redbullmarky

don't be so negative. that's my advice. as it's going to cost money, you might just have to put some more planning into it from a business perspective. look at ways your site might make money. premium memberships? could you do a preview (free) and full download (paid for) service? could you support your site with ads? as it's unsigned music, could you get a local recording studio to sponsor you? i'm sure youtube had far bigger bandwidth issues when they started. it's good you're aware of the problems you might have, but IMO getting over them is the difference between those that do this stuff for pure fun and those that make fortunes from it. like i say - as it could cost money, treat it like a business and plan it like one.

what have you done before? what level are you at? what have you tried/looked at so far for this one? please be a little more specific else you might not get the help/advice you're after and people might only end up going over ground that you've already covered.

hmmmm. donotdoublepost.com ? http://www.phpfreaks.com/forums/index.php/topic,200942.0.html

you tried using PNGs?

a Java Applet might be your best bet.

no - what i'm saying is - you're asking for a signature to confirm something, right? why won't the more traditional web-based approaches work such as a 'Yes, I agree' or 'No' work? or just a simple checkbox? Why does it need to be a signature? You're topic/questions so far are incredibly vague - if you want to know more, share more.

there are many alternatives to signatures which is why you don't see this sort of thing very often on websites. however - if you have a specific requirement, then you're probably going to need to do some research into DHTML (to create the client-side part) and AJAX (to send the "image" back to the server to be saved as it's being drawn). It'd guess that it'd definitely require a fair bit of work - so whether it's worth it is down to whether you really specifically need something like this or whether you can find an alternative way of getting someone's authorisation?

you'll need to be far more specific - now personally, i'd think you'd want something that lets you draw to the screen using the mouse - like a proper signature. but I don't much like guessing. please elaborate....

"Dear PHP developer community - what is your preferred development language?" Before anyone else jumps in, RoR is a framework built on the Ruby language, not a language in itself. Not trying to be pedantic - just thought i'd clear that one up first so noone else feels the need to Anyway: - PHP is my preferred language - easy to use, quick to get stuff done with, huge community to get help when you're stuck. - Ruby - without its Rails framework, it would be virtually unknown. No benefits over other similar languages and wouldn't touch it with somebody elses stick. Sounds harsh maybe, but I'm not a sheep and I don't like following everyone else in terms of "what's cool" - Perl - no experience, so can't speak about it. I came across Django at one point whilst looking around at resources and methods for doing stuff, which got me into really liking Python. Delving deeper into the Python language makes me like it even more and if I wasn't building sites so comfortably in PHP, I'd probably be using it much more. Forget Ruby on Rails, it'd be Django on Python all the way.

but "PHP"Freaks is for....um.....PHP...you really would be better getting your c# answers elsewhere. in any case - personally - a quick Google search will find thousands upon thousands of links that either a) offer ways around having the CD inserted or b) have many questions about how to get around having the CD inserted. There are many nicer ways of copy protection that aren't so inconvenient.

i thing you might need a bit of strip_tags() and/or htmlspecialchars() - there is next to no filtering on input at the moment, which could be good if myspace hadn't already done that...

plus in addition, not to be rude also, but applications that require the CD to be in defeat the point of me having a big hard drive that i can install everything onto so i don't need to keep swapping disks. aside from installing software in the first place, the only CD that I ever want in my drive either contains music or is a DVD. sure - copy protection, etc - find another way. having to insert the CD is just very annoying and very inconvenient. Not to mention the "Please insert CD" reminds me of when games came on floppy and I had to keep swapping between levels...*sigh*

Zend would probably be the best for this - whilst quite in depth and potentially confusing if you're new, it's a great example of "best practice", demonstrates all features of PHP OOP and design patterns, and its online documentation is great. I think there was a link in the App Design 'Resources' sticky, which covered exactly what you wanted - ie, getting under the bonnet of CodeIgniter - but it might have been removed. I can't find the link on Google either, so guessing that's why it's not listed any longer. edit it wasn't codeigniter, it was CakePHP and the site they were originally on now seems to have moved. http://debuggable.com/posts/learning-from-the-cakephp-source-code-part-i:480f4dd6-28d0-445e-a1dc-4ceacbdd56cb http://debuggable.com/posts/learning-from-the-cakephp-source-code-part-ii:480f4dd6-57fc-4715-8709-439acbdd56cb

Hi and welcome to the forums Please read the board descriptions before posting - OOP Help is for Object Oriented Programming not general PHP help (moved). To answer your question - the URL you've pasted is not a great example for a beginner, as it's handled by a custom interpreter (don't worry about that for now!). A general query string is appended to your URL using a ? and each variable key/value pair is seperated by an ampersand (&). For example: www.example.com/index.php?user=1&page=2&something=hello+world in your index.php script, you can access these variables by: <?php echo $_GET['user']; // outputs 1 echo $_GET['page']; // outputs 2 echo $_GET['something']; // outputs 'hello world' ?> notice the + between hello and world in my example link - this denotes a space, as regular spaces are not part of a valid URL. By all means read up on urlencode() and urldecode() for more info on forming valid URLs, but you probably shouldn't trouble with yourself just yet. Back to the original link: There are little tricks that one can use to improve search engine rankings. Generally, query strings containing lots of variables are not very search engine friendly, as are those that contain certain characters. However - assuming there are no rewrite tricks set up, doing: echo $_GET['action']; would output: post;board=65.0 which is then handled by an internal SMF (the forum software) script that would extract the info needed to build the page. so rather than having 2, 3, 4 or loads more variables, there's just the one. In a nutshell - rather than using the default way of handling GET parameters, SMF uses its own methods to improve search engine friendliness. Hope that helps a bit.

in my experience, there's always an alternative to JS that can be built as a fallback, should you wish to. But so many people nowadays, with the usage of Facebook, Gmail/Google maps, etc etc are being expected to have JS turned on so how compatible you make yours for people with no JS is up to you.

if line 41 is this: $this->error-report("The two emails provided did not match.",1); then i'd suggest changing error-report to error_report doesn't explain why it works on PHP5 though, unless you're testing it in a different way...

sometimes it's not about others customising it, but about you customising it. spending each and every day using the same website/back end, it's only a matter of time before you get bored of it and want to give it a new coat of paint. there isn't really a "definitive" way of doing templates, though I tend to stick to PHP ones but keep as much non-display logic out of my templates, just so it doesn't become an absolute mess. Anything more PHP-intensive that's needed in my template goes inside a helper, leaving just basic if/else/foreach, etc in my templates - nothing more. either way, whatever floats your boat - but a bit of discipline didn't hurt anyone, even if it is a system for your eyes only.

thing is - each person's requirements are soooo different that it's very hard to judge what is going to be better. maybe one person's application is not heavy on the database compared to another. maybe one does alot of templating/parsing, etc. the only real way of deciding which framework is good for you is to actually play with it yourself. sometimes it's more about the way you work rather than specific features - ie, i'd rather have a framework that was lacking in "features" but easy to develop for than a fully-fledged framework that's hard to add things to easily, with all common items grouped in one place logically.

well - PHP4 will give you a basic understanding but PHP came on leaps and bounds with v5 in terms of features and ability to stick to "good practice" a bit better. I tend to find the ones aimed at PHP5 cover a broader skillset, too - they tend to cover the basics but also get into OOP a bit, giving you more of a varied knowledge base to build on. Plus - consider PHP6 is just around the corner, getting a book two versions old is probably not great. Only problem with PHP6 books is that PHP6 is still under development, so a) you won't find any hosts yet (and probably for a long while) that will support it, unless you get a VPS or dedicated server and install it yourself and b) i find it kinda scary that people release a book based on something that's not even finished - and possibly subject to changes. Seems a bit too "early bird" to me. Also - personally, I wouldn't worry too much about cost - see it as an investment instead. Sure, it might cost £30 or £40, but it's a one-off, not a monthly payment or something - and making your money back isn't too tricky. Cheers Mark

do not use AJAX unless a) you're doing little widgets that degrade well or b) you are Google AJAX is one of those things that sort of sounds cool in concept and is easy to do simple stuff, but really isn't for the faint-hearted to do it properly and for more advanced needs. When you NEED ajax, use it. Else, don't bother just for the sake of it. Especially not for loading the majority of a page. Also - IMO - the moment you start selling stuff on your site, you should really try your absolute best to: a) leave out the fancy stuff, keep things as simple as possible b) make it as search engine friendly as possible. Most (all?) bots do not support javascript when crawling. c) make more-than-normal effort to get your site working on old browsers with minimal/no javascript. d) make more-than-normal effort to get your site standards compliant and accessible. The more people that can view and use your site, the bigger your potential market.

of the "PHP and MySQL Web Development" book, one of the links you posted (the more expensive) will be the more revised copy - though to be honest, either will do as the revised copies rarely carry much extra aside from corrections and a few more examples and pages, etc. It won't take you far into advanced areas, but it will sure give you all you need to knock out a website (even an advanced one) plus will give you your own legs to stand on in terms of knowing what to do, what to look for, how to find stuff out, etc. Like I say - IMO, avoid the Dummies books. Programming is not really a trivial "hobby" - it's a proper industry that takes time, effort and fuckloads of hard work. I tend to steer very very clear of "professional" books that belong to the same range as books about gardening and aromatherapy and other totally unrelated stuff.

my own recommendation, as well as those of others, can be found here. For the lazy who can't be arsed to click and read, I got alot from "PHP and MySQL Web Development" by Luke Welling and Laura Thomson. The chunk of time between reading that book and my current read of "PHP5 Objects, Patterns and Practices", everything was either gained via this site (especially this sticky) or Googling for stuff as and when necessary or just when I get stuck. The problem with the 'Dummies' books is the series seems a bit too "jack of all trades" - rather than expert and in-depth. They're ok if you really are getting started and have a need to learn quick - otherwise, forget them. PHP/MySQL development is a specialist area thus requiring specialist books.

i get the same ping results as you and localhost still ok for me, so that's probably not the issue. I've have had cross-browser issues before hence my suggestion - otherwise - this is the point i bail out and say I have not got a clue

might sound like a far fetched guess, but have you tried a different browser? and has the problem occured just today or since upgrading to FF3 (assuming you have)

if you're not a primary Window's user or not familiar with where bits and pieces are, the hosts file is at C: >> Windows >> System32 >> drivers >> etc >> hosts