Hundreds of ecommerce systems exist, but very few can match the power of Magento. In this screencast, I'll demonstrate how to download and install Magento to a local host, configure some of the site options, and create simple and configurable products and categories for our test e-commerce site.

PHP CMS systems are appearing everywhere - it's a veritable population explosion!

Backup2Mail is mini PHP application that creates regular backups of your MySQL database and sends it to configurable e-mail address. The whole process is scheduled with a help of Cron, a Unix program that runs programs at scheduled times.

Now I am no project planning expert but maybe this will help out some beginners and get them pointed in the right direction. I am going to break this up into a few different sections and try to keep it as general as possible to cut back on confusion.

Learn to grasp the concept behind URL Routing with PHP, rails style

This is an old trick, but I still find it useful and will post it here in case it will help other symfony developers out there.

Here’s a “Learn by Example” type of entry for php arrays. I tried to comment as much as I can, but like always, please ask if there’s something you don’t understand. I also want to note, you have to run the script to see that my comments are telling you the truth.

A couple days ago, Acquia moved Acquia Search out of beta and made it available commercially available through their Acquia Network service. Acquia Search is a hosted search service based on the Software as a Service (SaaS) model.

If you are like me you probably once upon a time spotted that PHP had a random number generating function called rand(), decided to save it to your memory, and left it at that. After all, a random number is a random number. Why would a programming language need more than one random number generating function? Well, apparently the creators of PHP did once upon a time decide one random number generating function is not enough.

A recent release of Zend Framework intruduced Zend_Application: an organized way to bootstrap the framework without the need of an ugly boostrap.php file. It comes with plugins support too, so let's see how to create one.

After working on a YUI TabView theme for the AjaxControlToolkit’s TabContainer control, I thought it might be fun to create a few more TabContainer themes for some of the other tab-style controls that I have seen floating around the web. I was especially curious in seeing what it would take to include images in each of the tab panel header’s.

Every web site needs a counter. You can implement Google Analytics or some other fully fledged statistics system, but for most sites you just need a simple counter. Read on for a simple PHP-based counter that does not rely on database access.

Using a bitwise operator is faster than using modulus operators, right? Apparently this is not the case with PHP. If you want to know the definite fastest way of checking for on/off, for instance when deciding background colors for a table cell, then read on.