"The goal of the osCommerce project is to continually evolve by attracting a community that supports the ongoing development of the project at its core level and extensively through contributions to provide additional functionality to the already existing rich feature set." Why shouldn't I use it?

Here's his five reasons:

• no separation of logic and presentation
• difficult to integrate into an existing design
• security
• cannot have multiple sizes of image previews
• admin navigation issues

He includes some other options, too, just to give you an idea of what else is out there.

External libraries are useful for performance demanding tasks where PHP is simply too slow. Also PHP can work as front-end system for various back-end systems (where server doesn't provide any PHP supported communication types). I have written some posts about using .Net libraries in PHP so far, but there are some other choices available too.

He looks at the three types of library choices - PHP extensions, exec call. For what he wants to do, though, the COM objects are the best fit for the job.

If you use osCommerce for your site's e-commerce, and you're not happy with the quality or quantity of visitors your site receives, keep reading. Though osCommerce provides some excellent features, its weaknesses could be getting in the way of giving you the number of visitors and conversions you expect. Fortunately, there's a solution, hidden in something as simple as a title tag.

The trick is in editing two files - the main index and a product info page - to add in a bit of PHP at the top that pulls out the matching category information for the item and pushes that into the $title variable for output.

Zero doesn't currently support the COM/.NET extension in PHP. No matter though, there is a handy open source project called JACOB that bridges between Java and COM/.NET. In fact, there is an easier way to do this using a Groovy library called Scriptom. This is really just a friendly wrapper around JACOB to provide a better syntax for calling methods and accessing properties.

He also includes a quick introduction and howto on getting the functionality up and working in a Windows environment - download, add the JAR to your path, edit your php.ini and copy and paste some example code in to see it in action.

The Microsoft Web Application Installer (Web AI) is a companion to Web PI, and provides a super easy way to download, install and configure many popular community and open source applications on IIS7. Available applications include DotNetNuke, Drupal, Gallery, Graffiti, osCommerce, PHPBB, and Wordpress, with more on the way.

You can find out more about this web installer and the Microsoft Platform tools from this page on Microsoft's site or in this Web AI forum (where you can also provide your own feedback).

Communicating via COM in PHP is easy as ever; especially for people coming from a VB background where executing complex tasks in MS-applications is a piece of cake, you will feel right at home in PHP. In fact, VB COM calls can be converted to PHP COM calls in just a few simple search and replaces.

He shows how to use the COM extension in a (Windows) PHP installation to access the text inside the document and manipulate the contents however you'd like (even writing them back out to another Word file).

The exploit has been published as a PHP file for easy testing on your Windows/PHP installation (it was tested on WinXP Pro SP2 on both the CLI and Apache). No additional modules are needed for this exploit - only the COM functions and a Windows system.

The issue comes from an overflow in the str_repeat function allowing for the execution of whatever applications the developer wants on the remote Windows machine (including the ability to create and remove files and directories). There is no path for this issue currently (should be corrected in the next minor PHP release).

There are two main ways to build Excel, Word, and PowerPoint documents using PHP. The first is by using the COM library (only if you are using a Windows server) and the other is by using a more standardized approach such as HTML or CSV.

All three examples use the COM method and make basic structures to save out. They also include a screenshot (and description) showing where you can find the list of functions you can call to the COM object for each application.

Just now I was looking at some crappy OSCommerce code, and deciding how to rip it up into a template system. And I'm talking with kyle, and the proverbial question comes up, do you give your template system objects, or strings. What if you gave it special "active record"-esque template objects. Active Printers... or something. Then you could work with everything in a consistent interface, escaping all content with htmlspecialchars if needed, etc etc. Looping through object data and making a table...

The email included a block of concept code of how he pictured it working - a pretty simple system really. Pushing data into the class and showing what tag(s) to style it with and have it "know" how to format it (like a phone number string). Michael asks his readers if they've seen something like this before.

Comments already made include discussions of things like xmlWriter, presentation and business logic, and the Savant templating library.

I'm trying to use PHP 5.2 to talk to Skype via the COM extension and Skype4COM interface.

I'm using this example from the Skype Forum, but I get a COM exception of "Skype client is not installed."

He also points to someone else with the problem, but still hasn't quite found a solution. Anyone want to help?