It’s a piece of cake to install the tool with the PEAR installer, and since I last used it 2 great new features are on offer:

• tab completion for all (or many) PHP functions and built-in classes and interfaces
• handling of fatal errors

What a relief to have this working again!  I was ssh-ing onto my Fedora servers just to test out code but of course this became impractical pretty quickly.  And did I mention it runs great on PHP 5.3?

And if you’re tempted to use the similarly named phpsh project from the Facebook open src stables, I can confirm this is not an option with the latest version of PHP.

This video really hits the nail on the head when it comes to the kind of interaction you sometimes get with clients over graphic design questions.

1. port
2. pear
3. cpan
4. gem
5. yum
6. apt-get
7. ant
8. easy_install
9. emerge
10. rpm (ok that was a while ago ..)

I’m sure I’m forgetting some.  Standardisation?

As “the PHP company” I think Zend ought to at least select projects that have some merit in terms of software design, as surely beginner PHP devs look to Zend for good examples and copy/emulate whatever they showcase.

PHPterror took a closer look at some of the OXID code, really jaw-dropping stuff.

A new look at how to create unit tests – using Photoshop!  Sense of humour required …

I spent ages combing the web for a decent ERD tool for the Mac, and for some time resigned to using dbwrench, a java binary the provides decent but limited functionality and is free of charge.

The choice of tools for ERD work is much narrower than what’s available on Linux or the PC, where something like DBDesigner 4 is fantastic and can handle pretty much any job you throw at it.

Then finally I stumbled across SQLEditor and I have to say it’s excellent.  It has a sharp and clean GUI with the attention to detail you’d expect from a first rate Mac app.  However there is a price tag, $79, and after years of being able to depend on high quality apps that are available for free, I have to say paying such a price takes some getting used to.  In this case I think it’s totally worth it and would recommend this tool for any Mac-based software developer.

NB: As phpMyAdmin has collapsed in recent versions, you might also be looking for a decent MySQL client.  Here are some I’ve had a good experience with:

• Navicat Lite
• Sequel Pro

Thanks to Andrew Betts, a PHPlondon regular, for coming up with BadAPI, a service that allows you to simulate misbehaving APIs.

These days there’s almost no such thing as a web app that’s not integrating data from various external APIs, and with that integration comes a new set of problems the developer must handle.

From the BadApi website:

BadAPI allows you to simulate misbehaving APIs. This is useful if your site relies on the availability of service X, and you want to ensure that any downtime experienced by that service has minimal impact on your own application.

But a fairly simple sounding task like tracking conversions for Adwords campaigns actually requires a bit of work.  Here is the system I found works best, you can get it up and running in only a few minutes.

The goal is to be able to track when contact enquiries result from a paid campaign.  I’m using this systems at http://seagullsystems.com.

• the contact form plugin you need is cForms, version 1.5 or later (scroll down past the pluses, big banner on left hand side)
• install the plugin, you will probably need to create the file abspath.php manually
• configure a basic contact form, for example name it “my_form”
• insert the form in your relevant page by pasting the html comment <!–cforms name=”my_form”–>
• in the cformII options panel select Form Settings
• make 2 settings:
  • disable the Ajax mode in the first section
  • in the Core Form Admin / Email Options section, tick Enable alternative success page (redirect) and enter a Thanks page URL you previously created inWordpress
• in your Thanks page paste your conversion javascript code provided by Adwords

And that’s it!  Any probs please mention in the comments.