Computers cannot generate random numbers. A machine which works in ones and zeros is unable to magically invent its own stream of random data. However, computers can implement mathematical algorithms which produce pseudo-random numbers. They look like random numbers. They feel like random distributions. But they’re fake; the same sequence of digits is generated if you run the algorithm twice.

Planting Random Seeds

To increase the apparent randomness, most algorithms can be passed a seed — an initialization number for the random sequence. Passing the same seed twice will still generate the same set of random numbers but you can set the seed based on external input factors. The easiest option is the current time but it can be anything; the last keypress, a mouse movement, the temperature, the number of hours wasted on YouTube, or any other factor.

Random PHP Functions

PHP offers a number of random number functions. The main ones are:

1. rand() and the more efficient mt_rand() function. Both return a random number between zero and getrandmax()/mt_getrandmax(). Alternatively, you can pass minimum and maximum parameters:

   
   // random number between 0 and 10 (inclusive)
   echo mt_rand(0, 10);
   

2. srand($seed) and mt_srand($seed) to set a random number seed. This has been done automatically since PHP 4.2.0.

PHP is Too Random!

There are instances when creating a repeatable list of pseudo-random numbers is useful. It’s often used for security or verification purposes, e.g. encrypting a password before it’s transmitted or generating a hash code for a set of data. Unfortunately, PHP can be a little too random. A generated sequence will depend on your hosting platform and version of PHP. In other words, you can’t guarantee the same ‘random’ sequence will be generated twice on two different machines even if the same seed is used.

Rolling Your Own Random Class

Fortunately, we can write our own random number generator. You’ll find many algorithms on the web, but this is one of the shortest and fastest. First, we initialize our class and a random seed variable:

class Random {
	// random seed
	private static $RSeed = 0;

Next we have a seed() function for setting a new seed value. For the algorithm to work correctly, the seed should always be a positive number greater than zero but not large enough to cause mathematical overflows. The seed function takes any value but converts it to a number between 1 and 9,999,999:

	// set seed
	public static function seed($s = 0) {
		self::$RSeed = abs(intval($s)) % 9999999 + 1;
		self::num();
	}

Finally, we have our num() function for generating a random number between $min and $max. If no seed has been set it’s initialized with PHP’s own random number generator:

	// generate random number
	public static function num($min = 0, $max = 9999999) {
		if (self::$RSeed == 0) self::seed(mt_rand());
		self::$RSeed = (self::$RSeed * 125) % 2796203;
		return self::$RSeed % ($max - $min + 1) + $min;
	}
}

We can now set a seed and output a sequence of numbers:

// set seed
Random::seed(42);
// echo 10 numbers between 1 and 100
for ($i = 0; $i < 10; $i++) {
	echo Random::num(1, 100) . '<br />';
}

If you’ve copied this code exactly, you should see the following values no matter what OS or version of PHP you’re running:

76
86
14
79
73
2
87
43
62
7

Admittedly, repeatable “random” numbers isn’t something you’ll need every day — you’re more likely to require something closer to real randomness and PHP’s functions will serve you better. But there may be occasions when you find this useful.

For many years I used a code editor that is now discontinued by its developers, and the introduction of HTML5 and CSS3 led me to look for an editor that supports the new tags and properties. In this article I’ll share the criteria and process I used to find an editor suitable for making quick fixes and a development environment for large-scale projects. My initial candidate list contained over 30 popular Linux, Java, Windows and XUL software packages which had at least one stable release after January 1, 2010: Arachnophilia, Bluefish, Bluegriffon, CoffeeCup HTML Editor, Dreamweaver, Eclipse PDT, Emacs, Expression Web, Geany, gedit, HTML-Kit, jEdit, Kate, KDevelop, Komodo Edit, KWrite, Netbeans, Notepad++, Notepad2, OpenBEXI, PHPEdit, PHPEd Pro, PHPStorm, Programmer’s Notepad, PSPad, RadPHP, Scite, SeaMonkey, Vim, WebDev, WebMatrix, and Zend Studio. You can google each program for their specific details

Read More:
PHPMaster: How I Chose My Programming Editor

Web applications usually follow a synchronous communication model. However, non-interactive and long-running tasks (such as report generation) are better suited for asynchronous execution. One way to off-load tasks to run at a later time, or even on a different server, is use the Job Queue module available as a part of Zend Server 5 (though not as part of the Community Edition). Job Queue allows job scheduling based on time, priority, and even dependencies.

See the article here:
PHPMaster: Zend Job Queue

You can make the WordPress interface easier for clients by removing unnecessary menus, widgets and meta boxes. However, in WordPress 3.3, the admin and header bars have been merged to create a single toolbar. It may also contain options you want to hide…

The WordPress Toolbar API

The new toolbar is defined using a single WP_Admin_Bar object (see wp-includes/class-wp-admin-bar.php). This provides a number of useful methods:

• add_node() — add a new toolbar item
• remove_node() — remove a toolbar item
• get_node() — fetch a node’s properties
• get_nodes() — fetch a list of all nodes

Removing Toolbar Items

We’re going to place our code into a reusable plugin named wp-content/plugins/change-toolbar.php but you could put it within your theme’s functions.php file.

WordPress plugins require a header at the top of the file, e.g.

<?php
/*
Plugin Name: Change Toolbar
Plugin URI: http://www.sitepoint.com/change-wordpress-33-toolbar
Description: Modifies the WordPress 3.3+ toolbar.
Version: 1.0
Author: Craig Buckler
Author URI: http://optimalworks.net/
License: GPL2
*/

We now require a single function where our changes will be made:

function change_toolbar($wp_toolbar) {
	/* ... code to go here ... */
}

followed by an action hook which runs the function and passes the toolbar object:

add_action('admin_bar_menu', 'change_toolbar', 999);

We can now remove toolbar items within the change_toolbar() function. For example, the following line hides the WordPress logo and help sub-menu by referencing its ID, “wp-logo”:

$wp_toolbar->remove_node('wp-logo');

To remove other items you need to discover what ID they’re using. You could delve into the PHP code but there’s an easier way:

• Open Firebug or your favorite Firebug-like development console.
• Locate the toolbar item you want to remove (in most browsers you can right-click the item and select “Inspect Element”).
• Navigate up the parent nodes until you find an LI tag. It will have an ID starting “wp-admin-bar-” followed by the internal ID code:

In this example, the Comments item is highlighted. Therefore, to remove it from the toolbar, we use:

$wp_toolbar->remove_node('comments');

Adding Toolbar Items

We can add toolbar items within the same function. The syntax is:

$wp_toolbar->add_node($arg);

Where $arg is an associative array containing:

• id — the item’s ID
• title — the title text
• parent — the parent menu ID (optional)
• href — the link URL (optional)
• group — true if the node is a group (optional)
• meta — another array providing other keys including: html, class, onclick, target, title, tabindex

Let’s add a “Help” item which links to our support pages:

$wp_toolbar->add_node(array(
	'id' => 'myhelp',
	'title' => 'Help',
	'href' => 'http://mysite.com/support/',
	'meta' => array('target' => 'help')
));

We could now add an email support link within a sub-menu by referencing the ‘myhelp’ ID in the parent:

$wp_toolbar->add_node(array(
	'id' => 'mysupport',
	'title' => 'Email Support',
	'parent' => 'myhelp',
	'href' => 'mailto:support@mysite.com?subject=support%20request'
));

I hope you find it useful — it’s easy to customize the whole WordPress 3.3 toolbar using a few API calls.

If you’ve ever tried to read code written by someone other than yourself (who hasn’t?), you know it can be a daunting task. A jumble of “spaghetti code” mixed with numerous oddly named variables makes your head spin. Does this function expect a string or an array? Does this variable store an integer or an object?

Taken from:
PHPMaster: Introduction to PhpDoc

Ok, so you’re pretty comfortable with using the Zend Framework, specifically the use of Forms. Along with that, you have a good working knowledge of how to combine a host of standard validators such as CreditCard , EmailAddress , Db_RecordExists , and Hex , and standard filters such as Compress/Decompress , BaseName , Encrypt , and RealPath . But what do you do when a situation arises that’s outside the scope of the pre-packaged validators and filters? Let’s say you want to guard against users uploading files that contain viruses, for example.

More here:
PHPMaster: ClamAV as a Validation Filter in Zend Framework

Phing is a PHP project build tool based on Apache Ant. A build system helps you to perform a group of actions using a single command. If you’re wondering why PHP needs a build tool, consider a work flow where you write code and unit tests on your local machine, and if the tests pass you upload the code to staging/production server and make any changes to the production database.

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PHPMaster: Using Phing

Phing is a PHP project build tool based on Apache Ant. A build system helps you to perform a group of actions using a single command. If you’re wondering why PHP needs a build tool, consider a work flow where you write code and unit tests on your local machine, and if the tests pass you upload the code to staging/production server and make any changes to the production database. Without a build file, you’ll need to go through each step manually

Read the article:
PHPMaster: Using Phing

When I first came across Heroku it was a Ruby-only cloud service. I wasn’t a Ruby developer so I quickly forgot about it. But then they partnered with Facebook and you could create a Facebook app hosted on Heroku with the Facebook PHP-SDK in just a couple of clicks. Now the question: is it possible to create a PHP application with Heroku that works both outside and inside of Facebook?

Original post:
Build Your App in the Cloud with Heroku and the Facebook SDK

Did you know there are over 4 billion mobile phones in use today ? Here in Australia, we have a population of approximately 11 million people and over 22 million mobile phones – that’s an average of 2 phones per person! It’s obvious that mobile phone usage is becoming more prevalent. And given the ubiquity of smartphones and other mobile devices, more and more customers are now opting to receive notifications via SMS rather than email. Text messages certainly have advantages over email – they’re short, immediate, and best of all SPAM is negligible.

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PHPMaster: Understanding the Command Design Pattern

Did you know there are over 4 billion mobile phones in use today ? Here in Australia, we have a population of approximately 11 million people and over 22 million mobile phones – that’s an average of 2 phones per person! It’s obvious that mobile phone usage is becoming more prevalent. And given the ubiquity of smartphones and other mobile devices, more and more customers are now opting to receive notifications via SMS rather than email.

See more here:
PHPMaster: Understanding the Command Design Pattern

Imagine a friend of yours approaches you one day and would like you to build her a website so she can showcase her photography. She wants to be able to easily upload her photographs and have them watermarked so that people can’t easily steal them. “Don’t worry!” you tell her, because you know there are functions provided by the Imagick extension that makes watermarking images a breeze in PHP. This article shares a few pointers on what makes an effective watermark, and then shows you how to use the Imagick functions to add a watermark to your image.

See the article here:
PHPMaster: Watermarking Images

Session are a tool which helps the web programmer overcome the stateless nature of the internet. You can use them to build shopping carts, monitor visits to a website, and even track how a user navigates through your application. PHP’s default session handling behavior can provide all you need in most cases, but there may be times when you want to expand the functionality and store session data differently.

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PHPMaster: Writing Custom Session Handlers

PHP’s default session handling behavior provides all you need in most cases, but there may be times when you want to expand the functionality and store session data differently.

Follow this link:
PHPMaster: Writing Custom Session Handlers