Got your beta invite to phpcloud.com but not sure where to start. Read on, we’ll take a look at the concepts involved and the staps to take to not only get up and running quickly but to be productive in this interesting tool.

p. This area is intended for everyone new to PHP. It opens with a series of informal, entertaining tutorials written by Vikram Vaswani, founder and CEO of Melonfire. These tutorials build on a previously-published 5-part series which has now been updated and extended to embrace PHP 5, making parts of it suitable for those of you who already have worked with PHP 4 in the past.

Recently, the Zend Framework community has developed a new component for cloud services: Zend_Cloud_Infrastructure. This component was provided to manage [...]

There’s no shortage of PHP template engines and they’re all very similar, often differing only in implementation details and support for specific features. They all serve the same purpose: that of functionally separating a Web application’s user interface from its business logic, and thereby enabling developers and interface designers to work on the same application without getting in each other’s hair.

Plurk is a popular micro-blogging site that allows users to quickly and concisely post status updates, news and event streams. It also comes with a JSON-based Web service API that allows developers to programmatically add, search and manipulate Plurk content. This article shows you how to quickly and efficiently connect your PHP application to Plurk using Plurk’s PHP library.

Zend Server, Zend Server CE and Zend Server Cluster Manager for Linux are
provided through DEB And RPM repositories. This has multiple benefits; one of
them is the ability to easily create an internal mirror of the Zend Server
repositories, using common tools available on virtually all Linux machines. The question always comes up though, “Why Mirror? I’ll look at that plus how to setup your mirror in this article.

Digg offers a Web service API that makes possible to develop customized applications on top of the base service. This API, currently in its second incarnation, allows access to a number of important Digg functions, including searching and commenting on Digg stories. This article takes a fast look at how to integrate Digg’s Web service with a PHP application using the PEAR Services_Digg2 class.

If you’ve been around PHP for a while, you’ve probably heard about APC, the Alternative PHP Cache. Adding APC to an application usually results in improved application response times, reduced server load and happier users. This article will introduce you to APC and guide you through the process of integrating it with your PHP application.

When building a Web application, you’ll often find it necessary to save and retrieve user-defined configuration values. Rather than rolling your own code, consider using Zend_Config, which offers a complete API to read and write configuration data in INI, XML and PHP array formats. In this article, I’ll give you a crash course in how Zend_Config works, and show you how you can integrate it into a PHP application.

Unit testing is becoming a fairly common element of software projects because of its promise of providing better quality to the code base. A unit test is a class or method that exercises your code for purposes of verifying that it functions correctly. During the course of your project, these tests remain as artifacts that can be used over and over again to verify that your code is always working correctly. The higher percentage of your production code you exercise, the higher degree of certainty you can have that your code is doing what it was designed to do.