PHP Link Directory Scripts for free

PHP Link Directory is now the most widely used link directory management systems around. It is an affordable, commercial PHP script that allows you to easily build your customized link directory, with built in themes as well as additional templates and modes that are readily available.

The great advantage of phpLD is the number of templates and mods available. There are complete sites devoted to mods and templates, so in addtion to this site, you will find lots of helpful information elsewhere too. There is no shortage of people available to help you find success with your directory.

There is  a very active support forum where people are able to get help, discuss features, request mods, or release mods. If you have questions, you will find answers in the support forum, and They strive to answer all questions.

While phpLD can still be used strictly as a link directory script, it has evolved into a full fledged CMS that allows for page creation, article submission, user submitted content, and the ability to customize nearly everything to fit the needs of your website.

It is currently in version 3.3.0 of the script, and you are invited to take a look at the phpLD Features page to see some of the many features phpLD offers.

You can find a DEMO here.

And Download the free version of 2.1.2  here.

Zend Technologies announced today the addition of two new PHP training courses

[via Zend]
Cupertino, CA  –  August 6, 2008  –  Zend Technologies announced today the addition of two new PHP training courses: “Migration from PHP 4 to PHP 5” and “Zend Studio for Eclipse”. These courses further expand the portfolio of Zend training courses, which include PHP from introduction to advanced levels, as well as courses about PHP Security, creation of Rich Internet Applications, and the use of major Zend products.

 

The PHP courses, complemented with PHP 5 Certification Training, prepare students for the Zend PHP Certification Examination. With over 3,300 Zend Certified Engineers (ZCEs) worldwide, Zend Certification has become the global standard by which enterprises select, recruit and educate PHP professionals. More than 300 ZCEs advertise their Zend certification on their resumes in the LinkedIn professional network (http://www.linkedin.com).

Oxagile is a rapidly growing software outsourcing company with a strong focus on quality. They have achieved  a number of goals with their participation in Zend’s certification programs.

“Becoming a certified expert brings many benefits to the engineer, to the company, and its clients,” says Dmitry Karpovich, Oxagile CEO.  “The ZCE Certification demonstrates that the development team keeps in step with the latest PHP technology.  And it helps to show our customers and prospects that we have highly qualified PHP developers where it matters most of all - their critical projects.”

Through Zend, enterprise organizations have access to a complete training portfolio that enable their staff to deliver high-impact web applications faster, more predictably, and with better quality. They’ll be trained in industry best practices for web development, leveraging the modern object-oriented capabilities of PHP and frameworks, while leveraging state-of-the-art Zend product solutions.

“Signing our engineers up for the Zend Framework training was by far the best ROI investment I’ve made for our project,” said Jose C. Lacal with HealthLibrarian. “Our engineers delivered a fully working search engine with many customizations we needed within two weeks of completing Zend’s course.”

“By offering our curriculum in multiple languages, on-line and on-site through Zend training centers, Authorized Training Partners, and in collaboration with universities, we make our training easily accessible to both the growing PHP community and to commercial companies worldwide,” said Susie Sedlacek, vice president for global services at Zend. “Participants also benefit from our in-depth analysis of customer input, extensive research, and proven methods of instructional design. Zend has invested thousands of hours of experience into developing a curriculum that focuses on business relevance.”

“Our goal is to endow our clients with the skills and tools necessary to meet their needs in the most convenient and powerful methods used in adult education today, and our consistently high customer satisfaction ratings confirm our success,” adds Deirdre Bradley, head of instructional design at Zend.

Sponsored by Zend and delivered through Pearson Vue, the Zend PHP certification, leading to the title of Zend Certified Engineer (ZCE), is the standard for developers who want to demonstrate PHP proficiency.

Zend Certification testing is provided as part of conference attendance at the Zend/PHP Conference 2008, to be held in Santa Clara, California from September 15-18. For more information about ZendCon and to register, please visithttp://www. zendcon. com.

For additional details about Zend Training programs including courses, schedules, training partners, and for course registration, please visithttp://www.zend.com/training.

 
About Zend Technologies, Inc.
 

Zend Technologies, Inc., The PHP Company, is the leading provider of products and services for developing, deploying, and managing business-critical PHP applications.  PHP is used by more than twenty million web sites and has quickly become the most popular language for building dynamic web applications.  Deployed at more than 25,000 companies worldwide, the Zend family of products is a comprehensive platform for supporting the entire lifecycle of PHP applications.  Zend is headquartered in Cupertino, California.

For more information, please visit www. zend. com<!–[if !supportNestedAnchors]–><!–[endif]–>, or call +1 408 253 8800.

                                                                                                 ###
 Press Contact information:
 Bradford Cottel
Zend Technologies
+1 408 253 8812

pr@zend. com

Linux.com:China takes lead in Linux education

By Chen Nan Yang [via:Linux.com]

Since the Chinese government began supporting domestic open source communities in 2005, hundreds of thousands of young people in the world’s most populous country have become a part of the open source world.

With the help of the government-supported Leadership of Open Source University Promotion Alliance (LUPA), Zhejiang Technology Institute of Economy (ZJTIE) founded its Linux Training & Examination Center in 2006. The center started out offering a simple 48-hour course; upon completion, students received a Linux operator certificate or a Linux network administrator certificate or both. According to ZJTIE, 1,500 students in the last two years have passed the examination. However, those students who wanted to learn more had to learn by themselves.

Now, however, LUPA offers nine Linux certificates, including certificates for software engineers, C programming language engineers, and LAMP system engineers. In response to a requirement from China’s Ministry of Education, LUPA published 11 new Linux textbooks in July. The Ministry hopes that these textbooks will help Chinese students learn more advanced Linux technologies.

Rising employment

Some Chinese schools believe that Linux education has helped students gain employment. According to ZJTIE, 90% of the students in its Economic Information Department received the LUPA certificates in 2006; as a result, employment rose to the highest the school has seen. This may be a result of the booming open source market in China. According to CCID Consulting, the sale of Chinese open source software increased 17.1%, while sales of Linux increased 20.2% in 2007.

As Linux accounts for 66.5% of China’s open source market (according to a 2007 survey from CCID Consulting), open source education has been focused mostly on Linux. However, its success has encouraged ZJTIE to expand its teaching and certification. In March 2008, ZJTIE worked with LUPA to expand its education system from Linux to the whole open source industry.

According to LUPA, more than 300 Chinese universities and colleges have joined its system. Open source technology has become a required course in many of these schools. Although the total number of students who have been trained for open source technologies is not available yet, Zhang Jianhua, chairman of LUPA, estimates that LUPA will train 100,000 students in Linux per year.

Beyond the classroom

Besides developing open source courses, government-supported communities also regularly hold activities such as open source conferences, speeches, contests, festivals, and campus marches to attract students to learn more about the culture, history, ideas, and technologies of the open source industry. At the same time, open source communities without government support have brought many young Chinese to the open source world by offering free open source information, translation of open source articles from other countries, and forums for open source technologies communication.

Thanks in part to promotion by these communities, open source has become a powerful idea among Chinese programmers. In a survey by PHPChina in June 2007, 32.6% of PHP professionals said that they chose PHP mostly because it’s open source, and 64.8% of interviewees who would start to learn PHP believed that “open source is the strong point of PHP.” The same survey also showed that more than three quarters of the Chinese PHP professionals learned something from or received information through domestic PHP communities.

The rapid growth of China’s open source expertise has yet to result in much contribution to the development of the global open source industry. This may be because young Chinese people are still novices in the open source industry, or it may be due to the fact that they have to work more than 60 hours a week to fight for their new jobs and have no time to work on open source projects for the time being. However, as the open source education system improves and as more young people become open source veterans, the global open source community will benefit from China’s presence.

Chen Nan Yang is a Chinese freelance journalist and former IT director in the Chinese government.

How to install PHP for IIS on Home Server

[via wegotserved]

If you’re interested in running a website from your home server, you may have considered various options, including running PHP. But running PHP with IIS can be fraught with problems - or at least was, until WGS reader, Christopher Courtney, wrote the following guide to installing PHP for IIS on Windows Home Server. Over to Christopher…

Because running IIS and Apache really isn’t feasable, one needs to be able to install PHP into IIS. If you have tried before or searched for how, you will notice many different ways, and a lot of problems with doing so. I’ve tried several times and gotten the same problem, but finally fixed it and got PHP working under IIS. Now I am going to share it. (more…)

Freeglobes - a free open source php directory from france

Are you looking up a free php directory script? Maybe the Freeglobes is your choice.

Freeglobes is a Free PHP/MySQL directory, aims to be user friendly and respectfull of the standards of the internet, easy to install and  be customized. There is a plugin system, you can add new features to Freeglobes without having to modify the main source code.
And Freeglobes is a open source php directory, free to use! You can build up a web directory very easily.
Freeglobes is written by a french guy, but there is a English language version.
You can find more information about at the Freeglobes official site, and live demo here and here( live webcams ), the supporting forum, a wiki of Freeglobes, and you can find lots of Freeglobes themes here.

Download Freeglobes.

Requirements:
- PHP 4 (4.3.0 or greater); PHP 5 is not officially supported. (it may work with PHP5 but some features may have bugs)
- MySQL 3.23 or greater (MySQL 4 and greater is recommended)
- PHP GD2 and XML libraries
- Optional : URL Rewrite. this feature can be disabled in admin panel if your host doesn’t support it. It’s recommended to enable it.

How to install Wordpress on local windows server?

There are many blog service provider on the Internet, but sometimes we want to install a wordpress blog on my windows xp operating system, how can we do it?

Here’s a little guide that will help you install and run a Wordpress blog locally on your windows XP os in less then 10 minutes:

Install wampserver on your computer, if you have any questions about it, you can find more details on my another airticle of Use wamp to build a php website running environment(windows) , keep the wampserver running.

  1. Open your web browser(IE,firefox…),and type http://localhost/phpmyadmin/ ,use the phpmyadmin to create a new database for wordpress .
    create a wordpress mysql database
    create a wordpress mysql database

     

  2. Download Wordpressand unzip it under the WWW folder (generally c:\wamp\www) ,and rename the default folder name to what you like, such as “blog”, “myblog”…etc.
  3. Rename the wp-config-sample.php file to wp-config.php.
    Open wp-config.php in your favorite text editor and fill in your database details. Attention, you should not use notepad.exe to edit the wp-config.php file, otherwise an error may be occurred.A text editor is a program which edits files in plain text format, as compared to binary format. Using a non-text based word processing program (e.g. using Microsoft Word to edit PHP scripts) can cause major problems in your code. This is because non-text based word processing programs insert extra formatting into text files, and can corrupt the files when they need to be interpreted by the interpreter. An editor like Notepad does not insert any extra formatting. Edit WordPress Files with a text only editor. some examples are  UltraEdit-32, TextPad, EditPlus, Notepad++ …etc.
  4. Run the WordPress installation script by accessing http://localhost/myblog/wp-admin/install.php in your favorite web browser. The myblog folder is the one you put all files in, maybe another name.
  5. That’s all, it’s so easy to install it on local computer, if you’v installed successfully, let me know.

Use wamp to build a php website running environment(windows)

If we want to debug a php website on local computer, we must build up a php website running environment first, that is PHP + mysql + Apache.
However, for PHP beginners, the establishment of such an environment is very difficult.Fortunately, there are some smart guys have considered to this point, they create tools that make this process more easier.
Now I’ll introduce a tool named “wampserver“, a Windows web development environment,that allows you to create web applications with Apache, PHP and the MySQL database. And it also comes with PHPMyAdmin and SQLiteManager to easily manage your databases.
Wampserver is easy to install and use, it installs automatically (installer), and its usage is very intuitive. You will be able to tune your server without even touching the setting files.
WampServer is the only packaged solution that will allow you to reproduce your production server. Once WampServer is installed, you have the possibility to add as many Apache, MySQL and PHP releases as you want.
WampServer also has a trayicon to manage your server and its settings.

  1. First, download the software from the official site download page of wampserver.The newest version is wampserver2.0, including Apache 2.2.8, MySQL 5.0.51b, and PHP 5.2.6 .
  2. Second, install it.You can find detial information from here.
  3.  Third,when you have installed wampserver, a “www” directory is created (generally c:\wamp\www). Create a directory inside for your project and put your PHP files in it. Click on the link “Localhost” in the WampServer menu or open your browser and open the http://localhost address. 
  4. Fourth,Add Apache, MySQL and PHP releases. 
    WampServer allows you to install almost all the existing releases of Apache, PHP and MySQL so you can reproduce exactly the settings of your production server.
    To add a new release, donwload it here and install it.
  5. Finally, click on the WampServer menu and activate the release that you want to use.

 Wait until the WampServer icon become white again and start to work.

Now, you can put your php scripts into the WWW folder, and use URL such as:http://localhost/test.php
to run it.

Wish you a good luck!

Official PHP Manual

This is the official PHP Manual of PHP.net.

by:
Mehdi Achour
Friedhelm Betz
Antony Dovgal
Nuno Lopes
Hannes Magnusson
Georg Richter
Damien Seguy
Jakub Vrana
2008-08-08
Edited By: Philip Olson

Why use PHP?

PHP is a server side code, which means that before your visitor ever sees a thing on your site, the server is told to perform some functions and first. For example, you might tell the server “Get today’s date, put in a certain format, and show it in this table… then send the html to the visitor.” The great thing about php is that except for the fact that the page ends with .php, all they see is html if they view the source code. In contrast, JavaScript is a client side code. Your visitor has to have Javascript turned on and installed in order for all the neat javascript to work on your website. The good news is that most people have javascript enabled on their browsers. So, where PHP would get the time and date from the server, you could have a similar javascript program that gets the time and date from the visitor’s own computer. Both codes have pluses and minuses… but the fact that php works on everyone’s computer (since it does all the magic at the server) I’ve focused my efforts on PHP. There are other differences between javascript and PHP, but that’s not the issue right now. PHP can be used for partically many applications and sides of the online life, some things of which I have used PHP in the past for:

  1. E-commerce.
  2. Password protection.
  3. Advertising.
  4. Database management.
  5. Auctions.

PHP is quick to learn, and quick to develop (in an environment free from distractions). It is faster than pearl, simpler than c and just better than ASP for every reason possible. The PHP reference is useful and complete with good examples and user contributed notes, probably the most helpful help manual I?ve ever used. PHP with mySQl is very easy to develop and use and probably the best language to use for any dynamic site or business / shopping site, though only just better than c because of its short development time, and general easiness. If you know c, c++ or any other ?proper? programming languages you will find PHP extremely easy. Unlike ASP (which is based on a shitty VB) its structure has many similarities to c and c++ as well as JavaScript. Unlike sites made in c it is very easy to switch between PHP and HTML in a page, and small pieces of PHP code can easily be inserted into HTML documents.

What is PHP & History of PHP

What is PHP?

PHP is a server-side, cross-platform, HTML embedded scripting language that lets you create dynamic web pages. PHP-enabled web pages are treated just like regular HTML pages and you can create and edit them the same way you normally create regular HTML pages. There are two meanings which programmers mostly associate PHP with:

  1. Personal Home Page.
  2. PHP Hypertext Preprocessor.

History of PHP

PHP/FI

PHP succeeds an older product, named PHP/FI. PHP/FI was created by Rasmus Lerdorf in 1995, initially as a simple set of Perl scripts for tracking accesses to his online resume. He named this set of scripts ‘Personal Home Page Tools’. As more functionality was required, Rasmus wrote a much larger C implementation, which was able to communicate with databases, and enabled users to develop simple dynamic Web applications. Rasmus chose to release the source code for PHP/FI for everybody to see, so that anybody can use it, as well as fix bugs in it and improve the code.

PHP/FI, which stood for Personal Home Page / Forms Interpreter, included some of the basic functionality of PHP as we know it today. It had Perl-like variables, automatic interpretation of form variables and HTML embedded syntax. The syntax itself was similar to that of Perl, albeit much more limited, simple, and somewhat inconsistent.

By 1997, PHP/FI 2.0, the second write-up of the C implementation, had a cult of several thousand users around the world (estimated), with approximately 50,000 domains reporting as having it installed, accounting for about 1% of the domains on the Internet. While there were several people contributing bits of code to this project, it was still at large a one-man project.

PHP/FI 2.0 was officially released only in November 1997, after spending most of its life in beta releases. It was shortly afterwards succeeded by the first alphas of PHP 3.0.

PHP 3

PHP 3.0 was the first version that closely resembles PHP as we know it today. It was created by Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski in 1997 as a complete rewrite, after they found PHP/FI 2.0 severely underpowered for developing an eCommerce application they were working on for a University project. In an effort to cooperate and start building upon PHP/FI’s existing user-base, Andi, Rasmus and Zeev decided to cooperate and announce PHP 3.0 as the official successor of PHP/FI 2.0, and development of PHP/FI 2.0 was mostly halted.

One of the biggest strengths of PHP 3.0 was its strong extensibility features. In addition to providing end users with a solid infrastructure for lots of different databases, protocols and APIs, PHP 3.0’s extensibility features attracted dozens of developers to join in and submit new extension modules. Arguably, this was the key to PHP 3.0’s tremendous success. Other key features introduced in PHP 3.0 were the object oriented syntax support and the much more powerful and consistent language syntax.

The whole new language was released under a new name, that removed the implication of limited personal use that the PHP/FI 2.0 name held. It was named plain ‘PHP’, with the meaning being a recursive acronym - PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor.

By the end of 1998, PHP grew to an install base of tens of thousands of users (estimated) and hundreds of thousands of Web sites reporting it installed. At its peak, PHP 3.0 was installed on approximately 10% of the Web servers on the Internet.

PHP 3.0 was officially released in June 1998, after having spent about 9 months in public testing.

PHP 4

By the winter of 1998, shortly after PHP 3.0 was officially released, Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski had begun working on a rewrite of PHP’s core. The design goals were to improve performance of complex applications, and improve the modularity of PHP’s code base. Such applications were made possible by PHP 3.0’s new features and support for a wide variety of third party databases and APIs, but PHP 3.0 was not designed to handle such complex applications efficiently.

The new engine, dubbed ‘Zend Engine’ (comprised of their first names, Zeev and Andi), met these design goals successfully, and was first introduced in mid 1999. PHP 4.0, based on this engine, and coupled with a wide range of additional new features, was officially released in May 2000, almost two years after its predecessor, PHP 3.0. In addition to the highly improved performance of this version, PHP 4.0 included other key features such as support for many more Web servers, HTTP sessions, output buffering, more secure ways of handling user input and several new language constructs.

Today, PHP is being used by hundreds of thousands of developers (estimated), and several million sites report as having it installed, which accounts for over 20% of the domains on the Internet.

PHP’s development team includes dozens of developers, as well as dozens others working on PHP-related projects such as PEAR and the documentation project.

PHP 5

PHP 5 was released in July 2004 after long development and several pre-releases. It is mainly driven by its core, the Zend Engine 2.0 with a new object model and dozens of other new