On the O'Reilly OnLamp.com website today, there's a new article that compares searching methods on a site - a "search engine showdown".
It's a universal frustration. You just know that the piece of information you're looking for is somewhere on a site. You click one link, then another, and another. You go back to the home page and try a different branch of the site. After dozens of clicks, you still can't find the information you need. Then it's back to Google and on to another site. At last you find one with an internal search engine. You enter your search term, and voilá!--the information you need pops up in less than a second.
They compare these two types - hosted versus local - and show how to get started on integrating one, the local option, into your site. They start with a few things consider before getting into the choices - the physical issues involved, the page information itself, and how the engine will index.
The rest of the article is devoted to the different options they'd recommend along with ratings, what technology they use, if they're PHP5 compatible, difficulty of installation, and many more criteria. Their list of leading local search engines for your site are:
On the Inside Open Source blog today, there's a "quick hit" post from Jason Gilmore for WordPress users out there using the WP-Cache and being frustrated by it's functionality during the development process.
I'm using WordPress to build out a blog for a new endeavor, and couldn't figure out why I had to go through a rather unwieldy refresh process (disabling a template and then enabling it anew) every time I changed it from within the WordPress administration interface.
It was the WP-Caching mechanism that WordPress comes with that was causing the issue, so he tracked down where to disable it for the duration of the development time. (Options -> WP-Cache -> Disable It).
I just released PEAR-1.4.10 (Greg released it again later, I forgot to commit the new state, stable ;) ). Besides many bug fixes, this release boost the open_basedir and safemode support.
Also, I really hope it is the last 1.4.x release, we will now focus on PEAR 1.5.x and up but more about that later this week.
With this new update, you can finally run the installer with open_basedir in effect, as corrected with two new config options. You can grab the latest update here.
If you've ever worked with WebSphere and tried to integrate it with PHP, you know the frustration Daniel Crook has faced. Thankfully, he's found the answer to this marging of technology and shares it here on his blog.
Just as you can communicate with DB2 from your PHP applications via three distinct interfaces - Unified ODBC, ibm_db2, and PDO - there are several approaches to adding PHP support to WebSphere Application Server, each with benefits and drawbacks.
As a disclaimer, I don't claim to represent IBM or provide IBM's viewpoints on this, but I'm offering this list as a general overview about what options are available as IBM continues to encourage the use of PHP in enterprise environments.
He offers four methods to getting WebSphere and PHP to play nicely together:
Build PHP as an Apache module and connect to WAS via the Web server plugin
Use the PHP Integration Kit to add PHP support to WebSphere Application Server Community Edition
Use the PHP / Java Bridge
Use an implementation of a PHP interpreter in Java
For each, there's a brief explaination as far as the steps to take to use the option and links to other resources that show in a bit more detail how to accomplish that kind of integration.
Mike Wallner shares with us today a method for getting pecl_http installed and correctly configured for your system.
As pecl/http 1.0 has finally been released and I had noticed that it's been packaged already by several projects like PLD, Gentoo and FreeBSD, I wanted to explain what one is going to gain respectively lose by using the different build/configure options for the extension.
He goes through and explains each of the conifgure options - enable-http, with-http-curl-requests, with-http-zlib-compression, with-http-magic-mime, and with-htt-shared-deps - giving about a paragraph worth of information of what it is and what it does for the package.
Yet another fine tutorial has been posted over on PHPit.net today, this time dealing with the use of the cURL library in PHP.
Sooner or later you're bound to run across a certain problem in your script: how to retrieve content from other websites. There are several methods for this, and the simplest one is probably to use the fopen() function (if it's enabled), but there aren't really a lot of options you can set when using the fopen function. What if you're building a web spider, and want to have a custom user agent? That isn't really possible with fopen, nor is it possible to define the request method (GET or POST).
That's where the CURL library comes in. This library, usually included with PHP, allows you to retrieve other pages, and also makes it possible to define dozens of different options.
This article doesn't look to be comprehensive on the topic, but does provide a great introduction to the hows and whys of using cURL in PHP. There's no installation procedures here, so you'll need to already have it installed, but other than that, you should have a great grasp on things by the time you're through.
Builder.com.au has this new article posted today with a good guide for working with the command-line version of PHP.
PHP is most often used in combination with a Web server, to dynamically generate Web site pages. However, this Web server interface isn't the only way to use PHP, because the PHP distribution also includes a command-line interface which can be used to run PHP programs at the command prompt, much like Perl or bash.
This document will introduce you to PHP's command-line interface (CLI), showing you how to interact with PHP programs at the command prompt.
They start off with basics, things like making it executable and creation of a simple program. They then move into taking in arguments on the command line and some of the options you can pass in too. Lastly, they demonstrate the interactive mode that the PHP CLI has to allow you to interpret PHP code on the fly...
