It’s been a while since I’ve written a blog post because I’ve been extremely tied up with projects at work up for the last year+. However, now comes a time when I want to go back, explore what I’ve learned, and in the process develop a short set of tutorials explaining it all. The tools and code that I post up are going to be used in my everyday work, things I find useful and even things to make my personal coding experience easier (hopefully yours too).

The first part of this series will focus solely on downloading the starter kit, how to pull it down from the SVN, and how to make sure your apache is configured to handle it. The rest of the series will focus on using this starter kit to make some awesome apps.

To start with, this series will assume that you have a basic knowledge of the following:

• Configuring your own local apache test environment or using a live apache server.
• Basic understanding of PHP syntax, functions and usage.
• Some knowledge of OOP, understanding of classes and methods.

Basically I will be giving you a “Starter Kit”, which will require you to have a functional PHP/Apache setup in order to run. From here on out, instead of referring to the package as the “Zend Framework Starter Kit”, I will simply be calling it ZF-Starter. You are free to use this code however you see fit, without attribution! Read on to check out all the steps in getting the code and getting started!

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The Active Record Pattern is a method developed to help access and store data in relational databases. This small post will cover some of the basic Active Record methods that you can use with the ADOdb Library in PHP. When used properly, the Active Record Pattern can help you develop and visualize your data faster than just throwing database queries into your applications.
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ADOdb is a powerful database abstraction library for PHP (as well as Python) designed to simplify some of the day to day database activities you may need in your PHP applications. I’ve used this library for about 3 years now, from site to site, just to simply the retrieval of data and cache the data locally for ease of use.

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Using cURL is a simple and effective way to gather data from another website, run it through a script, parse the data and transform it into something useful that you can use on your website. Whether you are “scraping” data to build a summary of a link, pulling an XML file to parse into a database, or just simply wanting to get the contents of the file, cURL is a simple and effective way to pull the data from an outside source into your page.

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There is a lot of PHP specific syntax that every PHP programmer uses in their day to day work, that everyone has just learned that it is the way it is meant to be. But, to truly be able to go through, read someone’s code and truly understand it, you need to know exactly what the syntax means, and why it’s formatted that way. Throughout this small post, there are just some thoughts and practices for coding using the PHP syntax.

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In our first section, we talked about the multiple ways that you can use the equals sign to assign variables or compare them, based on value and type. In part 2 of this series, we are going to dive deeper into the comparison operators, and exactly how they function. There is a lot of basic programming concepts here, but where better to start than the basics.

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One of the fundamental variable types, yet one of the more complex when you are beginning, is the Array. The array just takes a little bit to wrap your mind around, or maybe a good analogy as to exactly what it is doing.

You can pretty much think of an array as a mini-storage unit for variables, someplace to order them, keep them in one space, and reference them by name dynamically. There are more advanced ways to do some of this as well but arrays are a good starting point.

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Coming into PHP fresh, you may notice a few things that don’t exactly line up with some of the other programming languages out there. In this initial “Operators” post, I am going to talk a little bit about the different operators that are available for people programming in PHP. There are different ways to compare and assign variables, as well as the reasons you might want to use each of these. It’s a good springboard or starting point for starting to understand PHP.

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