whatknows

I agree with Magic-Node. Get yourself over to EasyPHP and download a slick system with which you can test all of your code! You will find that eventually there will be things that you cannot test on your desktop. The one I keep running into is the use of mail(), which uses sendmail on a *nix host, and nothing but errors on my own machine.

I was just wondering what people's concensus was about this. What is the best distro for a web server, and why? I have heard people rave about Debian's stability. What about others?What about desktops? SuSE is looking really good these days, but I haven't anything other than SuSE, Mandrake, and Knopix. Suggestions?

Oh, and as for books (as I get up on my soap box), I can not recommend PHP and MySQL Web Development enough. I think it is great to learn PHP, but I think it really helps to learn it in context of database systems - thats the whole point after all, isn't it? This book really has it all. After that, if you are ready for hardcore enterprise level PHP discussion, try Advance PHP Programming by George Schloosnagle (sp?). All I can say is that these two books taught me how to program.

CodeTeam posted this in a different thread: It might help you out.

Debuging in PHP is a pain. It is just that simple. Dreamweaver (which I use) is worthless beyond syntax highlighting. Others such as Crimson, PHPEdit, and of course Zend allow you to debug, but they require a PHP engine on your machine, which requires that all locations be accurate to the debugging machine. I find this to be a pain considering you are programming for the web and not your machine.Hopefully I am just an idiot. I would love to hear if someone has had a great debuging experience. That being said, I wouldn't trade my syntax highlighting for my right ear. Maybe I will just have to take the plunge and buy Zend.

I like Crimson Editor. Has anyone tried Zend? Is it worth the money? I hear great stuff - CVS support is the latest attractant.

virrey is right on. Think about added code to the top of each of the pages you wish to track. The query could insert $PHP_SELF into a page column, giving you a row for each page load.Alternately you could set up another field as "hits" and then do a query to see if a row for that page is already in the database. If it is, use UPDATE, if not, INSERT.Eventually when MySQL 4.1 goes from Gamma release to General, you will be able to use "INSERT... ON DUPLICATE KEY SET..." which will let the database decide whether to update or insert.

This might be harasy considering that most (all?) of us are here because we like free things, but I would strongly recommend PHP and MySQL Web Development to any new PHP/MySQL developer. It was an invaluble learning tool for me. I know you can get all of it off the web for free, but it was great to have the book pull everything together in one tidy package.

These are all great ways to do it. For the sake of conversation, here is a variation on the theme. In some of the enterprise projects that I work on we will use a "mode" which is simply defined by the text post ? (eg. myfile.php?mypage would be "mypage" mode). I will often grab the $QUERY_STRING as the mode, or parse it if anything else is on the GET string. Eg. $mode = $QUERY_STRING;[br]switch ($mode) {[/br] case "mode1":[br] include_once("Mode1.class.php");[/br] ...[br] case "mode2":[/br] include_once("Mode2.class.php");[br] ...[/br]} So if I went to mypage.php?mode1 it would include the Mode1 class and then you could execute some functionality out of that. You will notice that this does not limit the code to one file, but it does limit it to one URL. I love this combination - it consolidates as many functions as you want into one URL, maintains code in manageable classes, and helps you avoid having to come up with strange new names for each page that you want to do something.

I spent a good amount of time trying a bunch on for size. Typo3 is certainly the best, but it has a bit of a learning curve. For simpler projects, I prefer Mambo.