lower rank in search engines.
There are two other detrimental SEO effects this type of system has. The first is that each unique page is viewed as an aspect of the template script, rather than as a unique standalone page. This can result in search engines lowering the importance of individual content pages relative to the template script - which is often not the desired result. The other weakness of this approach is that having individual pages set up as CGI arguments makes site metrics harder to track, as statistics often show a visit to a specific page as a visit to the general template script. The popular web statistics packages AWstats and Webalizer are most affected by this.
However, this type of templating system is popular and sucessfully used in the world of e-commerce. In such systems, product information is stored in a database and is inserted into the template when a product is requested by its code. This means that both a unique title and a set of meta-tags can be stored alongside the product data (or generated on the fly), and inserted into the global template effectively. The only detrimental effects that remain are the latter mentioned two, and are usually an acceptable tradeoff for the increased ease of administration that a database-driven system provides.
Template as an Include
In this architecture, each page on the website has its own filename with a .php extension. The top and bottom portions of the template are stored in separate files that are included (using include_once() ) by each content file. This technique increases the importance of the page with search engines, as each page is its own standalone page rather than a CGI argument. This type of template system also makes it simple to track page views through regular website statistics software.
On the other hand, this type of template system still has the weakness of having one title and one set of meta-tags for the entire site. This is, again, because the header portion of templates has to include everything from the opening of the tag to the end of the code for the header portion of the template. And this area includes the title and meta-tags. One workaround for this type of system is to code the top template page to check which file it is being called from, and to substitute a suitable pre-coded title. Although effective, such a system is cumbersome to maintain as each new page that is published warrants a new title and meta-tag entry in this secondary system.
Body-Only Includes
The ideal PHP templating system will permit content producers to enjoy the reusability of templates, while maintaining unique titles and metadata for each page with ease. The system that meets all of these SEO needs is a "body-only include" system: a system where each php content page includes the top and bottom portions of the template (as in the previous approach), but only includes the elements below the body tag. This translates into a document that has its own html, head, title and meta tags, has an include_once() statement which is called at the top of the body element and includes the top portion of the template, has the content, and an include for the footer portion of the template. Such a system allows for individual editing of the title and meta-information during the creation of documents and solves the problems that both of the aforementioned systems face.
I find this system the most search-engine friendly, because it keeps the title information and the content together - allowing for the presence of relevant, unique titles for each page. This system is also the most human friendly, as storing the title information in the same file as the page content allows for fast updating and avoids maintaining a second "workaround" system that attempts to match titles to content.
Conclusion
The types of template system that PHP developers choose to implement for clients' sites have a crucial impact on the future search-engine popularity of the client's webpages. Important factors to consider when developing a template solution are: relevant titles tied to content, relevant meta-tags, standalone files and ease of statistics tracking. The popular approaches of page-as-an-argument and template-as-an-include do not effectively provide these functions. Including template information after the body tag, and keeping headers intact is the best way to ensure that sites are optimized for search engines - and this is why you should consider using the Body-Only Includes model during your next project.
Jacob Filipp is a Canadian search engine optimization specialist at [http://powerspiritonline.com/contact.html]Powerspirit. Jacob has 7 years of experience as a web developer and webmaster.
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Jacob_Filipp http://EzineArticles.com/?Choose-Wisely:-PHP-Templates-and-Search-Engine-Rank&id=597857
By [http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=Jacob_Filipp]Jacob Filipp
This article is intended for PHP web developers who create template systems for consistently presenting website content. PHP designers who create their own template systems should be concerned about how their choices affect the website's position in search engines. Below is a discussion of three types of systems, their impact on search ranking and a recommendation for the best approach.
Webpage as a CGI Argument
In this architecture one PHP script contains the entire template, and plugs in content from a file it reads in - getting the file name from a CGI parameter. These types of systems are not only prone to security problems (as users can modify the path argument to retrieve arbitrary files) but are also ineffective for search engine optimization.
This particular design does not allow for titles and keyword/description meta-tags to be associated with individual pages. This is because the header portion of the template includes the section within it, and only allows for one site-wide title and set of meta-tags. Titles are one of the most important page elements, and having one title - unrelated to the actual content retrieved - results in a lower rank in search engines.
There are two other detrimental SEO effects this type of system has. The first is that each unique page is viewed as an aspect of the template script, rather than as a unique standalone page. This can result in search engines lowering the importance of individual content pages relative to the template script - which is often not the desired result. The other weakness of this approach is that having individual pages set up as CGI arguments makes site metrics harder to track, as statistics often show a visit to a specific page as a visit to the general template script. The popular web statistics packages AWstats and Webalizer are most affected by this.
However, this type of templating system is popular and sucessfully used in the world of e-commerce. In such systems, product information is stored in a database and is inserted into the template when a product is requested by its code. This means that both a unique title and a set of meta-tags can be stored alongside the product data (or generated on the fly), and inserted into the global template effectively. The only detrimental effects that remain are the latter mentioned two, and are usually an acceptable tradeoff for the increased ease of administration that a database-driven system provides.
Template as an Include
In this architecture, each page on the website has its own filename with a .php extension. The top and bottom portions of the template are stored in separate files that are included (using include_once() ) by each content file. This technique increases the importance of the page with search engines, as each page is its own standalone page rather than a CGI argument. This type of template system also makes it simple to track page views through regular website statistics software.
On the other hand, this type of template system still has the weakness of having one title and one set of meta-tags for the entire site. This is, again, because the header portion of templates has to include everything from the opening of the tag to the end of the code for the header portion of the template. And this area includes the title and meta-tags. One workaround for this type of system is to code the top template page to check which file it is being called from, and to substitute a suitable pre-coded title. Although effective, such a system is cumbersome to maintain as each new page that is published warrants a new title and meta-tag entry in this secondary system.
Body-Only Includes
The ideal PHP templating system will permit content producers to enjoy the reusability of templates, while maintaining unique titles and metadata for each page with ease. The system that meets all of these SEO needs is a "body-only include" system: a system where each php content page includes the top and bottom portions of the template (as in the previous approach), but only includes the elements below the body tag. This translates into a document that has its own html, head, title and meta tags, has an include_once() statement which is called at the top of the body element and includes the top portion of the template, has the content, and an include for the footer portion of the template. Such a system allows for individual editing of the title and meta-information during the creation of documents and solves the problems that both of the aforementioned systems face.
I find this system the most search-engine friendly, because it keeps the title information and the content together - allowing for the presence of relevant, unique titles for each page. This system is also the most human friendly, as storing the title information in the same file as the page content allows for fast updating and avoids maintaining a second "workaround" system that attempts to match titles to content.
Conclusion
The types of template system that PHP developers choose to implement for clients' sites have a crucial impact on the future search-engine popularity of the client's webpages. Important factors to consider when developing a template solution are: relevant titles tied to content, relevant meta-tags, standalone files and ease of statistics tracking. The popular approaches of page-as-an-argument and template-as-an-include do not effectively provide these functions. Including template information after the body tag, and keeping headers intact is the best way to ensure that sites are optimized for search engines - and this is why you should consider using the Body-Only Includes model during your next project.
Jacob Filipp is a Canadian search engine optimization specialist at [http://powerspiritonline.com/contact.html]Powerspirit. Jacob has 7 years of experience as a web developer and webmaster.
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Jacob_Filipp http://EzineArticles.com/?Choose-Wisely:-PHP-Templates-and-Search-Engine-Rank&id=597857
Saturday, October 27, 2007
PHP Developers
SQL Server ASP Websites - First Steps for Novice Developers
By [http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=Margaret_Cruise_O'Brien]Margaret Cruise O'Brien
Database-Driven Websites
Ten years ago, novice web developers worked hard to create static websites with HTML and perhaps a bit of Javascript to spice up the action. Now, novice developers are starting with database-driven web pages that let web site visitors enter data and view dynamic content. When you're learning, it's important to start small and work your way up to large complex sites. So where should the novice developer start?
Your First Web Database Application
To keep motivated, you should choose a small project that will actually be useful. A great candidate is the opt-in page: a web page that lets visitors provide their name and email address to be saved to the website database. Presumably the website owner will use this data to send out newsletters and email marketing, but we won't worry about that! This is the perfect training application: a simple but useful one-page database application.
Choosing Your Tools - the Microsoft option
Once you've decided what you're going to develop, you need to decide which tools to develop with. If you're on a budget (and who isn't), then Microsoft has released a development environment available for free. You can download and install Visual Web Developer Express from the Microsoft website, which also comes with a free version of the popular database engine Microsoft SQL Server. The free database is branded as SQL Server Express.
There are other free alternatives open to you - MySQL and PHP has traditionally been a popular choice. If you come from a Linux or Unix background, you'll probably want to go that route, but if you are used to working on Windows machines, then the Microsoft option is appealing.
Creating the Table
For the simple opt-in application, you need a database table that will store names and their email addresses - this is about as simple as it gets. Visual Web Developer Express provides a GUI to let you create tables. For this project, you'll be creating a three-column table. Of course, you need one column to store the visitor's name, and another to store the email address. So why the third?
For proper database design, you should also have a unique ID column within the table that is defined as a primary key and set as an identity field. If this terminology is alien to you, you'll need to read some tutorials on SQL and creating tables. You will find lots of online articles, including [http://www.salmontraining.com/sqlexpresszone/index.html]step-by-step walk-throughs on the process. The work you put into learning basic table creation at this stage will be invaluable for future web projects!
Creating the Web Page
The opt-in web page needs to provide two input boxes to allow the visitor to enter a name and email address. If you've already done a bit of HTML coding, that's no problem to you. The tricky bit is connecting the page to the database and ensuring that the details are written to the table.
This is where Visual Web Developer Express comes into its own. With alternative programming languages, this would take lines of code to put together (and hours of debugging when it doesn't work!). With VWD Express, you use the GUI interface and wizards to drag-and-drop ASP.Net controls to access the database - the tool creates the code you need behind the scenes.
Finding a Hosting Provider
In order to go live, your hosting provider must support ASP.Net and SQL Server. Shop around - there are a number of competing providers out there. If you're working on a budget, then you'll find Go Daddy hard to beat.
Going Live
Getting things working on your laptop or PC is a great achievement! But putting your database application live is real success.
If what's been described up to now sounds too easy - well, the development process is relatively simple with the Microsoft ASP.Net development environment. The Microsoft tools hide much of the complexity of database development.
Unfortunately, developers can hit a roadblock when they try to put their new web application live on a hosted site. Getting the web page to connect to the live database is the first hurdle as the hosting provider will most likely be using SQL Server Enterprise, the big brother of the database on the local laptop or PC. Hosting providers may insist that developers use their own Control Panel to work with the database and create the database table.
Persevere! A bit of time and effort spent going live is worth the feeling of achievement when your first website visitor enters details into the web page and the data flows successfully to the live database!
Margaret Cruise O'Brien is a database consultant, and founder of [http://www.salmontraining.com]Salmon Training Check out our website for training on [http://www.salmontraining.com/sqlexpresszone/going_live_with_vwd_and_sqlexpress.aspx]going live on Go Daddy with a simple ASP.Net SQL Server application
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Margaret_Cruise_O'Brien http://EzineArticles.com/?SQL-Server-ASP-Websites---First-Steps-for-Novice-Developers&id=684430
By [http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=Margaret_Cruise_O'Brien]Margaret Cruise O'Brien
Database-Driven Websites
Ten years ago, novice web developers worked hard to create static websites with HTML and perhaps a bit of Javascript to spice up the action. Now, novice developers are starting with database-driven web pages that let web site visitors enter data and view dynamic content. When you're learning, it's important to start small and work your way up to large complex sites. So where should the novice developer start?
Your First Web Database Application
To keep motivated, you should choose a small project that will actually be useful. A great candidate is the opt-in page: a web page that lets visitors provide their name and email address to be saved to the website database. Presumably the website owner will use this data to send out newsletters and email marketing, but we won't worry about that! This is the perfect training application: a simple but useful one-page database application.
Choosing Your Tools - the Microsoft option
Once you've decided what you're going to develop, you need to decide which tools to develop with. If you're on a budget (and who isn't), then Microsoft has released a development environment available for free. You can download and install Visual Web Developer Express from the Microsoft website, which also comes with a free version of the popular database engine Microsoft SQL Server. The free database is branded as SQL Server Express.
There are other free alternatives open to you - MySQL and PHP has traditionally been a popular choice. If you come from a Linux or Unix background, you'll probably want to go that route, but if you are used to working on Windows machines, then the Microsoft option is appealing.
Creating the Table
For the simple opt-in application, you need a database table that will store names and their email addresses - this is about as simple as it gets. Visual Web Developer Express provides a GUI to let you create tables. For this project, you'll be creating a three-column table. Of course, you need one column to store the visitor's name, and another to store the email address. So why the third?
For proper database design, you should also have a unique ID column within the table that is defined as a primary key and set as an identity field. If this terminology is alien to you, you'll need to read some tutorials on SQL and creating tables. You will find lots of online articles, including [http://www.salmontraining.com/sqlexpresszone/index.html]step-by-step walk-throughs on the process. The work you put into learning basic table creation at this stage will be invaluable for future web projects!
Creating the Web Page
The opt-in web page needs to provide two input boxes to allow the visitor to enter a name and email address. If you've already done a bit of HTML coding, that's no problem to you. The tricky bit is connecting the page to the database and ensuring that the details are written to the table.
This is where Visual Web Developer Express comes into its own. With alternative programming languages, this would take lines of code to put together (and hours of debugging when it doesn't work!). With VWD Express, you use the GUI interface and wizards to drag-and-drop ASP.Net controls to access the database - the tool creates the code you need behind the scenes.
Finding a Hosting Provider
In order to go live, your hosting provider must support ASP.Net and SQL Server. Shop around - there are a number of competing providers out there. If you're working on a budget, then you'll find Go Daddy hard to beat.
Going Live
Getting things working on your laptop or PC is a great achievement! But putting your database application live is real success.
If what's been described up to now sounds too easy - well, the development process is relatively simple with the Microsoft ASP.Net development environment. The Microsoft tools hide much of the complexity of database development.
Unfortunately, developers can hit a roadblock when they try to put their new web application live on a hosted site. Getting the web page to connect to the live database is the first hurdle as the hosting provider will most likely be using SQL Server Enterprise, the big brother of the database on the local laptop or PC. Hosting providers may insist that developers use their own Control Panel to work with the database and create the database table.
Persevere! A bit of time and effort spent going live is worth the feeling of achievement when your first website visitor enters details into the web page and the data flows successfully to the live database!
Margaret Cruise O'Brien is a database consultant, and founder of [http://www.salmontraining.com]Salmon Training Check out our website for training on [http://www.salmontraining.com/sqlexpresszone/going_live_with_vwd_and_sqlexpress.aspx]going live on Go Daddy with a simple ASP.Net SQL Server application
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Margaret_Cruise_O'Brien http://EzineArticles.com/?SQL-Server-ASP-Websites---First-Steps-for-Novice-Developers&id=684430
Wednesday, October 24, 2007
PHP Developers
Introduction to PHP
By [http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=Gagandeep_Singh_Tathgar]Gagandeep Singh Tathgar
What is PHP?
PHP stands for "PHP: HyperText Preprocessor". PHP is a server side scripting language for making dynamically driven websites. PHP written scripts can be used to keep track of your visitor’s activities on your site, send out emails to your subscribers, let your users upload files or images to your site, and drive the content on your site dynamically using databases. The possibilities are endless. Most of the social networking websites you visit are writing in PHP. Yep! PHP is that powerful.
What are PHP benefits?
PHP is a free open source language. That means you don't have to pay thousands of dollars in licensing fee to acquire PHP. Best of all, it is easy to install. The most striking feature of it is that it is easy to learn. PHP is used by millions of people and developers around the world. There are thousands of websites on the internet which are written using PHP. One primary example is Yahoo! Bookmarks.
What PHP can do for me?
PHP can greatly enhance the functionality of your website. It allows you to write scripts which let your visitors interact with you through your website. If you run a small business website, you can use PHP to let your users send you feed back to you on your products ad services or create a form which will allow your customers to send you emails, etc, etc.
Is PHP easy to learn?
Thou PHP will allow you to almost do anything complicated on your website. But you can implement simple forms or logic on your site very easily. At [http://php-learn-it.com]PHP-Learn-It.com, i explain some of those techniques with examples.
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Gagandeep_Singh_Tathgar http://EzineArticles.com/?Introduction-to-PHP&id=556967
By [http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=Gagandeep_Singh_Tathgar]Gagandeep Singh Tathgar
What is PHP?
PHP stands for "PHP: HyperText Preprocessor". PHP is a server side scripting language for making dynamically driven websites. PHP written scripts can be used to keep track of your visitor’s activities on your site, send out emails to your subscribers, let your users upload files or images to your site, and drive the content on your site dynamically using databases. The possibilities are endless. Most of the social networking websites you visit are writing in PHP. Yep! PHP is that powerful.
What are PHP benefits?
PHP is a free open source language. That means you don't have to pay thousands of dollars in licensing fee to acquire PHP. Best of all, it is easy to install. The most striking feature of it is that it is easy to learn. PHP is used by millions of people and developers around the world. There are thousands of websites on the internet which are written using PHP. One primary example is Yahoo! Bookmarks.
What PHP can do for me?
PHP can greatly enhance the functionality of your website. It allows you to write scripts which let your visitors interact with you through your website. If you run a small business website, you can use PHP to let your users send you feed back to you on your products ad services or create a form which will allow your customers to send you emails, etc, etc.
Is PHP easy to learn?
Thou PHP will allow you to almost do anything complicated on your website. But you can implement simple forms or logic on your site very easily. At [http://php-learn-it.com]PHP-Learn-It.com, i explain some of those techniques with examples.
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Gagandeep_Singh_Tathgar http://EzineArticles.com/?Introduction-to-PHP&id=556967
Monday, October 22, 2007
Illusion Technologies: PHP Developers
Easy Website Builder For Beginners And Pro Web Developers
By [http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=Bruce_Manaka]Bruce Manaka
Have you ever wanted to build a website for personal or business use without the constraints of website templates or the hassle of learning HTML, PHP, web development software, and the necessary learning curve involved? Have you ever been asked by potential clients or customers whether or not you have a website where they can find out more about you and the services you provide?
Nowadays if you do not have a website, you stand the chance of losing out on a lot of business, and potential customers may not look upon you as being "professional." Likewise, for the individual who does not have a business per se, he or she stands the chance of amassing a vastly wider network of contacts through a personal website than the person who relies only on person-to-person network organizations.
Every business needs a website! It's still surprising to see so many businesses that do not have a web presence. This is mainly due to a combination of economic and time factors. It may cost anywhere between $500 to $1500+ to hire a web designer to build a business site containing 1-10 pages of content. To build a site on your own requires time and some knowledge of web development skills. Seen in this light, it's understandable that business owners procrastinate in this very important aspect of their business.
However, building a website has finally reached the 21st Century as far as ease of use and availability to the masses. An easy website builder tool is being released to the world allowing unprecedented ability for just about anyone to build their own website for personal and business use. Whether it's the beginner who wants a one page website or the web developer putting together a hundred page business site, technology just took a huge jump with the advent of Site Rubix, the brainchild of Kyle and Carson of Wealthy Affiliate.
There is absolutely no HTML coding skills needed. Images, video, screen capture and content can be added quickly and easily. With simple click and drag features, websites can be designed the way you want it to look. There is also no need to go through the learning curve required to use Dreamweaver, Frontpage and other web development software.
Site Rubix is an easy website builder that has leveled the playing field in terms of online presence. With this latest in web technology, there is no reason whatsoever to go without a website for yourself and your business!
Would you like to know more about the most recommended website builder? Find out at http://recommendedinternetmarketingresource.blogspot.com/
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Bruce_Manaka http://EzineArticles.com/?Easy-Website-Builder-For-Beginners-And-Pro-Web-Developers&id=765308
By [http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=Bruce_Manaka]Bruce Manaka
Have you ever wanted to build a website for personal or business use without the constraints of website templates or the hassle of learning HTML, PHP, web development software, and the necessary learning curve involved? Have you ever been asked by potential clients or customers whether or not you have a website where they can find out more about you and the services you provide?
Nowadays if you do not have a website, you stand the chance of losing out on a lot of business, and potential customers may not look upon you as being "professional." Likewise, for the individual who does not have a business per se, he or she stands the chance of amassing a vastly wider network of contacts through a personal website than the person who relies only on person-to-person network organizations.
Every business needs a website! It's still surprising to see so many businesses that do not have a web presence. This is mainly due to a combination of economic and time factors. It may cost anywhere between $500 to $1500+ to hire a web designer to build a business site containing 1-10 pages of content. To build a site on your own requires time and some knowledge of web development skills. Seen in this light, it's understandable that business owners procrastinate in this very important aspect of their business.
However, building a website has finally reached the 21st Century as far as ease of use and availability to the masses. An easy website builder tool is being released to the world allowing unprecedented ability for just about anyone to build their own website for personal and business use. Whether it's the beginner who wants a one page website or the web developer putting together a hundred page business site, technology just took a huge jump with the advent of Site Rubix, the brainchild of Kyle and Carson of Wealthy Affiliate.
There is absolutely no HTML coding skills needed. Images, video, screen capture and content can be added quickly and easily. With simple click and drag features, websites can be designed the way you want it to look. There is also no need to go through the learning curve required to use Dreamweaver, Frontpage and other web development software.
Site Rubix is an easy website builder that has leveled the playing field in terms of online presence. With this latest in web technology, there is no reason whatsoever to go without a website for yourself and your business!
Would you like to know more about the most recommended website builder? Find out at http://recommendedinternetmarketingresource.blogspot.com/
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Bruce_Manaka http://EzineArticles.com/?Easy-Website-Builder-For-Beginners-And-Pro-Web-Developers&id=765308
Saturday, October 20, 2007
Illusion Technologies: PHP Developers
Wrtiting Less PHP Code With More Results
By [http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=Bobby_Handzhiev]Bobby Handzhiev
Most web development companies use their own or third party frameworks to improve their development process. If you want to work as a PHP developer in a company you will most probably need to agree to write your code using their framework. This article is for these developers and companies who want to build their own framework and improve their coding speed, the quality of their code and get paid more for less time. I will share with you the ideas we discovered in PIM Team Bulgaria while working on our PHP framework, but not the framework itself - you need to develope your own one which to suit the most your coding style. Our advises are valid for almost any other programming language.
What is a framework and why I need it?
Don't you get bored when you need to write same or similar types of code again and again? Do you hate when customer wants to change "some unsignificant thing" but you need to change it in 10 different files? Are your scripts too long? Do you write "spagetti" code? If you answer "yes" on some of these questions, then you need a set of functions and classes which will automate most of the tasks, reduce your code size and avoid copy-paste practices. That is framework. It is a set of classes and functions which you just include in your scripts and make your life of a web developer easier.
What to "put" in a framework?
Some people and companies tend to believe that everything should be generated by functions and classes and you should never have a "free flying" PHP code. As a result of that they put everything in objects and extremly complicated functions which try to handle everything for everyone. As a result the code gets hard to read, buggy, hard to change and slow to write and learn.
Other group prefers to write everything for the current situation, again and again for every project and file. They often copy-paste hundreds of rows to save development time and effort, but when they have to modify the code it turns into a pain. And all of this is because they are too lazy to create a framework.
The solution as usually is somewhere in the middle. You should be looking to optimize tasks which are repeated often in the project or in different projetcs. Here are the best propositions:
- Mail functions - it's terrible to see most developers putting all the headers in each place where they need to send a mail. Just wrap the mail() function and use the wrapper.
- Database wrappers - you MUST have one. Stop using the built in mysql (or other DB) functions directly into your projects. What will happen if the database must be changed?
- Database functions - do you really need to type manually all the 50 field names of that table and then to manually fill the values from $_POST? Sure, it is often needed when the values come in a different way. But very often, especially in admin panels you just have a form with fields corresponding to the table ones and values in them. Just iterate thru the database fields (hint: "SHOW FIELDS FROM table_name") and insert/update
- HTML code snippets - aren't you tired of creating or copy-pasting date dropdowns, checkboxes, normal dropdowns or radio groups? Create functions for each of these - it could accept parametters as name, values, selected name...
- Formatting specifics such as date, money, phone numbers etc. Yes, the PHP functions like date() allow you to format in any way. But what happens if you have dates on hundred places and the customers decide that instead of mm/dd/yy they want format "dd Month, YYYY"? Don't change it everywhere, don't use the MySQL data formatting. Create your own wrapper and use it.
- Admin panels - each and every admin panel includes screens for add/edit/delete various table contents. Why to do it each time? In PIM Team we created a class called table_editor which simply receives several massives and arguments and handles all the operations on any complex DB table, including the HTML code for the editing webform in less than 20 lines! The admin pages don't need to look nice, but yet our table_editor allows your tables to look perfect with CSS
- File and picture uploading, resizing, thumbnails. You don't really write every time all the codes in your scripts I hope. It would be crazy. You need functions or class for these
- Project sopecific functions. Many websites have specific features like displaying category trees, specific dropdowns, small tables with user's profiles etc etc. You can and must put these in objects or functions and use across your porjects.
Don't overdo your framework
You can't handle everything for every case. Maybe you can but this will make your framework heavy, slow to process and hard to use. The goal of the framework is to make your life easier, not some idealistic idea for pure OOP coding. You need to export functions and objects of things which you do often within different projects or several times in one project. You will only loose time if you try to handle some individual cases.
Bobby Handzhiev is a Senior Developer in http://pimteam.net and editor of http://knowledgebase.pimteam.net
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Bobby_Handzhiev http://EzineArticles.com/?Wrtiting-Less-PHP-Code-With-More-Results&id=150773
By [http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=Bobby_Handzhiev]Bobby Handzhiev
Most web development companies use their own or third party frameworks to improve their development process. If you want to work as a PHP developer in a company you will most probably need to agree to write your code using their framework. This article is for these developers and companies who want to build their own framework and improve their coding speed, the quality of their code and get paid more for less time. I will share with you the ideas we discovered in PIM Team Bulgaria while working on our PHP framework, but not the framework itself - you need to develope your own one which to suit the most your coding style. Our advises are valid for almost any other programming language.
What is a framework and why I need it?
Don't you get bored when you need to write same or similar types of code again and again? Do you hate when customer wants to change "some unsignificant thing" but you need to change it in 10 different files? Are your scripts too long? Do you write "spagetti" code? If you answer "yes" on some of these questions, then you need a set of functions and classes which will automate most of the tasks, reduce your code size and avoid copy-paste practices. That is framework. It is a set of classes and functions which you just include in your scripts and make your life of a web developer easier.
What to "put" in a framework?
Some people and companies tend to believe that everything should be generated by functions and classes and you should never have a "free flying" PHP code. As a result of that they put everything in objects and extremly complicated functions which try to handle everything for everyone. As a result the code gets hard to read, buggy, hard to change and slow to write and learn.
Other group prefers to write everything for the current situation, again and again for every project and file. They often copy-paste hundreds of rows to save development time and effort, but when they have to modify the code it turns into a pain. And all of this is because they are too lazy to create a framework.
The solution as usually is somewhere in the middle. You should be looking to optimize tasks which are repeated often in the project or in different projetcs. Here are the best propositions:
- Mail functions - it's terrible to see most developers putting all the headers in each place where they need to send a mail. Just wrap the mail() function and use the wrapper.
- Database wrappers - you MUST have one. Stop using the built in mysql (or other DB) functions directly into your projects. What will happen if the database must be changed?
- Database functions - do you really need to type manually all the 50 field names of that table and then to manually fill the values from $_POST? Sure, it is often needed when the values come in a different way. But very often, especially in admin panels you just have a form with fields corresponding to the table ones and values in them. Just iterate thru the database fields (hint: "SHOW FIELDS FROM table_name") and insert/update
- HTML code snippets - aren't you tired of creating or copy-pasting date dropdowns, checkboxes, normal dropdowns or radio groups? Create functions for each of these - it could accept parametters as name, values, selected name...
- Formatting specifics such as date, money, phone numbers etc. Yes, the PHP functions like date() allow you to format in any way. But what happens if you have dates on hundred places and the customers decide that instead of mm/dd/yy they want format "dd Month, YYYY"? Don't change it everywhere, don't use the MySQL data formatting. Create your own wrapper and use it.
- Admin panels - each and every admin panel includes screens for add/edit/delete various table contents. Why to do it each time? In PIM Team we created a class called table_editor which simply receives several massives and arguments and handles all the operations on any complex DB table, including the HTML code for the editing webform in less than 20 lines! The admin pages don't need to look nice, but yet our table_editor allows your tables to look perfect with CSS
- File and picture uploading, resizing, thumbnails. You don't really write every time all the codes in your scripts I hope. It would be crazy. You need functions or class for these
- Project sopecific functions. Many websites have specific features like displaying category trees, specific dropdowns, small tables with user's profiles etc etc. You can and must put these in objects or functions and use across your porjects.
Don't overdo your framework
You can't handle everything for every case. Maybe you can but this will make your framework heavy, slow to process and hard to use. The goal of the framework is to make your life easier, not some idealistic idea for pure OOP coding. You need to export functions and objects of things which you do often within different projects or several times in one project. You will only loose time if you try to handle some individual cases.
Bobby Handzhiev is a Senior Developer in http://pimteam.net and editor of http://knowledgebase.pimteam.net
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Bobby_Handzhiev http://EzineArticles.com/?Wrtiting-Less-PHP-Code-With-More-Results&id=150773
Tuesday, September 18, 2007
Illusion Technologies: PHP Developers
User Interface Design: Key to Achieve Best Web Development
By [http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=Nikhil_Salvi]Nikhil Salvi
From early days of www, the Internet sites that are added day by day are increasing tremendously. When you will consider this pool of web, may be they are about computers, industry, entertainment, search engines, fashion, organizational or even individual, all of these sites are concerned about one major part of web development apart from the logic or programming efforts behind it is ‘User Interface Design’.
Any web site will gain your interest by its appearance in front of you as well as ease of using and understanding the contents in that particular page. Therefore many of the web developers out there are always trying to go for the best user interface design which must also be affordable, can be either done by the developer firm or by web developer individual himself or he have to outsource the site for user interface creation.
The main stages in the creation of the user interface can be roughly listed as follows:
1. Note down all the aspects of your web site,
2. Try to list items as per their priority on the web page as well as consider their categorization.
3. From this list highlight points that are required to be catchy (e.g. in most of the general web site the Chat / Mail / News are considered to be the most catchy points whereas on the online shopping site the special offers and hot selling items may be the most catchy points).
4. Then decide the color combination of your interface (As per my point of view this is the most crucial part which many of them out there do not take into consideration which results in to a web site which is nothing but a site full of color in fact site looking like a circus! (You can understand what I want to say). So if you are rally very careful about the richness of the user interface then you should not fail to consider this point.
5. Once you have decided the color combination you have already won half the battle. Now you have to draw a picture of how your web page will look like finally, where on the web page I will place the catchy points I have listed previously, what will be common between the web pages (A date and time may be there from home page to the last page of your web site).
6. Finalize placing of all the remaining points in the list prepared by you.
7. If required repeat the steps for all the succeeding pages in your web site.
8. Then and only then go for designing of the web pages using various tools.
You may take help of various image-editing softwares like Adobe Photoshop, Paintshop Pro, even normal paintbrush for giving effect to the various images, backgrounds used in the page design. You can also embody various animations in your web page to give it a nice touch. You can try Macromedia Flash, GIF Animator or Animationshop for the same.
Some important tips-n-tricks of making your web page look catchier than ever will be discussed in my next articles.
Remember more effective and easier user interface - more the number of visitor (or even customer) who will specially halt at your site to check it out.
Nikhil R. Salvi
B.E.Computer Engg.
India
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Nikhil_Salvi http://EzineArticles.com/?User-Interface-Design:-Key-to-Achieve-Best-Web-Development&id=5463
By [http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=Nikhil_Salvi]Nikhil Salvi
From early days of www, the Internet sites that are added day by day are increasing tremendously. When you will consider this pool of web, may be they are about computers, industry, entertainment, search engines, fashion, organizational or even individual, all of these sites are concerned about one major part of web development apart from the logic or programming efforts behind it is ‘User Interface Design’.
Any web site will gain your interest by its appearance in front of you as well as ease of using and understanding the contents in that particular page. Therefore many of the web developers out there are always trying to go for the best user interface design which must also be affordable, can be either done by the developer firm or by web developer individual himself or he have to outsource the site for user interface creation.
The main stages in the creation of the user interface can be roughly listed as follows:
1. Note down all the aspects of your web site,
2. Try to list items as per their priority on the web page as well as consider their categorization.
3. From this list highlight points that are required to be catchy (e.g. in most of the general web site the Chat / Mail / News are considered to be the most catchy points whereas on the online shopping site the special offers and hot selling items may be the most catchy points).
4. Then decide the color combination of your interface (As per my point of view this is the most crucial part which many of them out there do not take into consideration which results in to a web site which is nothing but a site full of color in fact site looking like a circus! (You can understand what I want to say). So if you are rally very careful about the richness of the user interface then you should not fail to consider this point.
5. Once you have decided the color combination you have already won half the battle. Now you have to draw a picture of how your web page will look like finally, where on the web page I will place the catchy points I have listed previously, what will be common between the web pages (A date and time may be there from home page to the last page of your web site).
6. Finalize placing of all the remaining points in the list prepared by you.
7. If required repeat the steps for all the succeeding pages in your web site.
8. Then and only then go for designing of the web pages using various tools.
You may take help of various image-editing softwares like Adobe Photoshop, Paintshop Pro, even normal paintbrush for giving effect to the various images, backgrounds used in the page design. You can also embody various animations in your web page to give it a nice touch. You can try Macromedia Flash, GIF Animator or Animationshop for the same.
Some important tips-n-tricks of making your web page look catchier than ever will be discussed in my next articles.
Remember more effective and easier user interface - more the number of visitor (or even customer) who will specially halt at your site to check it out.
Nikhil R. Salvi
B.E.Computer Engg.
India
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Nikhil_Salvi http://EzineArticles.com/?User-Interface-Design:-Key-to-Achieve-Best-Web-Development&id=5463
Monday, September 17, 2007
Illusion Technologies: PHP Developers
SQL Server ASP Websites - First Steps for Novice Developers
By [http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=Margaret_Cruise_O'Brien]Margaret Cruise O'Brien
Database-Driven Websites
Ten years ago, novice web developers worked hard to create static websites with HTML and perhaps a bit of Javascript to spice up the action. Now, novice developers are starting with database-driven web pages that let web site visitors enter data and view dynamic content. When you're learning, it's important to start small and work your way up to large complex sites. So where should the novice developer start?
Your First Web Database Application
To keep motivated, you should choose a small project that will actually be useful. A great candidate is the opt-in page: a web page that lets visitors provide their name and email address to be saved to the website database. Presumably the website owner will use this data to send out newsletters and email marketing, but we won't worry about that! This is the perfect training application: a simple but useful one-page database application.
Choosing Your Tools - the Microsoft option
Once you've decided what you're going to develop, you need to decide which tools to develop with. If you're on a budget (and who isn't), then Microsoft has released a development environment available for free. You can download and install Visual Web Developer Express from the Microsoft website, which also comes with a free version of the popular database engine Microsoft SQL Server. The free database is branded as SQL Server Express.
There are other free alternatives open to you - MySQL and PHP has traditionally been a popular choice. If you come from a Linux or Unix background, you'll probably want to go that route, but if you are used to working on Windows machines, then the Microsoft option is appealing.
Creating the Table
For the simple opt-in application, you need a database table that will store names and their email addresses - this is about as simple as it gets. Visual Web Developer Express provides a GUI to let you create tables. For this project, you'll be creating a three-column table. Of course, you need one column to store the visitor's name, and another to store the email address. So why the third?
For proper database design, you should also have a unique ID column within the table that is defined as a primary key and set as an identity field. If this terminology is alien to you, you'll need to read some tutorials on SQL and creating tables. You will find lots of online articles, including [http://www.salmontraining.com/sqlexpresszone/index.html]step-by-step walk-throughs on the process. The work you put into learning basic table creation at this stage will be invaluable for future web projects!
Creating the Web Page
The opt-in web page needs to provide two input boxes to allow the visitor to enter a name and email address. If you've already done a bit of HTML coding, that's no problem to you. The tricky bit is connecting the page to the database and ensuring that the details are written to the table.
This is where Visual Web Developer Express comes into its own. With alternative programming languages, this would take lines of code to put together (and hours of debugging when it doesn't work!). With VWD Express, you use the GUI interface and wizards to drag-and-drop ASP.Net controls to access the database - the tool creates the code you need behind the scenes.
Finding a Hosting Provider
In order to go live, your hosting provider must support ASP.Net and SQL Server. Shop around - there are a number of competing providers out there. If you're working on a budget, then you'll find Go Daddy hard to beat.
Going Live
Getting things working on your laptop or PC is a great achievement! But putting your database application live is real success.
If what's been described up to now sounds too easy - well, the development process is relatively simple with the Microsoft ASP.Net development environment. The Microsoft tools hide much of the complexity of database development.
Unfortunately, developers can hit a roadblock when they try to put their new web application live on a hosted site. Getting the web page to connect to the live database is the first hurdle as the hosting provider will most likely be using SQL Server Enterprise, the big brother of the database on the local laptop or PC. Hosting providers may insist that developers use their own Control Panel to work with the database and create the database table.
Persevere! A bit of time and effort spent going live is worth the feeling of achievement when your first website visitor enters details into the web page and the data flows successfully to the live database!
Margaret Cruise O'Brien is a database consultant, and founder of [http://www.salmontraining.com]Salmon Training Check out our website for training on [http://www.salmontraining.com/sqlexpresszone/going_live_with_vwd_and_sqlexpress.aspx]going live on Go Daddy with a simple ASP.Net SQL Server application
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Margaret_Cruise_O'Brien http://EzineArticles.com/?SQL-Server-ASP-Websites---First-Steps-for-Novice-Developers&id=684430
By [http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=Margaret_Cruise_O'Brien]Margaret Cruise O'Brien
Database-Driven Websites
Ten years ago, novice web developers worked hard to create static websites with HTML and perhaps a bit of Javascript to spice up the action. Now, novice developers are starting with database-driven web pages that let web site visitors enter data and view dynamic content. When you're learning, it's important to start small and work your way up to large complex sites. So where should the novice developer start?
Your First Web Database Application
To keep motivated, you should choose a small project that will actually be useful. A great candidate is the opt-in page: a web page that lets visitors provide their name and email address to be saved to the website database. Presumably the website owner will use this data to send out newsletters and email marketing, but we won't worry about that! This is the perfect training application: a simple but useful one-page database application.
Choosing Your Tools - the Microsoft option
Once you've decided what you're going to develop, you need to decide which tools to develop with. If you're on a budget (and who isn't), then Microsoft has released a development environment available for free. You can download and install Visual Web Developer Express from the Microsoft website, which also comes with a free version of the popular database engine Microsoft SQL Server. The free database is branded as SQL Server Express.
There are other free alternatives open to you - MySQL and PHP has traditionally been a popular choice. If you come from a Linux or Unix background, you'll probably want to go that route, but if you are used to working on Windows machines, then the Microsoft option is appealing.
Creating the Table
For the simple opt-in application, you need a database table that will store names and their email addresses - this is about as simple as it gets. Visual Web Developer Express provides a GUI to let you create tables. For this project, you'll be creating a three-column table. Of course, you need one column to store the visitor's name, and another to store the email address. So why the third?
For proper database design, you should also have a unique ID column within the table that is defined as a primary key and set as an identity field. If this terminology is alien to you, you'll need to read some tutorials on SQL and creating tables. You will find lots of online articles, including [http://www.salmontraining.com/sqlexpresszone/index.html]step-by-step walk-throughs on the process. The work you put into learning basic table creation at this stage will be invaluable for future web projects!
Creating the Web Page
The opt-in web page needs to provide two input boxes to allow the visitor to enter a name and email address. If you've already done a bit of HTML coding, that's no problem to you. The tricky bit is connecting the page to the database and ensuring that the details are written to the table.
This is where Visual Web Developer Express comes into its own. With alternative programming languages, this would take lines of code to put together (and hours of debugging when it doesn't work!). With VWD Express, you use the GUI interface and wizards to drag-and-drop ASP.Net controls to access the database - the tool creates the code you need behind the scenes.
Finding a Hosting Provider
In order to go live, your hosting provider must support ASP.Net and SQL Server. Shop around - there are a number of competing providers out there. If you're working on a budget, then you'll find Go Daddy hard to beat.
Going Live
Getting things working on your laptop or PC is a great achievement! But putting your database application live is real success.
If what's been described up to now sounds too easy - well, the development process is relatively simple with the Microsoft ASP.Net development environment. The Microsoft tools hide much of the complexity of database development.
Unfortunately, developers can hit a roadblock when they try to put their new web application live on a hosted site. Getting the web page to connect to the live database is the first hurdle as the hosting provider will most likely be using SQL Server Enterprise, the big brother of the database on the local laptop or PC. Hosting providers may insist that developers use their own Control Panel to work with the database and create the database table.
Persevere! A bit of time and effort spent going live is worth the feeling of achievement when your first website visitor enters details into the web page and the data flows successfully to the live database!
Margaret Cruise O'Brien is a database consultant, and founder of [http://www.salmontraining.com]Salmon Training Check out our website for training on [http://www.salmontraining.com/sqlexpresszone/going_live_with_vwd_and_sqlexpress.aspx]going live on Go Daddy with a simple ASP.Net SQL Server application
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Margaret_Cruise_O'Brien http://EzineArticles.com/?SQL-Server-ASP-Websites---First-Steps-for-Novice-Developers&id=684430
Friday, September 14, 2007
Illusion Technologies: PHP Developers
Warning: The Truth About Having a Web Site!
By [http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=Judith_Kallos]Judith Kallos
If you don't have a web site yet, are thinking of slapping one up or have one that simply isn't producing, this Warning is for you!
All too often folks contact me about getting a Web Site when they really have not done their due diligence in determining even if their "idea" is one worth investing in. And although they hate spam and don't believe most of it, they do tend to fall into believing much of the fast, easy and cheap noise online in existence only to line the pockets of shysters and unscrupulous developers.
Here are some questions you need to ask and investigate getting the answers to so you can realistically determine if your idea is one worth pursuing and investing in. If any "solution" tells you these questions are not of concern, raise that red flag and run as fast as you can in the opposite direction! Certainly don't give them a dime of your hard earned money!
=> What will your online expenses be for your Web server, ISP connection, E-Commerce application, Web Site development and maintenance?
=> Why will people buy this product/service from you over any of the number of Web Sites currently online?
Have you searched at Google with your top 3-5, 2-3 word keyword phrases to get an idea of the level of competition you may be up against?
=> How do you intend to get your new site found?
=> What is your marketing plan to compete with the Sites already online that are promoting the same product/service?
=> Can you offer your product or service at a competitive price and what is that?
=> Will your suppliers support your requests and potential growth/demand for the product?
=> Is the quality of your product/service in line with the price you are asking?
=> How much will it cost to have enough inventories to support orders while additional product is in transit?
=> What options will I have for shipping, where will I ship and what will I charge respectively for shipping and handling?
=> What are the issues to consider and the best rates/providers for a Merchant Account so that I can accept credit cards securely on my site?
=> What are my policies and return procedures in regard to online ordering?
=> What are the tax and legal requirements and implications I need to consider when doing business online?
Unfortunately, all too many think that by just getting your own dot com and throwing up a Web Site - selling... er… well… anything, and then just sitting back and waiting for the orders or e-mail to roll in, they will soon be on the path to IPO-dom or financial freedom.
What happens when site owners do not do their due diligence or realize after the fact that this is a business with the very same responsibilities just as in the off-line world? What if they do not get all the above questions answered and a firm understanding of what will be involved before they jump online? They end up not becoming successful while wasting a lot of their hard earned money.
Having a Web site for commercial gain is not simply a bunch of pictures and code that make a pretty presentation. It is serious business and needs to be run as such if you plan to succeed. You need to know the basics of running a business from accounting, to operational policies, to tax and legal issues. You need to be prepared to plan how your marketing program will adjust to this evolving technology both on and off-line based on data and trends; how you will adjust as well.
Do you want to have your very own successful online enterprise that you worked hard at, built to be successful and are proud of based on sound business practices and proven principles? Or do you prefer to throw money at the hype that negates the need for any serious efforts? The choice is yours to make - not the developer or promotion touting Fast!, Cheap!, Easy!. Remember to use your common sense - if it sounds too good to be true when it comes to becoming successful online, it is!
About the Author:
Judith Kallos is an authoritative and good-humored Technology Muse
who has played @ http://www.TheIStudio.com for over a decade. Check out her popular Technology Cheat Sheets @: http://www.LearnAndThrive.com
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Judith_Kallos [http://ezinearticles.com/?Warning:-The-Truth-About-Having-a-Web-Site!&id=37101 ]http://EzineArticles.com/?Warning:-The-Truth-About-Having-a-Web-Site!&id=37101
By [http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=Judith_Kallos]Judith Kallos
If you don't have a web site yet, are thinking of slapping one up or have one that simply isn't producing, this Warning is for you!
All too often folks contact me about getting a Web Site when they really have not done their due diligence in determining even if their "idea" is one worth investing in. And although they hate spam and don't believe most of it, they do tend to fall into believing much of the fast, easy and cheap noise online in existence only to line the pockets of shysters and unscrupulous developers.
Here are some questions you need to ask and investigate getting the answers to so you can realistically determine if your idea is one worth pursuing and investing in. If any "solution" tells you these questions are not of concern, raise that red flag and run as fast as you can in the opposite direction! Certainly don't give them a dime of your hard earned money!
=> What will your online expenses be for your Web server, ISP connection, E-Commerce application, Web Site development and maintenance?
=> Why will people buy this product/service from you over any of the number of Web Sites currently online?
Have you searched at Google with your top 3-5, 2-3 word keyword phrases to get an idea of the level of competition you may be up against?
=> How do you intend to get your new site found?
=> What is your marketing plan to compete with the Sites already online that are promoting the same product/service?
=> Can you offer your product or service at a competitive price and what is that?
=> Will your suppliers support your requests and potential growth/demand for the product?
=> Is the quality of your product/service in line with the price you are asking?
=> How much will it cost to have enough inventories to support orders while additional product is in transit?
=> What options will I have for shipping, where will I ship and what will I charge respectively for shipping and handling?
=> What are the issues to consider and the best rates/providers for a Merchant Account so that I can accept credit cards securely on my site?
=> What are my policies and return procedures in regard to online ordering?
=> What are the tax and legal requirements and implications I need to consider when doing business online?
Unfortunately, all too many think that by just getting your own dot com and throwing up a Web Site - selling... er… well… anything, and then just sitting back and waiting for the orders or e-mail to roll in, they will soon be on the path to IPO-dom or financial freedom.
What happens when site owners do not do their due diligence or realize after the fact that this is a business with the very same responsibilities just as in the off-line world? What if they do not get all the above questions answered and a firm understanding of what will be involved before they jump online? They end up not becoming successful while wasting a lot of their hard earned money.
Having a Web site for commercial gain is not simply a bunch of pictures and code that make a pretty presentation. It is serious business and needs to be run as such if you plan to succeed. You need to know the basics of running a business from accounting, to operational policies, to tax and legal issues. You need to be prepared to plan how your marketing program will adjust to this evolving technology both on and off-line based on data and trends; how you will adjust as well.
Do you want to have your very own successful online enterprise that you worked hard at, built to be successful and are proud of based on sound business practices and proven principles? Or do you prefer to throw money at the hype that negates the need for any serious efforts? The choice is yours to make - not the developer or promotion touting Fast!, Cheap!, Easy!. Remember to use your common sense - if it sounds too good to be true when it comes to becoming successful online, it is!
About the Author:
Judith Kallos is an authoritative and good-humored Technology Muse
who has played @ http://www.TheIStudio.com for over a decade. Check out her popular Technology Cheat Sheets @: http://www.LearnAndThrive.com
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Judith_Kallos [http://ezinearticles.com/?Warning:-The-Truth-About-Having-a-Web-Site!&id=37101 ]http://EzineArticles.com/?Warning:-The-Truth-About-Having-a-Web-Site!&id=37101
Thursday, September 13, 2007
Illusion Technologies: PHP Developers
Web Hosting Php Mysql - Guide
By [http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=Lee_Brooker]Lee Brooker
Put web hosting php mysql together and you have yourself a dynamic website! Getting web hosting, php, MySQL opens the door for your business to develop in areas that your never thought possible.
Standard web hosting is fine when nothing much needs to happen to your site. Adding PHP enables you to create or use existing opt in forms or maybe a membership software package you may have purchased. You know the ones I mean. With username and password verification and all that technical stuff!
Having PHP and MySQL is the standard and most popular choice for most webmasters and website developers.
This may sound pretty obvious, but web hosting PHP MySQL do not all come as standard in hosting packages! One may not come with the other. But not only this, you must also be aware or the different versions of PHP and SQL. MySQL is a vendor for the SQL as is Ms Windows and Oracle.
Check and double check everything before committing yourself to any web hosting PHP MySQL set up. Like I said before this may seem a little obvious, but you will be amazed at the amount of people that actually over look not only the compatibility of web hosting PHP and MySQL but make the mistake in automatically thinking that they are all going to work together.
If your web hosting PHP MySQL is all in one then its safe to assume they all work together! Its when you are putting a bespoke hosting package together that the importance of making sure you kow your SQL and PHP versions.
If I any doubt at all, do not hesitate to email the company that you are considering purchasing your web hosting PHP and MySQL from. Its not good practice to think inferior of yourself and refrain from asking the simplest question regarding this type of service. Its complicated if its an unchartered area of your online business knowledge.
Not asking about web hosting PHP MySQL questions will result in many headaches and frustration not to mention valuable lost time!
Find Out More About The VodaHost Experience Here http://hubpages.com/hub/reliable_web_hosting_service
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Lee_Brooker http://EzineArticles.com/?Web-Hosting-Php-Mysql---Guide&id=645344
By [http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=Lee_Brooker]Lee Brooker
Put web hosting php mysql together and you have yourself a dynamic website! Getting web hosting, php, MySQL opens the door for your business to develop in areas that your never thought possible.
Standard web hosting is fine when nothing much needs to happen to your site. Adding PHP enables you to create or use existing opt in forms or maybe a membership software package you may have purchased. You know the ones I mean. With username and password verification and all that technical stuff!
Having PHP and MySQL is the standard and most popular choice for most webmasters and website developers.
This may sound pretty obvious, but web hosting PHP MySQL do not all come as standard in hosting packages! One may not come with the other. But not only this, you must also be aware or the different versions of PHP and SQL. MySQL is a vendor for the SQL as is Ms Windows and Oracle.
Check and double check everything before committing yourself to any web hosting PHP MySQL set up. Like I said before this may seem a little obvious, but you will be amazed at the amount of people that actually over look not only the compatibility of web hosting PHP and MySQL but make the mistake in automatically thinking that they are all going to work together.
If your web hosting PHP MySQL is all in one then its safe to assume they all work together! Its when you are putting a bespoke hosting package together that the importance of making sure you kow your SQL and PHP versions.
If I any doubt at all, do not hesitate to email the company that you are considering purchasing your web hosting PHP and MySQL from. Its not good practice to think inferior of yourself and refrain from asking the simplest question regarding this type of service. Its complicated if its an unchartered area of your online business knowledge.
Not asking about web hosting PHP MySQL questions will result in many headaches and frustration not to mention valuable lost time!
Find Out More About The VodaHost Experience Here http://hubpages.com/hub/reliable_web_hosting_service
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Lee_Brooker http://EzineArticles.com/?Web-Hosting-Php-Mysql---Guide&id=645344
Wednesday, September 12, 2007
Illusion Technologies: PHP Developers
Consuming RSS Feeds With ColdFusionBy [http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=Benjamin_Cortese]Benjamin Cortese
ColdFusion doesn't seem to get the respect it deserves amongst the dedicated Java or .NET or even PHP development circles, but having worked in all of those environments, I'd like to state for the record, that completing a large scale development project AHEAD of schedule, keeping your Business Managers and Projects Managers happy, and let's not forget the most important of all... THE CLIENT...Well, that's priceless. Well worth any investment made towards ColdFusion.
Web services, RSS, XML, SOAP to name several, are all welcomed friends to the ColdFusion web development language. This article will focus on the likes of RSS and XML.
Definition:
RSS is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated digital content, such as blogs, news feeds or podcasts. Consumers of RSS content use special browsers called aggregators to watch for new content in dozens or even hundreds of web feeds. The initials "RSS" are variously used to refer to the following standards:
Really Simple Syndication (RSS 2.0)
Rich Site Summary (RSS 0.91, RSS 1.0)
RDF Site Summary (RSS 0.9 and 1.0)
RSS formats are specified in XML (a generic specification for data formats). RSS delivers its information as an XML file called an "RSS feed", "webfeed", "RSS stream", or "RSS channel".
That's the Wikipedia definition for an RSS feed. What's not mentioned is that developers are able to take advantage of the content provided by these RSS feeds to display current and changing data on their websites, which adds value to the website and hopefully bring return visitors for more of the information that you provide.
Consuming an RSS feed in ColdFusion can be as simple or as complicated as you want it to be. There are several ways or more, to do this in ColdFusion. Parsing through array elements and defining the parent elements to children and testing for grandchildren elements, and recursive behaviors etc. But this article is not for the experienced ColdFusion developer. This article is for someone who might like to see some of the "ease of operation" of ColdFusion and how it relates to a popular web practice known as RSS.
We'll look at a fun and popular feed from RollingStone Magazine. Located here http://www.rollingstone.com/rssxml/album_reviews.xml as of the time of this article.
It's a feed that I have implemented on several of my websites. Now it's important to note that you should select feeds that are relevant to your website, I have several music based websites and thus having an "Album Review" feed was appropriate. Ok, so now what do we do with this feed you ask? Well, basically there are only 3 steps to consuming and parsing an XML/RSS feed.
1. Read the Feed in
2. Loop through the elements of the feed
3. Display the feed
Am I simplifying things a bit? Not really, the purpose here is to show how ColdFusion can do much of the 'heavy lifting' as it pertains to application development making many day to day programming tasks much less tedious.
Here's an example:
In ColdFusion we read the feed in like this.
< url="< /cfhttp >
< album_reviews_xml="XMLParse(cfhttp.FileContent)">
What this does is utilize the CFHTTP tag in ColdFusion which has many many uses, in this case it performs the request for the XML document on the server.
The second line defines a variable called "album_reviews_xml" and gives it the value of the http response. Using the built in function "XMLParse()" in ColdFusion takes the http response and delivers it to your browser in XML format or as an XML Object for you OOP guys.
If you would like to have ColdFusion show you a 'pretty' presentation of the XML you can simply add a cfdump statement to your document and you will see a nicely rendered and easy to read xml structure.
The next step is parsing or looping through the elements of the XML Object.
You do that like this:
<>
< index="x" from="1" to="#ArrayLen(album_reviews_xml.rss.channel.item)#">
Title: #album_reviews_xml.rss.channel.item[x].title.xmlText#
Link: < href="#album_reviews_xml.rss.channel.item[x].link.xmlText#">click here< /a >
Description:#album_reviews_xml.rss.channel.item[x].description.xmlText#
< /cfloop >
< /cfoutput >
This loop as shown, iterates through all of the elements of the document and displays the most common items in an RSS feed which are the TITLE, LINK and DESCRIPTION. Some feeds aren't formed entirely to standard and may have other elements designs, and of course this is not all of the data that you can get from an RSS feed, again it's just the most common and standard elements returned through RSS. But if the document provided by the RSS feed generator is to standard and well formed, you will see these 3 elements in most every RSS feed.
As you can see displaying an RSS feed in ColdFusion is easy and provides real time up to date information that you can provide to your visitors on your website.
You can apply style sheets and html formatting to your feeds and present the information in a pleasant looking way that visitors will enjoy reading.
An example where I use these feeds can be seen in action here http://www.news-junkie.net/. This is a personal site that I had developed a while ago that is a simple news aggregation website with a number of different topics. I found it fun to develop and good practice working with xml and ColdFusion. The information is constantly updated and visitors to my site see fresh new articles everyday, and all I have to do now that it is built, is keep the domain name active and maybe switch around a few of my affiliate links which hopefully provide a little income to pay for the hosting of the site.
Thanks for reading and Happy Coding!
Ben Cortese is a developer and business analyst for the financial industry and enjoys developing personal websites. View some of them at [http://www.inetsite.net/]http://www.blogger.com/www.InetSite.net
Copyright 2007. Article can be reprinted as long as author credits are given and content remains unchanged and intact.
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Benjamin_Cortese http://EzineArticles.com/?Consuming-RSS-Feeds-With-ColdFusion&id=403246
ColdFusion doesn't seem to get the respect it deserves amongst the dedicated Java or .NET or even PHP development circles, but having worked in all of those environments, I'd like to state for the record, that completing a large scale development project AHEAD of schedule, keeping your Business Managers and Projects Managers happy, and let's not forget the most important of all... THE CLIENT...Well, that's priceless. Well worth any investment made towards ColdFusion.
Web services, RSS, XML, SOAP to name several, are all welcomed friends to the ColdFusion web development language. This article will focus on the likes of RSS and XML.
Definition:
RSS is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated digital content, such as blogs, news feeds or podcasts. Consumers of RSS content use special browsers called aggregators to watch for new content in dozens or even hundreds of web feeds. The initials "RSS" are variously used to refer to the following standards:
Really Simple Syndication (RSS 2.0)
Rich Site Summary (RSS 0.91, RSS 1.0)
RDF Site Summary (RSS 0.9 and 1.0)
RSS formats are specified in XML (a generic specification for data formats). RSS delivers its information as an XML file called an "RSS feed", "webfeed", "RSS stream", or "RSS channel".
That's the Wikipedia definition for an RSS feed. What's not mentioned is that developers are able to take advantage of the content provided by these RSS feeds to display current and changing data on their websites, which adds value to the website and hopefully bring return visitors for more of the information that you provide.
Consuming an RSS feed in ColdFusion can be as simple or as complicated as you want it to be. There are several ways or more, to do this in ColdFusion. Parsing through array elements and defining the parent elements to children and testing for grandchildren elements, and recursive behaviors etc. But this article is not for the experienced ColdFusion developer. This article is for someone who might like to see some of the "ease of operation" of ColdFusion and how it relates to a popular web practice known as RSS.
We'll look at a fun and popular feed from RollingStone Magazine. Located here http://www.rollingstone.com/rssxml/album_reviews.xml as of the time of this article.
It's a feed that I have implemented on several of my websites. Now it's important to note that you should select feeds that are relevant to your website, I have several music based websites and thus having an "Album Review" feed was appropriate. Ok, so now what do we do with this feed you ask? Well, basically there are only 3 steps to consuming and parsing an XML/RSS feed.
1. Read the Feed in
2. Loop through the elements of the feed
3. Display the feed
Am I simplifying things a bit? Not really, the purpose here is to show how ColdFusion can do much of the 'heavy lifting' as it pertains to application development making many day to day programming tasks much less tedious.
Here's an example:
In ColdFusion we read the feed in like this.
< url="< /cfhttp >
< album_reviews_xml="XMLParse(cfhttp.FileContent)">
What this does is utilize the CFHTTP tag in ColdFusion which has many many uses, in this case it performs the request for the XML document on the server.
The second line defines a variable called "album_reviews_xml" and gives it the value of the http response. Using the built in function "XMLParse()" in ColdFusion takes the http response and delivers it to your browser in XML format or as an XML Object for you OOP guys.
If you would like to have ColdFusion show you a 'pretty' presentation of the XML you can simply add a cfdump statement to your document and you will see a nicely rendered and easy to read xml structure.
The next step is parsing or looping through the elements of the XML Object.
You do that like this:
<>
< index="x" from="1" to="#ArrayLen(album_reviews_xml.rss.channel.item)#">
Title: #album_reviews_xml.rss.channel.item[x].title.xmlText#
Link: < href="#album_reviews_xml.rss.channel.item[x].link.xmlText#">click here< /a >
Description:#album_reviews_xml.rss.channel.item[x].description.xmlText#
< /cfloop >
< /cfoutput >
This loop as shown, iterates through all of the elements of the document and displays the most common items in an RSS feed which are the TITLE, LINK and DESCRIPTION. Some feeds aren't formed entirely to standard and may have other elements designs, and of course this is not all of the data that you can get from an RSS feed, again it's just the most common and standard elements returned through RSS. But if the document provided by the RSS feed generator is to standard and well formed, you will see these 3 elements in most every RSS feed.
As you can see displaying an RSS feed in ColdFusion is easy and provides real time up to date information that you can provide to your visitors on your website.
You can apply style sheets and html formatting to your feeds and present the information in a pleasant looking way that visitors will enjoy reading.
An example where I use these feeds can be seen in action here http://www.news-junkie.net/. This is a personal site that I had developed a while ago that is a simple news aggregation website with a number of different topics. I found it fun to develop and good practice working with xml and ColdFusion. The information is constantly updated and visitors to my site see fresh new articles everyday, and all I have to do now that it is built, is keep the domain name active and maybe switch around a few of my affiliate links which hopefully provide a little income to pay for the hosting of the site.
Thanks for reading and Happy Coding!
Ben Cortese is a developer and business analyst for the financial industry and enjoys developing personal websites. View some of them at [http://www.inetsite.net/]http://www.blogger.com/www.InetSite.net
Copyright 2007. Article can be reprinted as long as author credits are given and content remains unchanged and intact.
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Benjamin_Cortese http://EzineArticles.com/?Consuming-RSS-Feeds-With-ColdFusion&id=403246
Tuesday, September 4, 2007
Illusion Technologies: PHP Developers
Choose Wisely: PHP Templates and Search Engine Rank
By [http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=Jacob_Filipp]Jacob Filipp
This article is intended for PHP web developers who create template systems for consistently presenting website content. PHP designers who create their own template systems should be concerned about how their choices affect the website's position in search engines. Below is a discussion of three types of systems, their impact on search ranking and a recommendation for the best approach.
Webpage as a CGI Argument
In this architecture one PHP script contains the entire template, and plugs in content from a file it reads in - getting the file name from a CGI parameter. These types of systems are not only prone to security problems (as users can modify the path argument to retrieve arbitrary files) but are also ineffective for search engine optimization.
This particular design does not allow for titles and keyword/description meta-tags to be associated with individual pages. This is because the header portion of the template includes the section within it, and only allows for one site-wide title and set of meta-tags. Titles are one of the most important page elements, and having one title - unrelated to the actual content retrieved - results in a lower rank in search engines.
There are two other detrimental SEO effects this type of system has. The first is that each unique page is viewed as an aspect of the template script, rather than as a unique standalone page. This can result in search engines lowering the importance of individual content pages relative to the template script - which is often not the desired result. The other weakness of this approach is that having individual pages set up as CGI arguments makes site metrics harder to track, as statistics often show a visit to a specific page as a visit to the general template script. The popular web statistics packages AWstats and Webalizer are most affected by this.
However, this type of templating system is popular and sucessfully used in the world of e-commerce. In such systems, product information is stored in a database and is inserted into the template when a product is requested by its code. This means that both a unique title and a set of meta-tags can be stored alongside the product data (or generated on the fly), and inserted into the global template effectively. The only detrimental effects that remain are the latter mentioned two, and are usually an acceptable tradeoff for the increased ease of administration that a database-driven system provides.
Template as an Include
In this architecture, each page on the website has its own filename with a .php extension. The top and bottom portions of the template are stored in separate files that are included (using include_once() ) by each content file. This technique increases the importance of the page with search engines, as each page is its own standalone page rather than a CGI argument. This type of template system also makes it simple to track page views through regular website statistics software.
On the other hand, this type of template system still has the weakness of having one title and one set of meta-tags for the entire site. This is, again, because the header portion of templates has to include everything from the opening of the tag to the end of the code for the header portion of the template. And this area includes the title and meta-tags. One workaround for this type of system is to code the top template page to check which file it is being called from, and to substitute a suitable pre-coded title. Although effective, such a system is cumbersome to maintain as each new page that is published warrants a new title and meta-tag entry in this secondary system.
Body-Only Includes
The ideal PHP templating system will permit content producers to enjoy the reusability of templates, while maintaining unique titles and metadata for each page with ease. The system that meets all of these SEO needs is a "body-only include" system: a system where each php content page includes the top and bottom portions of the template (as in the previous approach), but only includes the elements below the body tag. This translates into a document that has its own html, head, title and meta tags, has an include_once() statement which is called at the top of the body element and includes the top portion of the template, has the content, and an include for the footer portion of the template. Such a system allows for individual editing of the title and meta-information during the creation of documents and solves the problems that both of the aforementioned systems face.
I find this system the most search-engine friendly, because it keeps the title information and the content together - allowing for the presence of relevant, unique titles for each page. This system is also the most human friendly, as storing the title information in the same file as the page content allows for fast updating and avoids maintaining a second "workaround" system that attempts to match titles to content.
Conclusion
The types of template system that PHP developers choose to implement for clients' sites have a crucial impact on the future search-engine popularity of the client's webpages. Important factors to consider when developing a template solution are: relevant titles tied to content, relevant meta-tags, standalone files and ease of statistics tracking. The popular approaches of page-as-an-argument and template-as-an-include do not effectively provide these functions. Including template information after the body tag, and keeping headers intact is the best way to ensure that sites are optimized for search engines - and this is why you should consider using the Body-Only Includes model during your next project.
Jacob Filipp is a Canadian search engine optimization specialist at [http://powerspiritonline.com/contact.html]Powerspirit. Jacob has 7 years of experience as a web developer and webmaster.
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Jacob_Filipp http://EzineArticles.com/?Choose-Wisely:-PHP-Templates-and-Search-Engine-Rank&id=597857
By [http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=Jacob_Filipp]Jacob Filipp
This article is intended for PHP web developers who create template systems for consistently presenting website content. PHP designers who create their own template systems should be concerned about how their choices affect the website's position in search engines. Below is a discussion of three types of systems, their impact on search ranking and a recommendation for the best approach.
Webpage as a CGI Argument
In this architecture one PHP script contains the entire template, and plugs in content from a file it reads in - getting the file name from a CGI parameter. These types of systems are not only prone to security problems (as users can modify the path argument to retrieve arbitrary files) but are also ineffective for search engine optimization.
This particular design does not allow for titles and keyword/description meta-tags to be associated with individual pages. This is because the header portion of the template includes the section within it, and only allows for one site-wide title and set of meta-tags. Titles are one of the most important page elements, and having one title - unrelated to the actual content retrieved - results in a lower rank in search engines.
There are two other detrimental SEO effects this type of system has. The first is that each unique page is viewed as an aspect of the template script, rather than as a unique standalone page. This can result in search engines lowering the importance of individual content pages relative to the template script - which is often not the desired result. The other weakness of this approach is that having individual pages set up as CGI arguments makes site metrics harder to track, as statistics often show a visit to a specific page as a visit to the general template script. The popular web statistics packages AWstats and Webalizer are most affected by this.
However, this type of templating system is popular and sucessfully used in the world of e-commerce. In such systems, product information is stored in a database and is inserted into the template when a product is requested by its code. This means that both a unique title and a set of meta-tags can be stored alongside the product data (or generated on the fly), and inserted into the global template effectively. The only detrimental effects that remain are the latter mentioned two, and are usually an acceptable tradeoff for the increased ease of administration that a database-driven system provides.
Template as an Include
In this architecture, each page on the website has its own filename with a .php extension. The top and bottom portions of the template are stored in separate files that are included (using include_once() ) by each content file. This technique increases the importance of the page with search engines, as each page is its own standalone page rather than a CGI argument. This type of template system also makes it simple to track page views through regular website statistics software.
On the other hand, this type of template system still has the weakness of having one title and one set of meta-tags for the entire site. This is, again, because the header portion of templates has to include everything from the opening of the tag to the end of the code for the header portion of the template. And this area includes the title and meta-tags. One workaround for this type of system is to code the top template page to check which file it is being called from, and to substitute a suitable pre-coded title. Although effective, such a system is cumbersome to maintain as each new page that is published warrants a new title and meta-tag entry in this secondary system.
Body-Only Includes
The ideal PHP templating system will permit content producers to enjoy the reusability of templates, while maintaining unique titles and metadata for each page with ease. The system that meets all of these SEO needs is a "body-only include" system: a system where each php content page includes the top and bottom portions of the template (as in the previous approach), but only includes the elements below the body tag. This translates into a document that has its own html, head, title and meta tags, has an include_once() statement which is called at the top of the body element and includes the top portion of the template, has the content, and an include for the footer portion of the template. Such a system allows for individual editing of the title and meta-information during the creation of documents and solves the problems that both of the aforementioned systems face.
I find this system the most search-engine friendly, because it keeps the title information and the content together - allowing for the presence of relevant, unique titles for each page. This system is also the most human friendly, as storing the title information in the same file as the page content allows for fast updating and avoids maintaining a second "workaround" system that attempts to match titles to content.
Conclusion
The types of template system that PHP developers choose to implement for clients' sites have a crucial impact on the future search-engine popularity of the client's webpages. Important factors to consider when developing a template solution are: relevant titles tied to content, relevant meta-tags, standalone files and ease of statistics tracking. The popular approaches of page-as-an-argument and template-as-an-include do not effectively provide these functions. Including template information after the body tag, and keeping headers intact is the best way to ensure that sites are optimized for search engines - and this is why you should consider using the Body-Only Includes model during your next project.
Jacob Filipp is a Canadian search engine optimization specialist at [http://powerspiritonline.com/contact.html]Powerspirit. Jacob has 7 years of experience as a web developer and webmaster.
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Jacob_Filipp http://EzineArticles.com/?Choose-Wisely:-PHP-Templates-and-Search-Engine-Rank&id=597857
Monday, September 3, 2007
Illusion Technologies: PHP Developers
Choose Wisely: PHP Templates and Search Engine Rank
By [http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=Jacob_Filipp]Jacob Filipp
This article is intended for PHP web developers who create template systems for consistently presenting website content. PHP designers who create their own template systems should be concerned about how their choices affect the website's position in search engines. Below is a discussion of three types of systems, their impact on search ranking and a recommendation for the best approach.
Webpage as a CGI Argument
In this architecture one PHP script contains the entire template, and plugs in content from a file it reads in - getting the file name from a CGI parameter. These types of systems are not only prone to security problems (as users can modify the path argument to retrieve arbitrary files) but are also ineffective for search engine optimization.
This particular design does not allow for titles and keyword/description meta-tags to be associated with individual pages. This is because the header portion of the template includes the section within it, and only allows for one site-wide title and set of meta-tags. Titles are one of the most important page elements, and having one title - unrelated to the actual content retrieved - results in a lower rank in search engines.
There are two other detrimental SEO effects this type of system has. The first is that each unique page is viewed as an aspect of the template script, rather than as a unique standalone page. This can result in search engines lowering the importance of individual content pages relative to the template script - which is often not the desired result. The other weakness of this approach is that having individual pages set up as CGI arguments makes site metrics harder to track, as statistics often show a visit to a specific page as a visit to the general template script. The popular web statistics packages AWstats and Webalizer are most affected by this.
However, this type of templating system is popular and sucessfully used in the world of e-commerce. In such systems, product information is stored in a database and is inserted into the template when a product is requested by its code. This means that both a unique title and a set of meta-tags can be stored alongside the product data (or generated on the fly), and inserted into the global template effectively. The only detrimental effects that remain are the latter mentioned two, and are usually an acceptable tradeoff for the increased ease of administration that a database-driven system provides.
Template as an Include
In this architecture, each page on the website has its own filename with a .php extension. The top and bottom portions of the template are stored in separate files that are included (using include_once() ) by each content file. This technique increases the importance of the page with search engines, as each page is its own standalone page rather than a CGI argument. This type of template system also makes it simple to track page views through regular website statistics software.
On the other hand, this type of template system still has the weakness of having one title and one set of meta-tags for the entire site. This is, again, because the header portion of templates has to include everything from the opening of the tag to the end of the code for the header portion of the template. And this area includes the title and meta-tags. One workaround for this type of system is to code the top template page to check which file it is being called from, and to substitute a suitable pre-coded title. Although effective, such a system is cumbersome to maintain as each new page that is published warrants a new title and meta-tag entry in this secondary system.
Body-Only Includes
The ideal PHP templating system will permit content producers to enjoy the reusability of templates, while maintaining unique titles and metadata for each page with ease. The system that meets all of these SEO needs is a "body-only include" system: a system where each php content page includes the top and bottom portions of the template (as in the previous approach), but only includes the elements below the body tag. This translates into a document that has its own html, head, title and meta tags, has an include_once() statement which is called at the top of the body element and includes the top portion of the template, has the content, and an include for the footer portion of the template. Such a system allows for individual editing of the title and meta-information during the creation of documents and solves the problems that both of the aforementioned systems face.
I find this system the most search-engine friendly, because it keeps the title information and the content together - allowing for the presence of relevant, unique titles for each page. This system is also the most human friendly, as storing the title information in the same file as the page content allows for fast updating and avoids maintaining a second "workaround" system that attempts to match titles to content.
Conclusion
The types of template system that PHP developers choose to implement for clients' sites have a crucial impact on the future search-engine popularity of the client's webpages. Important factors to consider when developing a template solution are: relevant titles tied to content, relevant meta-tags, standalone files and ease of statistics tracking. The popular approaches of page-as-an-argument and template-as-an-include do not effectively provide these functions. Including template information after the body tag, and keeping headers intact is the best way to ensure that sites are optimized for search engines - and this is why you should consider using the Body-Only Includes model during your next project.
Jacob Filipp is a Canadian search engine optimization specialist at [http://powerspiritonline.com/contact.html]Powerspirit. Jacob has 7 years of experience as a web developer and webmaster.
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Jacob_Filipp http://EzineArticles.com/?Choose-Wisely:-PHP-Templates-and-Search-Engine-Rank&id=597857
By [http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=Jacob_Filipp]Jacob Filipp
This article is intended for PHP web developers who create template systems for consistently presenting website content. PHP designers who create their own template systems should be concerned about how their choices affect the website's position in search engines. Below is a discussion of three types of systems, their impact on search ranking and a recommendation for the best approach.
Webpage as a CGI Argument
In this architecture one PHP script contains the entire template, and plugs in content from a file it reads in - getting the file name from a CGI parameter. These types of systems are not only prone to security problems (as users can modify the path argument to retrieve arbitrary files) but are also ineffective for search engine optimization.
This particular design does not allow for titles and keyword/description meta-tags to be associated with individual pages. This is because the header portion of the template includes the section within it, and only allows for one site-wide title and set of meta-tags. Titles are one of the most important page elements, and having one title - unrelated to the actual content retrieved - results in a lower rank in search engines.
There are two other detrimental SEO effects this type of system has. The first is that each unique page is viewed as an aspect of the template script, rather than as a unique standalone page. This can result in search engines lowering the importance of individual content pages relative to the template script - which is often not the desired result. The other weakness of this approach is that having individual pages set up as CGI arguments makes site metrics harder to track, as statistics often show a visit to a specific page as a visit to the general template script. The popular web statistics packages AWstats and Webalizer are most affected by this.
However, this type of templating system is popular and sucessfully used in the world of e-commerce. In such systems, product information is stored in a database and is inserted into the template when a product is requested by its code. This means that both a unique title and a set of meta-tags can be stored alongside the product data (or generated on the fly), and inserted into the global template effectively. The only detrimental effects that remain are the latter mentioned two, and are usually an acceptable tradeoff for the increased ease of administration that a database-driven system provides.
Template as an Include
In this architecture, each page on the website has its own filename with a .php extension. The top and bottom portions of the template are stored in separate files that are included (using include_once() ) by each content file. This technique increases the importance of the page with search engines, as each page is its own standalone page rather than a CGI argument. This type of template system also makes it simple to track page views through regular website statistics software.
On the other hand, this type of template system still has the weakness of having one title and one set of meta-tags for the entire site. This is, again, because the header portion of templates has to include everything from the opening of the tag to the end of the code for the header portion of the template. And this area includes the title and meta-tags. One workaround for this type of system is to code the top template page to check which file it is being called from, and to substitute a suitable pre-coded title. Although effective, such a system is cumbersome to maintain as each new page that is published warrants a new title and meta-tag entry in this secondary system.
Body-Only Includes
The ideal PHP templating system will permit content producers to enjoy the reusability of templates, while maintaining unique titles and metadata for each page with ease. The system that meets all of these SEO needs is a "body-only include" system: a system where each php content page includes the top and bottom portions of the template (as in the previous approach), but only includes the elements below the body tag. This translates into a document that has its own html, head, title and meta tags, has an include_once() statement which is called at the top of the body element and includes the top portion of the template, has the content, and an include for the footer portion of the template. Such a system allows for individual editing of the title and meta-information during the creation of documents and solves the problems that both of the aforementioned systems face.
I find this system the most search-engine friendly, because it keeps the title information and the content together - allowing for the presence of relevant, unique titles for each page. This system is also the most human friendly, as storing the title information in the same file as the page content allows for fast updating and avoids maintaining a second "workaround" system that attempts to match titles to content.
Conclusion
The types of template system that PHP developers choose to implement for clients' sites have a crucial impact on the future search-engine popularity of the client's webpages. Important factors to consider when developing a template solution are: relevant titles tied to content, relevant meta-tags, standalone files and ease of statistics tracking. The popular approaches of page-as-an-argument and template-as-an-include do not effectively provide these functions. Including template information after the body tag, and keeping headers intact is the best way to ensure that sites are optimized for search engines - and this is why you should consider using the Body-Only Includes model during your next project.
Jacob Filipp is a Canadian search engine optimization specialist at [http://powerspiritonline.com/contact.html]Powerspirit. Jacob has 7 years of experience as a web developer and webmaster.
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Jacob_Filipp http://EzineArticles.com/?Choose-Wisely:-PHP-Templates-and-Search-Engine-Rank&id=597857
Saturday, September 1, 2007
Illusion Technologies: PHP Developers
Free PHP Web Hosting - Where To Find The Best Free PHP Web Site Hosting
By [http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=Karin_I_Manning]Karin I Manning
There are many benefits to a free PHP web hosting service. This article will reveal everything you need to know about php web hosting and the essentials of the best web site hosting service.
PHP was initially developed in 1994 by Rasmus Lerdorf. He created it as a tool to help website designers. What he developed was the ability to allow users to place macros in static html pages and codes. However, it wasn't till 1997 that it became a fully-fledged programming language.
Nowadays this tool is used with Apache in millions of websites worldwide and its popularity is ever on the increase.
How this application works is that it allows users to create dynamic applications and web pages. It allows website developers to insert several states into an easy simple tag. It has numerous multimedia capabilities and is also able to be used with audio streaming.
There are a large number of free hosting companies that offer it. It is often less expensive when compared with other hosting options and it can actually support numerous databases including MySQL and Oracle, just to name a few.
However, there are considerable disadvantages when using a free alternative.
The response may be very slow which could mean they are hosting more domains than they are really capable of managing. This may make it extremely difficult for website visitors to fully access and read your websites.
Another disadvantage is that generally speaking the customer service and tech support is very poor.
Banner ads are also a frequent eyesore on these websites and are a great distraction to your visitors who you are trying to promote or sell to.
While it is proving more and more popular I would recommend that you stay away from a free web hosting service and considerable a reliable but very inexpensive paid service. Some of these services only cost a few dollars a month. However, the difference to your bottom line is truly immeasurable.
For the latest information about the best web hosting options check out the website below today!
Copyright 2007. We've had enough of crook webhosting companies charging the earth and not delivering. For this reason we reviewed a range of web hosting companies that promise the best value for money and superior service. However, NOT all web hosting packages are created equal. Nor do they live up to their claims. Learn the shocking truth about webhosts at my [http://best-web-hosting-services-review.blogspot.com/]web hosting review site by visiting http://best-web-hosting-services-review.blogspot.com now!
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Karin_I_Manning http://EzineArticles.com/?Free-PHP-Web-Hosting---Where-To-Find-The-Best-Free-PHP-Web-Site-Hosting&id=670470
By [http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=Karin_I_Manning]Karin I Manning
There are many benefits to a free PHP web hosting service. This article will reveal everything you need to know about php web hosting and the essentials of the best web site hosting service.
PHP was initially developed in 1994 by Rasmus Lerdorf. He created it as a tool to help website designers. What he developed was the ability to allow users to place macros in static html pages and codes. However, it wasn't till 1997 that it became a fully-fledged programming language.
Nowadays this tool is used with Apache in millions of websites worldwide and its popularity is ever on the increase.
How this application works is that it allows users to create dynamic applications and web pages. It allows website developers to insert several states into an easy simple tag. It has numerous multimedia capabilities and is also able to be used with audio streaming.
There are a large number of free hosting companies that offer it. It is often less expensive when compared with other hosting options and it can actually support numerous databases including MySQL and Oracle, just to name a few.
However, there are considerable disadvantages when using a free alternative.
The response may be very slow which could mean they are hosting more domains than they are really capable of managing. This may make it extremely difficult for website visitors to fully access and read your websites.
Another disadvantage is that generally speaking the customer service and tech support is very poor.
Banner ads are also a frequent eyesore on these websites and are a great distraction to your visitors who you are trying to promote or sell to.
While it is proving more and more popular I would recommend that you stay away from a free web hosting service and considerable a reliable but very inexpensive paid service. Some of these services only cost a few dollars a month. However, the difference to your bottom line is truly immeasurable.
For the latest information about the best web hosting options check out the website below today!
Copyright 2007. We've had enough of crook webhosting companies charging the earth and not delivering. For this reason we reviewed a range of web hosting companies that promise the best value for money and superior service. However, NOT all web hosting packages are created equal. Nor do they live up to their claims. Learn the shocking truth about webhosts at my [http://best-web-hosting-services-review.blogspot.com/]web hosting review site by visiting http://best-web-hosting-services-review.blogspot.com now!
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Karin_I_Manning http://EzineArticles.com/?Free-PHP-Web-Hosting---Where-To-Find-The-Best-Free-PHP-Web-Site-Hosting&id=670470
Thursday, August 30, 2007
Illusion Technologies: PHP Developers
Web Development Process-Development Life Cycle
By [http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=Nik_Chauhan]Nik Chauhan
Web Development process can also be classified into different development life cycle steps just like traditional software development process. Basically Web development is process of designing a website for World Wide Web using various programming and designing technology.
Web development includes six processes:
Analysis:
Study and analyze the exact requirements. This can be through emails, questionnaires, interactive sessions, etc. Analysis must cover all aspects including the existing web system as well as audience.
Specification and documentation:
Create system functionality document which perceive all the requirements of the client with all the minute details. It will create better understanding about the system to be developed. Also mention all the future requirements as well as all the costing details.
Design:
This process includes designing a small prototype or small working model. It covers activities directed towards the architecture of the system and function flow diagrams including detailed specification of the system. In this process there can be lot many suggestions from the customer and those changes should be noted down and should discussed and before moving onto the next phase.
Development:
Development phase transforms the detailed design and specification into actual product through various hard code programs. It includes the integration of source code, database files and content into a single module or product.
Testing and Deployment:
It includes testing the product or modules of the product through various testing process like load testing, cross-browser compatibility testing, resolution testing and integration testing. It also includes the validation of pages through w3c consortium. The finished product is deployed and functions are carried out through the system, which the system is supposed to do.
Marketing and Maintenance:
Marketing is a process which involves preparation of Meta tags, optimizing pages from various factors, submitting the website to different search engine. Maintenance is the important step of the whole process. It includes frequent updating of the web site to keep it fresh. Various bug fixes and errors will be done during maintenance phase.
The above mentioned all the steps are not fixed for web development process. It may vary according to the company’s policy and strategy. [http://www.corporatesitesolutions.com]Web Development.
Source: [http://www.corporatesitesolutions.com]www.corporatesitesolutions.com
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Nik_Chauhan http://EzineArticles.com/?Web-Development-Process-Development-Life-Cycle&id=344293
By [http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=Nik_Chauhan]Nik Chauhan
Web Development process can also be classified into different development life cycle steps just like traditional software development process. Basically Web development is process of designing a website for World Wide Web using various programming and designing technology.
Web development includes six processes:
Analysis:
Study and analyze the exact requirements. This can be through emails, questionnaires, interactive sessions, etc. Analysis must cover all aspects including the existing web system as well as audience.
Specification and documentation:
Create system functionality document which perceive all the requirements of the client with all the minute details. It will create better understanding about the system to be developed. Also mention all the future requirements as well as all the costing details.
Design:
This process includes designing a small prototype or small working model. It covers activities directed towards the architecture of the system and function flow diagrams including detailed specification of the system. In this process there can be lot many suggestions from the customer and those changes should be noted down and should discussed and before moving onto the next phase.
Development:
Development phase transforms the detailed design and specification into actual product through various hard code programs. It includes the integration of source code, database files and content into a single module or product.
Testing and Deployment:
It includes testing the product or modules of the product through various testing process like load testing, cross-browser compatibility testing, resolution testing and integration testing. It also includes the validation of pages through w3c consortium. The finished product is deployed and functions are carried out through the system, which the system is supposed to do.
Marketing and Maintenance:
Marketing is a process which involves preparation of Meta tags, optimizing pages from various factors, submitting the website to different search engine. Maintenance is the important step of the whole process. It includes frequent updating of the web site to keep it fresh. Various bug fixes and errors will be done during maintenance phase.
The above mentioned all the steps are not fixed for web development process. It may vary according to the company’s policy and strategy. [http://www.corporatesitesolutions.com]Web Development.
Source: [http://www.corporatesitesolutions.com]www.corporatesitesolutions.com
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Nik_Chauhan http://EzineArticles.com/?Web-Development-Process-Development-Life-Cycle&id=344293
Wednesday, August 29, 2007
Illusion Technologies: PHP Developers
Choose Wisely: PHP Templates and Search Engine Rank
By [http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=Jacob_Filipp]Jacob Filipp
This article is intended for PHP web developers who create template systems for consistently presenting website content. PHP designers who create their own template systems should be concerned about how their choices affect the website's position in search engines. Below is a discussion of three types of systems, their impact on search ranking and a recommendation for the best approach.
Webpage as a CGI Argument
In this architecture one PHP script contains the entire template, and plugs in content from a file it reads in - getting the file name from a CGI parameter. These types of systems are not only prone to security problems (as users can modify the path argument to retrieve arbitrary files) but are also ineffective for search engine optimization.
This particular design does not allow for titles and keyword/description meta-tags to be associated with individual pages. This is because the header portion of the template includes the section within it, and only allows for one site-wide title and set of meta-tags. Titles are one of the most important page elements, and having one title - unrelated to the actual content retrieved - results in a lower rank in search engines.
There are two other detrimental SEO effects this type of system has. The first is that each unique page is viewed as an aspect of the template script, rather than as a unique standalone page. This can result in search engines lowering the importance of individual content pages relative to the template script - which is often not the desired result. The other weakness of this approach is that having individual pages set up as CGI arguments makes site metrics harder to track, as statistics often show a visit to a specific page as a visit to the general template script. The popular web statistics packages AWstats and Webalizer are most affected by this.
However, this type of templating system is popular and sucessfully used in the world of e-commerce. In such systems, product information is stored in a database and is inserted into the template when a product is requested by its code. This means that both a unique title and a set of meta-tags can be stored alongside the product data (or generated on the fly), and inserted into the global template effectively. The only detrimental effects that remain are the latter mentioned two, and are usually an acceptable tradeoff for the increased ease of administration that a database-driven system provides.
Template as an Include
In this architecture, each page on the website has its own filename with a .php extension. The top and bottom portions of the template are stored in separate files that are included (using include_once() ) by each content file. This technique increases the importance of the page with search engines, as each page is its own standalone page rather than a CGI argument. This type of template system also makes it simple to track page views through regular website statistics software.
On the other hand, this type of template system still has the weakness of having one title and one set of meta-tags for the entire site. This is, again, because the header portion of templates has to include everything from the opening of the tag to the end of the code for the header portion of the template. And this area includes the title and meta-tags. One workaround for this type of system is to code the top template page to check which file it is being called from, and to substitute a suitable pre-coded title. Although effective, such a system is cumbersome to maintain as each new page that is published warrants a new title and meta-tag entry in this secondary system.
Body-Only Includes
The ideal PHP templating system will permit content producers to enjoy the reusability of templates, while maintaining unique titles and metadata for each page with ease. The system that meets all of these SEO needs is a "body-only include" system: a system where each php content page includes the top and bottom portions of the template (as in the previous approach), but only includes the elements below the body tag. This translates into a document that has its own html, head, title and meta tags, has an include_once() statement which is called at the top of the body element and includes the top portion of the template, has the content, and an include for the footer portion of the template. Such a system allows for individual editing of the title and meta-information during the creation of documents and solves the problems that both of the aforementioned systems face.
I find this system the most search-engine friendly, because it keeps the title information and the content together - allowing for the presence of relevant, unique titles for each page. This system is also the most human friendly, as storing the title information in the same file as the page content allows for fast updating and avoids maintaining a second "workaround" system that attempts to match titles to content.
Conclusion
The types of template system that PHP developers choose to implement for clients' sites have a crucial impact on the future search-engine popularity of the client's webpages. Important factors to consider when developing a template solution are: relevant titles tied to content, relevant meta-tags, standalone files and ease of statistics tracking. The popular approaches of page-as-an-argument and template-as-an-include do not effectively provide these functions. Including template information after the body tag, and keeping headers intact is the best way to ensure that sites are optimized for search engines - and this is why you should consider using the Body-Only Includes model during your next project.
Jacob Filipp is a Canadian search engine optimization specialist at [http://powerspiritonline.com/contact.html]Powerspirit. Jacob has 7 years of experience as a web developer and webmaster.
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Jacob_Filipp http://EzineArticles.com/?Choose-Wisely:-PHP-Templates-and-Search-Engine-Rank&id=597857
By [http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=Jacob_Filipp]Jacob Filipp
This article is intended for PHP web developers who create template systems for consistently presenting website content. PHP designers who create their own template systems should be concerned about how their choices affect the website's position in search engines. Below is a discussion of three types of systems, their impact on search ranking and a recommendation for the best approach.
Webpage as a CGI Argument
In this architecture one PHP script contains the entire template, and plugs in content from a file it reads in - getting the file name from a CGI parameter. These types of systems are not only prone to security problems (as users can modify the path argument to retrieve arbitrary files) but are also ineffective for search engine optimization.
This particular design does not allow for titles and keyword/description meta-tags to be associated with individual pages. This is because the header portion of the template includes the section within it, and only allows for one site-wide title and set of meta-tags. Titles are one of the most important page elements, and having one title - unrelated to the actual content retrieved - results in a lower rank in search engines.
There are two other detrimental SEO effects this type of system has. The first is that each unique page is viewed as an aspect of the template script, rather than as a unique standalone page. This can result in search engines lowering the importance of individual content pages relative to the template script - which is often not the desired result. The other weakness of this approach is that having individual pages set up as CGI arguments makes site metrics harder to track, as statistics often show a visit to a specific page as a visit to the general template script. The popular web statistics packages AWstats and Webalizer are most affected by this.
However, this type of templating system is popular and sucessfully used in the world of e-commerce. In such systems, product information is stored in a database and is inserted into the template when a product is requested by its code. This means that both a unique title and a set of meta-tags can be stored alongside the product data (or generated on the fly), and inserted into the global template effectively. The only detrimental effects that remain are the latter mentioned two, and are usually an acceptable tradeoff for the increased ease of administration that a database-driven system provides.
Template as an Include
In this architecture, each page on the website has its own filename with a .php extension. The top and bottom portions of the template are stored in separate files that are included (using include_once() ) by each content file. This technique increases the importance of the page with search engines, as each page is its own standalone page rather than a CGI argument. This type of template system also makes it simple to track page views through regular website statistics software.
On the other hand, this type of template system still has the weakness of having one title and one set of meta-tags for the entire site. This is, again, because the header portion of templates has to include everything from the opening of the tag to the end of the code for the header portion of the template. And this area includes the title and meta-tags. One workaround for this type of system is to code the top template page to check which file it is being called from, and to substitute a suitable pre-coded title. Although effective, such a system is cumbersome to maintain as each new page that is published warrants a new title and meta-tag entry in this secondary system.
Body-Only Includes
The ideal PHP templating system will permit content producers to enjoy the reusability of templates, while maintaining unique titles and metadata for each page with ease. The system that meets all of these SEO needs is a "body-only include" system: a system where each php content page includes the top and bottom portions of the template (as in the previous approach), but only includes the elements below the body tag. This translates into a document that has its own html, head, title and meta tags, has an include_once() statement which is called at the top of the body element and includes the top portion of the template, has the content, and an include for the footer portion of the template. Such a system allows for individual editing of the title and meta-information during the creation of documents and solves the problems that both of the aforementioned systems face.
I find this system the most search-engine friendly, because it keeps the title information and the content together - allowing for the presence of relevant, unique titles for each page. This system is also the most human friendly, as storing the title information in the same file as the page content allows for fast updating and avoids maintaining a second "workaround" system that attempts to match titles to content.
Conclusion
The types of template system that PHP developers choose to implement for clients' sites have a crucial impact on the future search-engine popularity of the client's webpages. Important factors to consider when developing a template solution are: relevant titles tied to content, relevant meta-tags, standalone files and ease of statistics tracking. The popular approaches of page-as-an-argument and template-as-an-include do not effectively provide these functions. Including template information after the body tag, and keeping headers intact is the best way to ensure that sites are optimized for search engines - and this is why you should consider using the Body-Only Includes model during your next project.
Jacob Filipp is a Canadian search engine optimization specialist at [http://powerspiritonline.com/contact.html]Powerspirit. Jacob has 7 years of experience as a web developer and webmaster.
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Jacob_Filipp http://EzineArticles.com/?Choose-Wisely:-PHP-Templates-and-Search-Engine-Rank&id=597857
Monday, August 27, 2007
Illusion Technologies: PHP Developers
Web Development Tricks and Techniques
By [http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=Sean_R_Mize]Sean R Mize
In the recent past many industries have flourished as a result of internet life style becoming en vogue. One of these industries is the industry of web development. Web development means the work of constructing web sites. There are a number of freelancers and other web developers who are making a more than decent living through web development. The reasons are obvious. There has been a lot of increase in the number of web sites which are existing on the web today. The number of web sites is still increasing now.
Never before was the number of web sites on the internet as big as it is today. The competition has increased and as a result people need state of the art kind of web sites for their businesses. Success in the online business is dependent on the web traffic flow a web site gets. To ensure this flow, those web developers are preferred who can help you in promoting your web site by designing it properly. Web development is a full fledge industry now. It has its own rules of the game.
Being a web developer means you need to know everything about the current technology which is being employed to construct web sites these days. You need to be clear about the importance of promoting a web site. The web site designs which help a web site in promoting it are feasible these days. The use of media streaming and such other features is also important. The most important tack is that you need to know the latest technologies being used in the web development industry these days. You also need to assess the need of your client before you design the web site for your client. Paying attention towards these tricks will help you in being a successful web developer.
Do you want to learn more about how I do it? I have just completed my brand new guide to article marketing success, ‘Your Article Writing and Promotion Guide‘
Download it free here: [http://www.secrets-of-internet-success.com/ezwebdevelopment.html]Secrets of Article Promotion
Sean Mize is a full time internet marketer who has written over 1574 articles in print and 11 published ebooks.
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Sean_R_Mize http://EzineArticles.com/?Web-Development-Tricks-and-Techniques&id=666611
By [http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=Sean_R_Mize]Sean R Mize
In the recent past many industries have flourished as a result of internet life style becoming en vogue. One of these industries is the industry of web development. Web development means the work of constructing web sites. There are a number of freelancers and other web developers who are making a more than decent living through web development. The reasons are obvious. There has been a lot of increase in the number of web sites which are existing on the web today. The number of web sites is still increasing now.
Never before was the number of web sites on the internet as big as it is today. The competition has increased and as a result people need state of the art kind of web sites for their businesses. Success in the online business is dependent on the web traffic flow a web site gets. To ensure this flow, those web developers are preferred who can help you in promoting your web site by designing it properly. Web development is a full fledge industry now. It has its own rules of the game.
Being a web developer means you need to know everything about the current technology which is being employed to construct web sites these days. You need to be clear about the importance of promoting a web site. The web site designs which help a web site in promoting it are feasible these days. The use of media streaming and such other features is also important. The most important tack is that you need to know the latest technologies being used in the web development industry these days. You also need to assess the need of your client before you design the web site for your client. Paying attention towards these tricks will help you in being a successful web developer.
Do you want to learn more about how I do it? I have just completed my brand new guide to article marketing success, ‘Your Article Writing and Promotion Guide‘
Download it free here: [http://www.secrets-of-internet-success.com/ezwebdevelopment.html]Secrets of Article Promotion
Sean Mize is a full time internet marketer who has written over 1574 articles in print and 11 published ebooks.
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Sean_R_Mize http://EzineArticles.com/?Web-Development-Tricks-and-Techniques&id=666611
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