This is part one of the quick review of the book “ for Effective MySQL Management” and the phpMyAdmin software.

This article/review is not just another review about phpMyAdmin, but more some information about features I haven’t used during the last years of PHP/MySQL web development.

About phpMyAdmin

PMA is a full featured tool to administrate your MySQL database server via a web browser. While the functions are almost unlimited, it’s also a powerful tool to maintain the database content even for less experienced users.

It’s already a year ago (or more) that I got the book “Mastering phpMyAdmin” as a present/reward for contributing some snippets on weberdev.com. Finally I found the time to read (most of) the book during a vacation. The book is great for webmasters using phpMyAdmin (PMA) the first time and also more advanced users. The book covers the installation, basic database interactions using PMA like simple INSERT or SELECT commands and also advanced features like the relational system provided by the phpMyAdmin software. (more…)

There are several PHP scripts and classes to process PayPal payments using their native IPN (Internet payment notification) feature. Because the whole process is based on the data you need to send via a web form to the PayPal payment processor these script look very similar.

The payment / notification process is shown via the following graphic:

Inside the form there are several required values to process a payment. PayPal gives the advice to post them all to get everything working. The following variables get some special attention: (more…)

Today our partner site finalwebsites.com has announced an important update for the Access_user class. The update is a security update to make the script more safe against computer hacker. While there is not really a problem for existing, working applications, it’s advised to update applications very soon.

The release information:

This is an important (security related) update, in previous versions hackers can guess common and repeating passwords from user. While the “forgotten password” function was based on the password and the user id, it could be possible to change the password for some user (if the hacker knows the users id and the right password). The risk is not very high for most installations but could be work out some trouble. The new version doesn’t use the password for validation anymore. The login name (encrypted) is used together with some “secret” secret string. AU class user can replace the class file but need to update the method calls in the activate password script. You need to add the constant variable SECRET_STRING to the db_config.php file.

Download the updated version from the PHP class here.

For further questions about the class post them to the official support forum.

Setup a quick Yahoo Search page within a few minutes!

A few days ago the “old” Google web search API has stopped working for the web public. Not a big surprise after the release of the AJAX web search API. A customer of mine is using search results in his mini sites to give them a little more body. This is why I needed to look for some alternative. During the Zend PHP conference earlier this year, I got in touch with the Zend framework and learned that there is already a class to obtain results from the Yahoo search engine. The class has features to search the Yahoo API for web sites, image, news and the local search results.

Installing the library

I decided some time before to use the classes from the Zend framework for future projects because the classes are well written in PHP5. If you like to do the same you should install the lib on a central place on your web server to get access to the framework from all your websites. After uploading the files I added this row to .htaccess file for the website I’m working on:

php_value include_path ".:/home/mylocation_for_zend_framework/"

This way you’re able to access the classes without to think about the class paths. Of course you are free to add this include path to the php.ini file or to your apache configuration. (more…)