General Rules

Number 1: You don’t use “?>”. PHP does not require it. Do not end your files with ?> just leave it blank. It should not change anything at all in your code. It also prevents accidental whitespace injection into your files. The exception is when the file is both php and html. Although that is also bad practice. PHP shouldn’t really have HTML and PHP in the same file.

Number 2: Short tags are never allowed. Short tags are when you use instead of the full value which is .

Number 3: Indentation should be 4 spaces. Tabs aren’t allowed. Some IDE’s such as Dreamweaver allow you to set your tabs at 4 spaces. Number 4: You should aim to have a maximum of 80 characters per line. However Zend allows up to 120. This can also be set in your IDE. These should all be followed strictly.

Naming

The naming of files is important, files should be named appropriately and end in .php. There is no general rule but I like to have classes named as “ClassName.class.php”. It helps seperate classes from general php. It’s also easy for anyone looking at the code to find what they need. “MySQL.class.php” means they would know it’s a MySQL class. All characters in the name have to be alpha numberic. So either numbers or letters. Functions and methods are named starting with a lowercase then each new word starts with an uppercase. Underscores are not permitted. A function should be named along the lines of this. “phpIsAwesome( );”. Variable names can never contain underscores. Only alpha numberic characters. The same method as functions should be used when naming. This is the “$lowerUpper” variable naming. The one thing that does however need underscores are Constants. Constants should be underscored at each new word however all letters must be uppercase. “WE_LOVE_CONSTANTS”.

If and Else

If’s must have a single space before any conditions and a single space before an opening bracket. All code inside it should be properly indented with 4 spaces. This is one of the most vital rules as most people hate code without indentation. It is almost impossible to read. An example of good, clean and indented code is this:

if ( $a > $b ) {
	// Some Code
} else {
	// Some more code here
}

This is what you should aim for. Rather than a block of code with no indentation such as this:

if($a > $b){
//code and stuff
}else{
//other code
} 

Code like that is the pet hate of almost all developers.
Documentation
All documentation blocks must be documented using phpDocumentor format. This looks somewhat like this:

/**
 * Short description for file / class
 *
 * Long description for file / class (if any)...
 *
 * LICENSE: Some license information
 *
 * @copyright  2008 Your Company
 * @license    http://license.yoursite.com
 * @link       http://www.yourfile.com
 * @since      File available since Release 1.5.0
*/ 

Try and document alot of your code. It’s important so other developers know whats going on with your work. Remember that not everyone codes like you, everyone will have different ways of doing things. So explain what your doing but don’t go over the top.
The End
That’s all for this article on coding standards. I hope you learned somethings from this article and put them into practice. For a full list on zend coding standards read the Zend Coding Standards Manual. You do not have to adhere exactly to these, adding your own twists to the style.

Mark Cole.

**High Resolution Version Available To Download**

What we want: When the user clicks a list item, it will show the corresponding div

If i were a beginner and i was asked to write the script, i’d most likely code sections for each id/div such as below.. Once the specified link is clicked it’ll hide all the divs shown(the other content panels) and then it’ll fade in the relevant content panel.

This is alright.. it does the job but for each id/div you need around 3 lines of code, your also listening for alot of events (all of those clicks) which may use more memory and slow the script down in general.

Instead of listening for unique clicks(php, asp, ruby etc..), why don’t we just listen for any click (on the list) and after its clicked, find out which item it was by getting the id (via attributes), save it as a variable, and then use that variable in the selector for the div.

This code is alot smaller, its scalable and its not going to get any bigger. You can use this method in other applications such as calling for ajax.

Questions/Comments?

**The Next Day**
Thanks for all your thanks/comments/”gtfo noob why are you programming”-ings. Matt August, Bryan Migliorisi and Karol Kowalski pointed out that you can’t have more than 1 element with the same id, I completely overlooked this and I’ve fixed the code up.

First of all, download XAMPP from sourceforge. As of writing this, the latest version is 1.6.7 so ill be referencing to that in the tutorial. Save it to your /home/$USER/ directory.

Extract the archive to your /opt/ directory.

sudo tar xvfz xampp-linux-1.6.7.tar.gz -C /opt

Now its installed

To start it:

sudo /opt/lampp/lampp start

To stop it:

sudo /opt/lampp/lampp start

To launch the panel/manager:

sudo /opt/lampp/lampp panel

You can test if its on by going to http://localhost

To add files to the server, you would need to put them in /opt/lampp/htdocs/ but since that directory is owned by root, your user doesn’t have neccesary privilages. The easiest way to “get around” this is to set up a symlink folder in your home directory. You may be familiar with public_html or www directories on your webhosting, we are basically setting the same thing up here.

First we want to set up the directory we are going to link to in htdocs. So..

sudo mkdir /opt/lampp/htdocs/homefiles/

Then make the equivilant directory in our home directory.

mkdir ~/public_html/

And finally link them together.

sudo ln -S ~/public_html/ /opt/lampp/htdocs/homefiles/

So now we can put PHP files/whatnot into our ~/public_html/ folder and they will show up in localhost/homefiles/

As usual, the high resolution file is available to download. Here.

• kksou - Sample Codes, Hundreds of code examples with explanations.
• kksou - Blog, Some nice advanced info, updated frequently.
• kksou - Forums, Can ask for help on your codes.
• Gnope, Installation of PHP-GTK2.
• cweiske, Some PHP-GTK1 resources, you may/may not find it useful for PHP-GTK2 development.
• gtk.php.net, Official PHP-GTK2 homepage, numerous links, source code.
• gtk.php.net docs, Official PHP-GTK2 documentation.
• gtk.php.net FAQ, Frequently Asked Questions.
• gtk.php.net Resources, PHP-GTK2 mailing list, more resources.
• php-gtk.eu, Great support forum, samples,news.
• activenture, Docs, Refs, Tutorials. Very good.
• php-gtk.eu apps, Largest list (that i could find) of PHP-GTK2 apps.

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High Resolution .flv available for download. (*Right click save as*) If you can’t play it, use VLC.

I eventually was able to compile it without any errors. It did need a system restart to take effect, but low and behold.