Category Archives: Web Development

Send email from PHP inside local LAMP development environment

Sendmail LAMP Very often when developing for web inside your LAMP environment you need to send emails using PHP. Configuring fully fledged email server on your Linux box is an option, although one I don't recommend. Life's too short to spend it configuring many mail transport agent of your choice configuration files just to check is your PHP application sending emails or not. In this article I'll show you how make your development environment capable of testing email sending features of your PHP applications in almost no time.

Continue reading

LAMP development in your home directory with suPHP module

suPHP Logo In one of my earlier articles I've described how to easily manage LAMP name based virtual hosts using bash script that simplifies virtual hosts management on a Debian based Linux operating systems. While I was coding the script in question, I have assumed that most people develop from default document root /var/www and using Apache's mod_php5. In this article I'll show you how to setup your LAMP environment to develop in your home directory using another Apache module suPHP.

Continue reading

PHP random sentence spinning function

recycle_phpIn this article I'm presenting my solution for a very common PHP developer job interview task where it is required to create a random sentence spinning function. Input of this function is a PHP string that employs syntax telling our code where's the randomness and what are the possible substrings for each section of randomness. Basically it is required to create PHP code that's able to process strings like the following:

<?php
$string = '{Please|Just} make this {cool|awesome|random} test sentence {rotate {quickly|fast} and random|spin and be random}';
?>

As you can probably guess the input sentence uses braces to declare sections of randomness and the pipe character to delimit substrings that should be used randomly inside their sections. Code also must be able to process nested sections of randomness.

Continue reading

Install Magento on Ubuntu and fix PHP Extensions "0" must be loaded error with PHP 5.4

Magento LogoEvent though I follow MVC pattern in many of my web related projects, like every PHP web developer I came to the point when I have to dive into some well established MVC PHP framework. This is something backend developer must do if he wants to stop being a lone wolf and start working inside a team of developers. Web frameworks of my choice are fast Codeigniter and powerful Zend Framework. Getting to know about Codeigniter wasn't hard, but mastering Zend is still work in progress especially since Zend Framework 2 has been recently released. Talking about Zend, recently I got interested in getting to know about open source eCommerce solutions and I choose to get acquainted with Zend based Magento. In this article I'll show you how to install Magento on a Debian based distributions like Ubuntu and provide workaround for the PHP Extensions "0" must be loaded error thrown by Magento installer running on PHP 5.4.

Continue reading