From Sridhareena.com today, there's this quick tutorial covering the installation of the popular phpMyAdmin database management package on a shared hosting account.

It's a quick eight step process to get everything up and working, and that's including downloading the package, extracting it, and an optional language change.

In this new article (set) from HTMLGoodies.com today, they're looking to start off web developers on the right foot with PHP by providing a good resource of basic, common tasks budding PHP developers tend to work at.

the series as times goes on, but for now they cover a good range of topics, including:

• Your first page with PHP code
• A Little about Variables
• Passing Data To and From Functions
• Using the File System

According to the reasons listed here, PHP isn't good for much more than just the smallish, more personal sites. It was originally written back in 2004, but has just been recently updated (April 2006) with a more current state of PHP.

Some of the reasons they give include:

• Many PHP-modules are not thread safe
• Non-standard date format characters
• No Unicode

As referenced in this new blog post today, Leendert Brouwer has posted a rehacshing of a previous introductory tutorial for PHP to his site.

It's a good sized tutorial that covers a wide range of topics, including:

• getting started
• varaibles/datatypes
• loops/operators
• arrays
• form handling
• functions
• some string manipulation

Stephen Kellett wrote in to let us know about some new software tools for working with PHP that are in beta testing now for the Windows environment.

If you'd like to sign up and become a beta tester for this software, check out this page to contact them with your information.

According to this new post on Daniel Krook's blog today, a Redbook that he coauthored with a group of fellow "IBMers" has been published today - Developing PHP Applications for IBM Data Servers.

You can check out the online version of the book here as a PDF file. There's also some additional materials to suppliment it.

We have posted a feature request list for eZ publish 3.9 in the
specification section.

IBM developerWorks has another new tutorial today with a look at locking down your PHP applications - "four security rules you can't violate".

You'll need a system already running PHP (at least version 4.x) and MySQL on a web server (Apache or otherwise). They look briefly at some of the common security issues plaguing web applications these days before moving on to the four rules:

• Never trust outside data or input
• Disable PHP settings that make security difficult to enforce
• You can't secure it if you can't understand it
• "Defense in depth" is your new mantra

Web services are a great way to link machines and provide data out to a needy public (whether that be internal or external), but getting started with them can sometimes be confusing. Thankfully, there's tutorials like this one from IBM developerWorks to help things along.

There's many different methods one can use to handle the messages for a web service - they decided on SOAP. Obviously, you'll need a working PHP install on an Apache web server before even getting started, and they use a database (Apache Derby) to handle the data on the backend. You'll need to login/create a login to get into it, but once you do, you can follow their steps to the creation of an example client and server for the web service:

• Overview and Setup
• Simple SOAP server in PHP
• Derby: Setting Up
• Architecting the user interface
• The client
• The server

On the Zend Developer Zone, there's a new article concerning the creation of zip files and tarballs inside of a PHP script, including a link to a tutorial from PHPit.net and the steps he had to follow to get started.