In this tutorial, we will be creating a simple about page that is powered by PHP, HTML5 and CSS3. It will present your contact information to your visitors, with an option for downloading it as a vCard (useful for importing it in third party applications). You can use today's example as a placeholder for your upcoming personal website, or as an actual about page.

He includes all of the code, markup and styling you'll need to get it put together. The PHP is used to store the contact details and, based on a flag in the GET request (easily modifiable to any other method, like a HTTP header) it returns the basic page, a JSON set or a vcard of the contact data. The page also includes spots for linking to Facebook and Twitter accounts.

PHP has several [three] new documentation features that the community should be aware of.

They've introduced the following:

• PHP manual pages (man pages) - pman - installed via PEAR
• An enhanced CHM (Windows help) version of the manual with user notes
• The Online Documentation Editor allowing edits from anyone.

Now I didn't know it but is seems that php's session handling is blocking on a per request basis. Kinda makes sense if you think about it, that if two requests simultaneously try and change a session variable then you would get constancy issues. So php handles this by making session_start() a blocking action and will wait for any other request to either finish or close the session using session_write_close().

The only reliable fix he found for the issue was to only selectively use the session in certain circumstances (or on certain pages) and closing it out when you were done with it.

One of the golden rules when we want a high performance web site is minimize the HTTP requests. Normally we have several JavaScript files within our projects. It's a very good practice to combine all our JavaScript files into an only one file. [...] But if your project is alive and you are changing it, it's helpful to spare your JavaScript files between several files. [...] So we need to choose between high performance and development comfort.

He includes a quick script that runs through your javascript directory (recursively), grabs all of the javascript content from each, combines and minifies them to serve gzip compressed out to the browser.

In a previous blog post called How to Count Facebook Fans in PHP I've shown a code snippet of how to count the number of fans on a fan page using PHP. Times have changed, the Graph API has been introduced, and due to some responses I introduce here the new way of retrieving your fans count using the new Graph API and php.

He uses the Facebook PHP SDK to make the connection and call the "api()" method on a page (his example is the one for Mashable) and return back an array that includes the "fan_count" value.

After your websites getting more pages and links, the chance that a visitor will follow a dead link to your site exists. If a visitor is trying to access a page on your site, the server will report (normally) a 404 error. The response is by default some unfriendly page with some spare information about the error which let most visitors stop visiting your site. But using the 404 error the right way, you the site owner can collect important information.

He talks about some of the data that could be collected - what page they were requesting, where they came from, access statistics and more. The tutorial shows you how to harvest some of this information and how to put Google's Search and Adsense tools on the page as well as Google Analytics for tracking.

Error pages. Most people don't really consider error pages when building a website or application. They usually contain some debug information so that when something goes wrong the developer knows what is wrong. But in a lot of cases when an application goes into production, this information is still exposed.

He points out a specific example of a recent time when the only thing thrown to the page was an error about a database connection rather than anything more informative or useful to the typical visitor. He recommends that, at the very least, a website should still present these errors in a template similar to the rest of the site.

Your average visitor will come to your site expecting information. If something goes wrong (which can always happen), they only need to know that something went wrong, and perhaps they should get a phone number or e-mailaddress where they can report the error.

For a while I had vim configured to run reflection when I hit "K", but after the PHP documentation team released unix manual pages for PHP I now get the manual page in all its glory; function description, parameter descriptions, return values, examples, notes, see also and everything you are used to see from the online manual. Its awesome.

These manual pages aren't installed by default, so you'll have to grab the download from the PEAR channel for the PHP documentation (doc.php.net/pman). If you're wanting to use it in VIM, you'll also need to change the keywordprg setting to "pman".

Solar's manual has a getting started section that walks you through setting up a basic app, This app extends "Solar_Controller_Page" which handles a lot of the backend work for you. As you get into your project you will find that pretty much every controller you have needs access to some basic structures and information, how can you ensure these are always available?

His example extends the Solar_Controller_Page to provide two model objects automatically to the rest of his application (as protected objects in the base class).

Many framework and standalone PHP developers are given options to do full-page caching but partial page caching is rarely an option. Many times a sidebar or a footer that is loaded with dynamic content can be cached for 5, 10, or even 30 minutes without needing to read from the database again. This can drastically reduce the load on the server as query results for certain portions of your page are stored temporarily. [...] Memcached can store queries that have been processed and the bits of HTML that go with their presentation. Read on for a detailed example.

Once the memcache functionality is installed, its a snap to get right into caching your content. The two examples - pushing data in and pulling it back out - show how to cache a bit of HTML content to be used later.