PHP and MySQL

New: Visit my "PHP Musings" blog for more on the topic of PHP, MySQL, and related (and maybe unrelated) subjects.

PHP is a general-purpose, multi-platform scripting language optimized for use with web applications. MySQL is a multi-platform relational database management system. PHP includes many functions specifically for working hand-in-hand with MySQL; and as both are open-source programs, they are very popular for use in creating interactive web applications. As such, they have become my tools of choice for web programming.

Latest News from PHP.net

Seriously: PHP 5.4.15 and PHP 5.3.25 really were released! (2013-05-09)

We weren't trying to pull an April Fool's Day joke in May. A temporary glitch caused the latest distributions of PHP to not properly propagate to the mirror servers. This has been fixed at the root level, and it's now being distributed to all of the mirrors. We'll take some bacon to go with the egg on our faces, please!If you continue to experience issues with downloading these versions after 21:00 UTC on 9 May, 2013, please drop us a line at php-mirrors@lists.php.net, telling us from which mirror you're trying to download, and we'll get it resolved.We apologize for the delays and confusion this may have caused, and thank you for using PHP. (more...)

PHP 5.5.0RC1 is available (2013-05-09)

The PHP development team announces the availability of the first release candidate of PHP 5.5. This release fixes some bugs as well as some possible leaks from our last beta. THIS IS A DEVELOPMENT PREVIEW - DO NOT USE IT IN PRODUCTION! You can find an incomplete changelog of PHP 5.5.0RC1 here : Ignore QUERY_STRING when sent in SCRIPT_FILENAME in FPM SAPI.Fix build with system libgd >= 2.1 which is now the minimal version required (as build with previous version is broken). No change when bundled libgd is used. Fixed some bugs in SNMP Fixed bug where stream_select() fails with pipes returned by proc_open() on Windows x64). To get the full changelog, please, check the NEWS file attached to the archive. For source downloads of PHP 5.5.0RC1 please visit the download page, Windows binaries can be found on windows.php.net/qa/. Note that our release candidate cycle is only meant to bug fixes, no more features will be added to PHP 5.5 from now. Please help us to identify bugs in order to ensure that the release is solid and all things behave as expected. Please test this release candidate against your code base and report any problems that you encounter to the QA mailing list and/or the PHP bug tracker. We would like to thank all people helping us making PHP better by testing it and reporting problems, as well as all its contributors for their great work on this 5.5 version of PHP. (more...)

PHP 5.4.15 and PHP 5.3.25 released! (2013-05-09)

The PHP development team announces the immediate availability of PHP 5.4.15 and PHP 5.3.25. These releases fix about 10 bugs aswell as upgrading the bundled libmagic library. All users of PHP are encouraged to upgrade to PHP 5.4.15.For source downloads of PHP 5.4.15 and PHP 5.3.25 please visit our downloads page, Windows binaries can be found on windows.php.net/download/.The list of changes are recorded in the ChangeLog. (more...)

Articles and Scripts

The following are a few articles/scripts I've cobbled together at one point or another regarding common issues in the use of these tools:

Links

Here are a few links to on-line references and sources which I frequently use:

Forcing a File Download

This is just a little tip I picked up at the PHPBuilder.com forum to ensure that a file is presented for downloading rather than being automatically opened by a browser.

<?php
header('Content-Length: '.$fileSize);
header('Content-Type: '.$mimeType);
header('Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="'.$fileName.'"');
header('Content-Transfer-Encoding: binary');
header('Cache-Control: must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0');