PHP Tutorials, Resources, And Information

Family First Hosting

webmaster@handyphp.com (Handy PHP Administrator) — Sun, 04 Apr 2010 05:29:55 +0000

Handy PHP has partnered with a new hosting service. Family First Hosting offers full featured hosting accounts for an affordable price. All of the hosting accounts offer an unlimited email accounts which means that if you start a family website, everyone in your family can have a familymember@familyname.com email address. The same is true for business websites, all employees can have an employee@companyname.com email address. Having your own email addresses is a great way to promote your website or business. The best part, you can have a website for $3.00 per month. Less if you pay by the year. Your whole website with a domain name of your choice for just $45.00 per year.
Additionally, Family First Hosting offers all users with Sitebuilder which is a step-by-step web design tool. Just choose a template you like, type in the information you want on your pages, and publish. Want a more user interactive website? No problem, with the autoinstaller, account owners can quickly have a Wordpress blog site, a Joomla! based website like Handy PHP, an SMF bulletin board site, a Coppermine photo gallery site, and many more. Just plug in a few details and the autoinstaller does the rest. You can even use more than one autoinstalled application at the same time so your website can have a photo gallery and bulletin board.
For experienced users, Family First Hosting offers full PHP, MySQL, FTP support along with a list of other features professional web developers depend on such as cron jobs.
Visit Family First Hosting to get more information and to ask questions.

Designing Cross Browser Compatible Websites

webmaster@handyphp.com (Handy PHP Administrator) — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 18:56:05 +0000

For nearly as long as we have had HTML, we have had trouble getting it to look the same in a web browsers. Internet Explorer would display an element one while Netscape Navigator would display it a different way. Usually, a compromise needed to be made to get your page to look similar in most web browsers. Then CSS came along and really complicated everything. Suddenly, different web browsers just wouldn't parse the code the same and it made trying to fix the problem very difficult for most web designers. The good news was that once you figured out the compatibility for an element, it look 99.99% similar in all browsers.

Create Your Own PHP Function

webmaster@handyphp.com (Handy PHP Administrator) — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 05:27:55 +0000

As you write more and more scripts in any language, you will find that you have to use the same bits of code over and over. For example, in PHP you may use the echo function several times in each script. Now when the creators of PHP developed the scripting language, they realized that the job that echo performs was important and they created the function so that you wouldn't need to explain to the server how to echo every time you want to output data. Without the echo function, you would need to write a large block of code to do the same thing. In PHP like most languages, you have the ability to define your own functions for a script.

Handy PHP Upgraded

webmaster@handyphp.com (Handy PHP Administrator) — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 22:00:39 +0000

We are pleased to announce that Handy PHP has been recently upgraded. Now that the majority of extensions used for the website are compatible with the new software that makes the site work, an upgrade was warranted. We hope that this new generation of Joomla! (the content management system the runs Handy PHP) will offer the flexibility we require to bring our users the services they desire. With this generation of software, upgrades merely require new files to be copied over outdated files and the upgrade is complete. This ensures that we can provide the latest security and management features available to the system. It won't be until another generation leap is made before a complex upgrade like the one performed recently will need to be undertaken.

Chaos Laboratory

webmaster@handyphp.com (Handy PHP Administrator) — Sun, 25 May 2008 12:46:07 +0000

Chaos Laboratory is a multi topic web resource that covers everything from AJAX to Search Engine Optimization Tips. The format of the website is organized into an easy to read and search weblog. Articles are cross-referenced among all of the relative categories in which the site is arrange. Among my favorite categories are Google/AdSense and SEO.

Each article at Chaos Laboratory is well written and researched and contains useful information that will actually help the reader. The owner of the site writes articles based on tools, tips, and tricks that he has researched, uses and benefits from.

Here is a list of categories covered by Chaos Laboratory:
Ajax, C#, Firefox , Freeware, Gadgets, Google/AdSense, Graphics & Design, Hardware, Internet, Life, Universe & …, LifeStyle, Linux, News, Planet Boredom, Programming, Projects, Science, SEO, Tech News, Trend-Setters, VB.NET, Web 2.0, Windows, WordPress.

Handy PHP Search Engine Optimization Tips

webmaster@handyphp.com (Handy PHP Administrator) — Sun, 18 May 2008 22:08:09 +0000

We all want our websites to be shown on the first page of the search results when somebody is looking for the information that our sites has but often our page or pages aren't anywhere near the top of the list. Generally speaking, you'll never manage to optimize your website for every possible search query related to it. This is where search engine optimization comes in. Search Engine Optimization or SEO is simply the method in which you pick the correct keyword or words and convince the search engines that your page is the best possible match for it!

How To Pick The Right Keywords

To start with, you need to understand that this is a page by page process. Generally, if all of your pages are related to the same subject and the home page is optimized for that subject, then the site will do well in the search results. But for now we will pick one page and work on that. If the page has already been created, you'll probably need to update it but if the page is new, you can start the process from the beginning.

A Few Handy PHP Regular Expressions (RegEx)

webmaster@handyphp.com (Handy PHP Administrator) — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 17:38:37 +0000

I frequently find that I am looking around the Internet for various Regular Expressions and sometimes I tend to have trouble finding just the right one.Then when I do, I use it and forget all about it!

While I know quite a bit about regex, I haven't mastered the techniques and figure if someone else has already found the regex for what I need, it is easier and more time efficient to use that one. Again, the problem for me is that I usually forget what script I used what regex in and have to go look it up again or search through a bunch of scripts on my computer that I've forgotten about.

So I've decided to use this article as a regex repository that I'll add useful expressions and links to resources that will help you with your regex needs.

Creating Your First Template Driven PHP Website Part 1

webmaster@handyphp.com (Handy PHP Administrator) — Mon, 23 Apr 2007 15:48:09 +0000

Many people get discouraged when trying to start or even maintain a website because there are so many aspects of the website that need to be planned for in advanced. Since working with only HTML or even adding CSS and JavaScript can quickly limit the scalability of a website, many people simply give up! Here is an example of a situation where a new webmaster might abandon his dreams of running the World's greatest website!
Imagine that you are designing your website from scratch and you have about 20 pages all created and maybe even uploaded or published on the Internet. Each of the pages was easy enough to create since you planned ahead and made a blank page with all of the layout and images setup. All you have been doing is adding content to the blank and saving it as a new file! This is always a good idea, since it ensures that your website will have a uniform look throughout! As you are working on the 21st page, you realize that the menu doesn't have a link to the newest page. Usually, this can be fixed by adding the link to the file that is the next level up and hope that people will find it by following the flow of information that leads to it. Unfortunately, this newest file is a section header. It will have many subsections under it that can only be linked to from this page. Your only option now is to edit ALL of the previous 20 files and republish them with the updated menu.
Problem solved, right? well, just as you were getting ready to save that new file, you noticed a spelling error that is now on every page. You could let it slide by and hope nobody will notice but then again, you left a letter out of your website's name! So today, you have create 21 pages for your website and edited everyone of them twice! So, instead of having created 63 pages in one day, you wasted a bunch of time fixing small problems over and over again which will only get worse as your website gets larger.

Creating Your First Template Driven PHP Website Part 2

webmaster@handyphp.com (Handy PHP Administrator) — Wed, 25 Apr 2007 15:27:45 +0000

As suggested in part 1 of this series of tutorials, a PHP based template system can use PHP commands or keywords. Here we'll tackle the same task as before but this time we'll use keywords instead of PHP functions. The tricky part about this is that we have to "parse" the template instead of simply including it in the handler script!
This system is much more complex and is really only suggested when you want someone other than yourself to create templates. The first thing you should do when creating a template based website using PHP with keywords is to decide on the exact method of keyword implementation! You have to make the keywords easy enough for anyone to use but unique enough to keep the script from confusing regular content or words with keywords. Some little used non-alphanumeric character and/or all capital letters is one method while a prfix and underscore is another. For example:
{KEYWORD1}
{KEYWORD2}
or
[temp_menu]
[temp_header]
[temp_footer]
or
%_MY_MENU_%
%_MY_FOOTER_%
%_MY_HEADER_%

By making the keyword syntax rules early, you can avoid complications later.

Joomla CMS Tip #1 - Hide Your Special Links From Regular Users

webmaster@handyphp.com (Handy PHP Administrator) — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 04:58:24 +0000

The thing I like most about Joomla and for that matter Mambo, is the ability to create menus and set different permissions for different menus and menu items. For example, you can offer many more menu items to registered users than guests which makes sense for a lot of reasons. Why would you show a menu link to guests for a section of the website that is only accessible to registered members? More importantly, Why would you show the link to the Admin Control Panel to anyone other than your staff? It is unbelievable the number of Joomla based websites I have visited that show the link to the ACP. The first thing I always do is hide that link. That is just a very small step to adding a bit of security to your website. I'll explain the process here.