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…)

Widget is a funny name, but as with many other names online, it’s largely become a commonplace term within the blogging community, at least the blogging community that uses the world-renowned Wordpress blogging software.

What are Wordpress widgets?

“Wordpress widgets” is a term that is used to describe the easy-to-use sidebar functions in any of the widget ready Wordpress themes. From within your Wordpress blog’s administration area, through the use of client-side scripting languages; Ajax and JavaScript, users can “click and drag” certain sidebar elements and rearrange them to meet their ideal sidebar setup. These elements include the blog search box, links, pages, meta (containing admin login links, rss feed links), categories, most recent posts and text-box elements.

Today, nearly all up-to-date Wordpress themes are widget ready, meaning that instead of manually having to modify code in the sidebar.php file for your active Wordpress template to get your desired look, in order to modify the look of your Wordpress themes’ sidebar, you only need to click on the desired element to add it to the sidebar or re-arrange the elements in any widget ready theme. (more…)

After using the Webdigity Webmaster forums for supporting webmasters which are using the PHP classes and scripts provided on finalwebsites.com a new forum is created. The owner of finalwebsites.com has created a new support forum on his own domain. With this new part of the website it would be easier to provide new information to existing users (release notes, update information) and to help users with the scripts and classes.

People need to register only ones at finalwebsites.com to download the PHP classes and to get help via the forum while using the scripts. It’s not the idea to create a new PHP forum, but to offer an easy and fast way to provide information on the right place. (more…)