It's one of the gems in PHP that I find to be relatively under used. It's common for PHP applications to break out classes into their own files. This becomes cumbersome when working on large projects as you wind up with numerous include/require calls for any given page.

He shows an example of its usage (loading class files dynamically from a specified directory) and mentions how it can help to make your code a lot less ugly. Comments on the post range in topics - from comparing it to include paths, how the idea was borrowed from PEAR, and how proper naming conventions can make its use even easier.

To solve the upload problem, most of the big services have dedicated upload applications that run on all the different platforms. But it takes a lot of work to develop them, especially when they have to run on both Macintosh and Windows. Or is it so tough? As it turns out, Adobe AIR technology makes it possible to write applications for any platform using just HTML and JavaScript. It also offers access to cool desktop features, notably drag and drop.

The tutorial shows how to make the application with the HTML/Javascript version of an AIR app (as opposed to Flex) that lets you drag and drop files into it to be uploaded. They make the basic file upload form first as a foundation then extend it to make it accept the remote request (via POST) from the AIR application to handle the uploads. Javascript code and screenshots are included.

The CMS I am using is a small engine that puts together (potentially multi-lingual) page content, templates, and a site structure, and creates semi-static pages. It does not have a sleek GUI frontend, because by nature I am not afraid of a text editor, and most of the time get quicker results by just writing HTML than fighting with one of these what-you-see-is-what-you-might-get HTML editors.

He talks about the configuration files containing the app's settings (inspired by the YAML Symfony uses) and his work towards the "best matching pattern" algorithm. This is where the TDD came in - he cheated a little with some base classes (tests first!) and then came up with the tests for checking template names and more complex template interactions.

The post includes drops of code here and there as well - examples of the unit tests and of the configuration files.

The replace is as simple three line call, much the same as PHP's and the split call, while a bit more complex, is still pretty straight forward (it just needs a few extra variables).

Other methods in the post include a "switch" method, defining a procedure and updating variable by its name.

PHP has many functions that help us to implement Internet and/or networking protocols. In this article, we will look at how to implement some of those protocols using PHP.

They introduce the FTP functions for PHP (a basic list, PHP manual style) and include the code - the CSS to make it easier to use and the PHP code to make the FTP connection and grab the remote file listing. A screenshot is included to give you an idea of the end result.

This large, complex subject offers numerous possibilities for experimentation, which means that you'll surely have tons of fun creating timing systems with PHP. [...] his article, then, will be focused on evaluating different scripts that fetch sets of records, first from a database, and then from flat files.

They use the Timer class they defined in a previous part of the series and wrap it around both a database class (pulling user information from a MySQL database) and a fetch to a flat file for similar information. General exceptions are handled as a part of the resource connection class.

We are going to continue with the installation and configuration of web-based file managers. We'll present another freeware, open-source PHP-based file manipulation utility in the same way we explained bfExplorer in the previous part. This time, it's going to be the PHPfileNavigator2 (pfn2).

They cover the basics - installation (on a pre-existing Apache/PHP server), configuuration and some example screenshots of it in action when correctly set up.

Everybody knows how to use a conventional desktop application that acts as a file manager. And we all know how useful these manipulation utilities really are. They give us a hierarchical view of the content of our folders. They also have dozens of extra functions. [...] We will present two freeware PHP-based file managers. You'll find out how to install and configure them.

Part one handles the first steps with BytesFall - the installation and configuration (you'll already need a web server with PHP installed for this one).

At this stage, you've hopefully recalled how to build an expandable file uploading application with PHP 5 that uses only one custom function to transfer a target file from a client machine to a predefined web server. However, in the beginning, I said that I was going to teach you how to develop a brand new file uploading application using an object-oriented approach.

The finish off the FileUploader class they were working on previously and show some testing examples of it in action.

Given a directory, the test runner will recursively scan the directory for *Test.php files, build a test suite out of the *Test classes, and run it.

PHPUnit is framework that makes writing tests for your code easy and also includes functionality to run the tests and analyze their results.