Managing your online email list using /email_list_lite/
Features:
- auto install & setup, and
- import existing email lists, and
- add join/leave box with just one line of code, and
- self manages email list online, and
- automatic removal of none activated emails, and
- more…

AND Its FREE

Thanks to Damien over at Nexen.net who’s spotted the following collections of slides/PDFs stemming from the recent International PHP Conference in Amsterdam:

• Error Handling and Preventing
• Design Patterns and the Real World

and these from other conferences:

• Conference PHP en Quebec
• XML transformations with PHP

Should keep even the most voracious of readers at bay momentarily

Do you still need to convince your boss that PHP is a mainstream, widely-used, here-to-stay web technology?

I hope not, but if you’re in that unfortunate position please send him/her over to Dreamlab.ca who’ve put together a lengthy list of the organisations depending on PHP, I’m sure there’s a few on there you didn’t know about.

I’m also working on Zend to output their PHP jobs alerts as an RSS feed, with any luck you’ll be seeing that soon at PHPkitchen.

Another great article by Vikram Vaswani of Devshed fame, this tutorial covers pretty much all the basics involved in setting up a ftp server with proFTPD.

If you’re adminstering Redhat machines you probably got fed up pretty quickly with the deafault install of WU-FTPD: read more for some good proFTPD configuration pointers.

As usual lots of action at Sourceforge.  How many of these top 25 projects ‘ring the bell’?  – as they say here in spain

Also be sure to check out Sourceforge’s selection of RSS feeds.

Quite often you’re browsing through someone’s latest web app and you have no idea what you’re supposed to click on.  Whether it’s obscure, unlabed icons,  heavy "cognitive load and visual clutter" or seemingly illogical grouping of tasks, it’s obvious that adhering to good usability standards is of paramount importance.

As usual I’m stealing stories from PHPeverywhere mainly because John has good taste but also because I want a permanent, searchable link to quality content at PHPkitchen.

So for some good usability guidelines check out  Views and Forms: Principles of Task Flow for Web Applications Part 1 .  PHPseagull, the app framework released this week at PHPkitchen, will probably serve as a sounding board for some of the suggestions mentioned   Thanks for all the feedback/suggestions so far, keep ‘em coming.

The following topics were discussed at the PEAR meeting in Amsterdam this past Friday, 10th, May 2003 :

• Quality, Documentation
• PFC (PEAR Foundation Classes)
• PEAR on windows
• PEAR Installer
• PEAR Website
• PHP 5
• Promotion
• Future developments

PHPseagull is a PHP CMS/framework I’ve been working on for a while.  It helps developers manage basic application tasks like:

• authentication
• authorisation
• templating
• workflow
• rapid application development
• building easy-to-customise modularised components
• user/group management
• content management
• document management
• category management
• messaging
• error handling
• alerts

If you’re interested in contributing to the project, or have any feedback, I’d love to hear from you.

“Something mysterious is formed, born in the silent void. Waiting alone and unmoving, it is at once still and yet in constant motion. It is the source of all programs. I do not know its name, so I will call it the Tao of Programming.

If the Tao is great, then the operating system is great. If the operating system is great, then the compiler is great. If the compiler is great, then the application is great. The user is pleased and there exists harmony in the world.

The Tao of Programming flows far away and returns on the wind of morning.”

Ok, so you’ve got your web app together, spent months perfecting it, a little worried about the 25 include files per page, or your class inheritance hierarchy that often goes 5 levels deep – what do you do?

One way to benchmark the performance of your scripts is ab – the  Apache HTTP server benchmarking tool.  The only caveat, if your webserver is on a windows platform you’re going to have to look for something else

ab is a simple command line benchmarking tool that comes standard with the Apache package.  With it you can execute a series of requests against any given page in your app and extract performance statistics.  Experimenting with the command line switches you can force concurrent requests, the HTTP KeepAlive feature, tweak headers and more.