php

There was a little funky activity on a client's Drupal 6 website that was hosted at GoDaddy, and without having access to an Apache access log file, I wanted to be able to see what was going on. So I wrote the following PHP code snippet to do some manual logging, and placed it in the Drupal theme's page.tpl.php file:

Just a quick note today on how to access the Twitter API using PHP, specifically using the Abraham Williams PHP TwitterOAuth library. While the library itself seems very good, I couldn't find much in the way of documentation, particularly a simple "getting started" tutorial, so I thought I'd share this code.

In short, I dug through the PHP files in the root directory of the TwitterOAuth library, eventually creating this simple PHP Twitter client example:

Drupal debugging FAQ: How can I debug my Drupal form and module development process?

I should know more about this over the next few weeks, but if you're developing Drupal forms and modules, I've found the PHP error_log function and the Drupal watchdog function to be very helpful. They both let you log errors 'somewhere', and the error_log output shows up in your Apache logs, and the watchdog output shows up in your Drupal reports.

Here's how you call the PHP error log function:

While adding some AJAX autocomplete functionality to a new web application, I created a simple jQuery autocomplete example, using a PHP server-side script, and JSON to communicate the data from the server to the client. After creating that simple example, I thought I'd share all that code in a "jQuery AJAX autocomplete" tutorial here.

Before we get started, I'm going to assume you're familiar with basic HTML, CSS, and JavaScript programming fundamentals. It will also help if you've had a little exposure to jQuery, though that isn't entirely necessary.

As I embark on two new PHP web applications that have a lot of charting and graphing needs, I've started to dig into the PHP charts and graphs world. I'm pleased to say there are several nice, free PHP charts and graphs tools available, and several commercial PHP charting/graphing tools as well. Here's my quick review of the current PHP charts and graphs tools.