php

PHP here document FAQ: How do I create a here document in PHP?

If you ever need to use a "here document" in PHP, here's a short example of the PHP here document syntax:

<?php

print <<< END
Four score and seven years ago
our fathers set onto this continent
(and so on ...)
END;

?>

I believe the closing tag you use ("END" in my case) must begin in the first column. This is typical with here document syntax, but I haven't tested it in PHP.

PHP email FAQ: How do I send email from a PHP script? (Including sending email with an attachment.)

Continuing with my initiation into the PHP programming world, I just finished developing a PHP script to send a mail message with an arbitrary attachment. (I write 'arbitrary' there because a lot of the example PHP mail scripts I've seen focus on attaching an image, and I'm not really familiar with MIME types yet, and "image/jpg" wasn't working for my needs.)

If you're looking for a PayPal IPN example written in PHP, I believe the following code works okay. It's based on the PayPal PHP IPN example (from the PayPal developer site), but I fixed some bugs from their example, added an alternate PHP socket example so you don't have to use SSL to connect to PayPal, and added more variables to the script.

It's funny, when I first started working with PHP, the first thing I wanted to know is "What is the PHP comments syntax?" (It reminds me of learning to ride a motorcycle, where the first thing you want/need to learn is how to stop.)

Fortunately, if you have a Unix/Linux and/or C programming background, the PHP comment syntax will seem very familiar, and I'll share some simple PHP comment examples here.

CakePHP page title FAQ: I'm still a CakePHP newbie, but I just figured out how to change the page title on my CakePHP view pages (i.e., the HTML TITLE tag on my view pages), so I thought I'd share that process here.

Setting the CakePHP page title

The first step in setting a CakePHP view title is to set the pageTitle variable in your CakePHP controller method. Here's an example where I set the page title in a typical CakePHP controller index method: