PHP

The PHP Developer Tools Project reached a major milestone this week with the version 1.0 release of PDT. I had recently installed the all-in-one Europa/PDT release and received errors when attempting to update via the Update Manager—something about being unable to unzip a package. Today, however, everything seems fine and when I reviewed Help -> Software Updates -> Manage Configuration -> PDT Feature, it showed version 1.0 as installed.

Are you ready to take a step beyond writing code in a text editor like UltraEdit, BBEdit, or TextMate? Would you like to see those PHP and JavaScript syntax errors in the editor, without transferring files to the server or opening a browser? If so, then you're ready to jump into the world of the IDE — Integrated Development Environment. I'll compare the free, open source Eclipse IDE to a few of its commercial competitors Then we'll go through the steps to install Eclipse PDT All-In-One, the Zend Debugger, JSEclipse, and Subclipse.

I've been meaning to backup my sites' databases for quite some time now. Today I was finally overcome with guilt and the fear of something going horrible wrong, so I finally decided to put a backup script into place. My hosting provider provides backups, and fortunately I've never needed to request a restore. You may ask "Then why are you worried about backups?". The answer is simple—there are some things you should count on in this world–things will go wrong from time to time. Yes, my hosting provider is a reliable and stable company providing a reliable and stable hosting environment, but things can change, and one should always be prepared.

I'm going into the last day of a week long XML course at work. The class has been great, despite being completely Microsoft-centric. Despite this, the instructor has done a good job of covering the topics and inspiring many possible projects in my head. Most of these projects are for the day job and will focus mainly on XSL transformations of training manuals.

So, my challenge was to get an XSL parser that works with PHP. A buddy at work informed me that I'd need Sablotron to do XSL with PHP.

In years past we've been fortunate to have had Jeffrey Veen, Molly Holzchlag, Jeff Zeldman, Eric Meyer, Carrie Bickner, Vincent Flanders, and Bebo White among many others discuss how to's and the big ideas that spark great disucussions and new goals.... In Doug's place we had a free-form moderated panel that included David Sklar, Bebo White, Michael Angeles, and Allan Marcus.