KevinM1

Eh, it's pretty cheap if you're actually coding for a living. It costs maybe an hour or two of work.

You do realize that you can customize PhpStorm's appearance? Just like with every other IDE? I use a modified version of the ubiquitous Son of Obsidian theme for both PhpStorm and Visual Studio. Looks great.

What are you referring to when you mention 'code completion'? Intellisense? Actual code generation (say, dumb getters and setters)? I tend to like both, mainly because of my disabled hands. Less typing = good for me.

Yeah, while the image is cute, it's not really suitable as the background of the entire site. It makes things difficult to read and navigate. Cute shouldn't trump usability.

It was slow for me yesterday, too. Page loading took longer than the actual survey.

First, snark like: only makes people not want to help. Now, people are telling you to use another IDE because, evidentally Adobe Muse isn't meant for PHP editing. Note that no one has suggwsted that your brother also switch IDEs. Since, apparently, Muse just outputs HTML (and likely CSS as well), there's no reason why your brother couldn't do his part in Muse and you do your part in something else. Right tool for the job and all that. Regarding PHP, I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that you learned what you know from a poor and/or dated resource (like w3schools, which NO ONE should go to). I'm also going to guess that the resource's examples highlighted PHP's ability to go between PHP code and HTML. I'm guessing this because you want to put PHP code in the body of your pages. That's exactly the wrong way to write PHP. The best way to write PHP is to do all your scripting upfront, store your results in variables, and then use as little PHP as possible in your HTML to echo those results. For you, this means all session and database work first. Now, to your actual problem - do you have session_start() on each page? Can you post your code?

Have you looked at linode?

Object initializers are used to populate anonymous types. Anonymous types are types that don't have an actual class definition (thus no parameterized constructor). Instead, they're generated on the fly, usually as the result of some LINQ query. Example: var productInfo = from p in products select new { p.ProductName, p.UnitPrice }; productInfo contains a collection of objects of an anonymous type that are made up of the product's name and price. That info can then be iterated over by a foreach: foreach (var prod in productInfo) { Console.WriteLine("Name: {0} , price: {1}", prod.ProductName, prod.UnitPrice); }

I think they're fairly common. Symfony has Doctrine out of the box. I think Propel, too. Kohana had its own Active Record style ORM when I played with it back in the version 2 days. Same with CodeIgniter. Ruby on Rails uses Active Record. ASP.NET MVC has Entity Framework and there are others, like NHibernate. ORMs tend to fall apart with complex queries, especially if you're dealing with many-to-many relationships. Sometimes you just need to roll up your sleeves and write SQL.

I'm a fan of doing local business. Online freelance gigs always struck me as a bit sketchy as there's little to no face-to-face contact. Being able to actually sit down and talk to a client is invaluable. For one, it makes the consultation process go a lot smoother. But, it also reinforces that human connection. It's easy for one side to screw the other over if they're just an email or IM entity, especially if they're in another country. Interacting with a real person is grounding. Local businesses tend to fall into three categories: 1. They don't want a site 2. They don't currently have a site, but want one 3. They have a site, but it's shit There's not much you can do with category 1. Category 2 is nice, but it tends to be filled with clueless clients that drag their feet and are indecisive. Worthwhile, but also frustrating. Category 3 is the honey pot - you can sweep in and save the day, thereby getting yourself both a nice payment and future business as they usually spread the word and offer glowing reviews. They also tend to know what they want, and are willing to work with you to get it done. However, since they feel letdown/burned/betrayed by their last developer, trust is an issue. Earn that trust, and they'll be in your corner forever. How do you find local businesses to work for? Ask your friends and family if any of the places they frequent have a site. Go to your local hangout places and offer your services. Every town has at least a couple of small business owners that want more. And if you can satisfy them, more will appear. One word of advice: in the rush to get new clients, don't oversell your abilities too much. The worst kind of developer you can be is one that over sells and under delivers. Then again, people like me make money cleaning up those kinds of messes....

Anyone have any experience with cloud based PaaS hosting? I've heard of PHP Fog, and apparently Heroku has PHP hosting capabilities (poorly documented and not advertised). I'm curious to see if anyone's tried PaaS hosting, and what their thoughts are.

I recently bought a few names through hover.com. A bit expensive ($15 each), but a great control panel. and they were recommended by Leo Laporte, who generally knows his stuff. No complaints.

++PhpStorm. The new version even auto-detects if you have a popular MVC framework.

No! If you abdicate the throne, the serfs will revolt!

Yes. You'll need to research how their db access code works, and whether or not accessing a remote db is a better option than using a small db you can bundle with the app itself. There are lightweight mobile dbs available that are used in the cases when you don't need to share the data among multiple applications (like, say, a website and a standalone app).