Here’s a list of Chart & Graph modules which work with PHP. I personally like PHP/SWF Charts and FusionCharts, which are Flash based charts which you can interface to from PHP. Here’s a list of resources which I checked out.
Most of the commercial products like PHP/SWF charts and Fusion Charts have a free version also available.
Here’s a book from Bruce Perens’ Open Source Series called PHP5 Power Programming.
This book deals with :
In this book, PHP 5’s co-creator and two leading PHP developers show you how to make the most of PHP 5’s industrial-strength enhancements in any project—no matter how large or complex. Their unique insights and realistic examples illuminate PHP 5’s new object model, powerful design patterns, improved XML Web services support, and much more. Whether you’re creating web applications, extensions, packages, or shell scripts—or migrating PHP 4 code—here are high-powered solutions you won’t find anywhere else.
You can download the entire book from Prentice Hall (click on the download link at the Prentice Hall site to get the entire book in pdf):
http://www.phptr.com/title/013147149X
Here’s some of the latest web-based Office Suites based off Ajax. Some of these do eliminate the requirement of having a bulky office suite installed on your PC.
Think Free Online:
http://online.thinkfree.com/
“Thinkfree develops cross-platform applications and online solutions. It’s flagship offering, ThinkFree Office 3, is a Microsoft Office-compatible suite, which allows users to seamlessly create and interact with all kinds of documents and files. Because it is platform independent, it is an ideal and cost-effective way for anyone to work with their office files anywhere, anytime.”
Writely:
http://www.writely.com/
“Writely is a web word processor that provides simple and secure document collaboration and publishing on the web using only the browser. ”
gOFFICE:
https://goffice.com/
“gOFFICE.com, by Silveroffice, Inc., provides an online office suite which allows customers to quickly create documents via a web browser. The customer types in their browser, chooses a letterhead design and receives a professionally formatted PDF file in moments. Customers do not require Adobe Acrobat, as the PDF files are created on the gOFFICE servers. The output from gOFFICE is of high quality. Have a look at this example.”
Zoho Writer:
http://www.zohowriter.com/
Zoho writer allows you to access, edit, share your documents from anywhere. Imports Microsoft Word or Open office document formats. Documents created in Zoho Writer can be exported as PDF/DOC/HTML files.
Here’s a very good article on how to optimize performance and improve security on Apache Servers.
“This guide is written mostly for web administrators/developers, who want to optimize the speed and increase the security of Apache web server. Without a doubt, Apache is still one of the best web servers on the Internet. Being open source, loaded with modules that can do almost anything, Apache is a good solution for both development and production needs. This guide will help you get the best out of Apache web server by letting you control its usage with minimum resources.”
Link: Nasim Mansurov » Apache Performance and Security Guide
A new threat for PHPBB users. Here’s a post from the PHP Security Blog.
“At Halloween 2005 I had disclosed a number of bugs in phpBB, including a remote code execution exploit through the signature_bbcode_uid variable. You will not find this vulnerability in the phpBB security tracker because it is phpBB project’s practise to blame their bugs on PHP and/or otherwise downplay them or hide them. Unfortunately there is now a public exploit for this vulnerability, which was released yesterday while most of us were celebrating christmas.”
Link: phpBB exploit in the wild – PHP Security Blog
Here’s a cool way to swap Stylesheets on the fly using UDASSS(Unobtrusive Degradable Ajax Style Sheet Switcher). Works great even if Javascript is disabled on the browser.
The Unobtrusive Degradable Ajax Style Sheet Switcher combines the power of Server Side processing and DOM scripting to swap style sheets on the fly with the power of Ajax. If JavaScript is disabled – UDASSS degrades gracefully to improve your website accessibility. Needless to say, it is very sexy indeed.
Link: UDASSS Official Documentation
Here are a 3 tutorials showing you how to upload, store and watermark your images using GD with PHP.
The first tutorial shows you how to upload and store images on your server using PHP & GD.
Link: Storage and re-use of images using PHP/GD – Part 1 :: gvtulder.f2o.org
The second part of the tutorial shows you how to search images, generate img tags for the image and creating pop-ups to show the larger version of the image.
Link:Storage and re-use of images using PHP/GD – Part 2 :: gvtulder.f2o.org
Now how about watermarking the images you upload? Here’s a tutorial from SitePoint showing you how to do this.
Watermark Images on the Fly in PHP [PHP & MySQL Tutorials]
This is an attempt to create a free encyclopedia on cryptography. The initiative was started on 21-Dec-2005 by one of my friends Anuj Seth.
The project is looking for contributions in terms of providing original (non-copyrighted) material. You can add it directly to the site at the appropriate location, once you register yourself there.
Link : http://www.cryptodox.com
Here’s a great tutorial on how to create a fully functional search engine using the Symfony framework. You can develop your own search engine, with results ordered by relevancy, smart indexing and stemming of search terms. Head over to this fifteen-minutes tutorial from the symfony project.
Link: symfony PHP5 framework » Search engine
Symfony is a web application framework for PHP5 projects. It aims to speed up the creation and maintenance of web applications, and to replace the repetitive coding tasks by power, control and pleasure.
Here are a few XML parsing tutorials from kirupa.com. Kirupa.com is a cool place to check out tutorials on Flash and PHP.
” If you are looking at this tutorial then you probably have a good idea in your head about what XML is and what you can do with it. However, for those of you that stumbled across this tutorial on accident and are interested in learning more, I will briefly explain what XML is and what it is used for.”
Link to this tutorial: XML Parsing using PHP {Easy}
“ Ok, since I already went over the basics for formatting XML data and the basics of PHP/XML parsing I’m just going to jump right into the XML and PHP without much of an explanation. For this project I decided to create a mock-news headline parser. Basically, we have our XML file that has news headlines and a brief description of the story.”
Link to this tutorial: XML Parsing using PHP {Intermediate}
“ This tutorial will show you how to take data that is stored in your mySQL database and easily turn it into XML. From there you can use the XML however you wish. This is useful for blogs, shoutboxes, guestbooks, or even larger things such as back-end CMS (content management systems) for your site or sites. While writing this tutorial I am making the assumption that if you are looking at this tutorial then you already have a decent grasp of some of the basics of PHP and also that you know basic XML syntax rules.”
Link to this tutorial: Output mySQL data as XML with PHP
Before actually deciding upon any web design, a lot of web design consulting needs to be done. Ideally this should be done alongwith web development consulting. This is because while thinking over a web site design, a lot of things need to be taken into consideration, like getting a dedicated hosting service, that would provide colocation hosting as well.
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