PHP is not only a very competent web development language (and part of LAMP stack). It is also a very capable language for writing (command line) scripts. You can write simpler and cleaner scripts with php than perl. Here is a php code which takes a file name as input, trims whitespace from each line of the file and finally saves the result back in the same file.

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Translator Plugin Gold provides automatic machine translation of your WordPress blog in 32 languages - German, Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Japanese, Korean, Chinese Simplified, Chinese Traditional, Arabic, Dutch, Greek, Russian, Norwegian, Brazilian Portugue, Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Finnish, Hungarian, Icelandic, Latin American Spanish, Filipino, Polish, Romanian, Serbian, Slovenian, Swedish, Welsh, Turkish and Latin.

The new features in version 1.1 are:

1. In the option page (under Advanced -> Miscellaneous section) it now provides SQL queries which you can execute in your database to significantly speed-up Translator Pro on heavily trafficked sites. It adds indexes to the tables for faster querying.

2. Improved user interface

3. Translator Plugin Pro adds a new feature to verify completeness of translated pages by checking for keywords or tags in your page. This elegantly handles the failures in third party translation engine. This adds to the extensive checks we perform to ensure quality and completeness of translated pages.

4. New translation engine errors have been added for automatic fail-over support and load-balancing.

5. Overall performance improvement and optimizations have been added to this release.

6. New extensive documentation have been added in this release, old documentation revised and updated. You can read the full documentation here. Don’t forget to check our developer API for writing your custom look and extensions.

You can read about all the features here.

We now provide online help desk on our new support site. Please register there for customer support.

Please post your feedback in Translator Plugin Gold forum.

Translator Plugin Gold 1.1 is fully compatible with WordPress 2.5 as well as earlier version of WordPress.

PHP files are scripts which are interpreted by php interpreter (php.exe in windows). Converting them to exe files makes it easy to distribute PHP applications to Windows users. Unfortunately Zend, the PHP company, doesn’t provide a way to convert PHP scripts to Windows executables. Today I am going to show you a simple way to convert your PHP scripts to regular Windows executable files (.exe). Not only that you can also convert an entire directory of PHP scripts and assign one of the files as the main file to execute first. Additionally the source files are encoded which not only improves the performance but also protects your source code. You can also set the icon for the file which is useful when you are distributing your PHP application as a stand-alone executable.

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Suhosin is an advanced protection system for PHP installations. It was designed to protect servers and users from known and unknown flaws in PHP applications and the PHP core. Suhosin comes in two independent parts, that can be used separately or in combination. The first part is a small patch against the PHP core, that implements a few low-level protections against bufferoverflows or format string vulnerabilities and the second part is a powerful PHP extension that implements all the other protections.

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I am very happy to announce the much-awaited release of Comment Guard Pro for WordPress blogs. Comment Guard Pro is designed to unobtrusively protect your blog against all types of comment spams - trackback spam, pingback spam, robotic spam using comment form, human submitted spam (where the spammers actually goes to your site to spam you; they are the hardest to detect), referrer spam etc. We provide multiple layers of protection against all kind of comment spams.

Comment Guard Pro is a zero configuration plugin, even your grandma can use it. However if you want, you can configure every aspect of the system. You can make it your own, implement your own vision, replace, enhance and extend its functionality.

Comment Guard Pro is state-of-the-art comment spam detection software based on expert system to classify comments. Comment Guard Pro leverages several tried and tested comment spam fighting techniques & knowledge which is the result of several man-years of research into comment spam detection, both in-house and by the anti-spam community. We extensively tested and re-tested and fine-tuned the system with the key criteria - elimination of false positives and false negatives in comment spam detection.

Most spams are outright rejected without filling up your database and consuming your resource. Comment Guard Pro doesn’t normally ask your viewers to do anything extra like solving a problem etc.
Note: We reject a comment only when we are sure about its spamminess.

Comment Guard Pro was born after years of frustration with the state of comment spam prevention software available today. They fall in two major categories. Either they are ineffective in stopping spam (too many false negatives) or too strict and even deny legitimate comments (false positives). They are a pain in the neck for genuine commenters, resulting in bloggers losing their audience, and generate lots of false positives (marks a genuine comment as spam) which consume bloggers time to moderate. They also consume bandwidth and CPU by saving the junk comments in your database.

There is another issue. To eliminate false positives from existing plugins, you have to check their spam queue manually. It might be ok for 5-10 comments in queue, but not for say 2000-10000 comments in spam queue as is commonly the case with a widely used Comment spam protection plugin today. Most of such plugins protect against some type of comment spam or other but not the whole range. Frequency based spam detection techniques, for example, let in deluge of spams from new spammers. None of these are acceptable. Ultimately you get frustrated and tired of bloggng and suffer burn-out.

A big issue with today’s comment spam protection software is that you get a blackbox with no direct control over its actions. A widely used anti-spam plugin today is renowned for marking even the blog author’s comment as spam and another for even locking out the blogger from his own blog! The software today doesn’t respect your preferences. In short you lose control over your comments and have to blindly trust a third party for making the right decision about your comments; and often it fails.

Not any more. Comment Guard Pro puts you back in control over your comments. You control how it makes its decision. If you don’t like the logic employed by a pluglet (a rule) then you can decrease its score, change its decision on success or failure and you can even disable it. You can even add your own pluglets to implement your grand vision. You are the boss.

Comment Guard Pro gives you back the control and time to do what you do best, blog.

Comment Guard Pro is pluggable. You can individually control each pluglets, configure and fine-tune their functionality and weightage. You can also write your own pluglets to add more spam prevention techniques, gather more statistics or anything else you may desire like sending a cute / angry note to spammers and more. It comes with fully documented open pluglet API and examples to enable you to write your own pluglets.

It comes with lots of valuable features and functionalities. It was extensively tested for about a year with over 5 million comments. It came out with flying colors. Read more here (press).

The most common use of this is to display the current year in the copyright message dynamically. Anyone who really knows PHP should be able to do it easily. However not everyone who has to use PHP knows PHP, like, for example, people using snippets in ModX or modifying templates in WordPress. Here is the code snippet for them:
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I accidentally discovered a super-cool re-direction feature embedded in WordPress 2.3.x. Any blog may have multiple url pointing to the same blog. For example blog.taragana.com may also be accessed as www.blog.taragana.com. The proper practice, keeping SEO in mind, is to redirect all such URL to the canonical URL of the site. Now there is a simple way to achieve this.

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This WordPress blog was hacked for few hours on 24th December (nice Christmas present!) from Russia. The hacker exploited several WordPress vulnerabilities in administrative scripts to gain full access to the website (as permitted to apache user), including the ability to upload & run scripts, delete any file owned by apache user, view the file and directories etc. This is a full disclosure on the how the site was hacked and how I detected and removed the hack along with few comments on the state of WordPress security. I added a WordPress plugin and made modifications to prevent any such hacking attempts in future using WordPress. This is a must read for WordPress bloggers.

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strip_tags() in PHP has several problems. It doesn’t recognize that css within the style tags are not document text. It will not remove HTML entities or content within script tags. strip_tags() fails for invalid HTML. In short strip_tags() is not advisable to use except for trivial cases. The best solution I have come across is by uersoy at tnn dot net:
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I have been an avid user of Mambo and now Joomla since 2001. taragana.com is designed using Joomla. Unfortunately we haven’t been able to maintain the site very well, our fault not Joomla’s.

I wanted to re-design the site to highlight our products and service, and to cope up with our plan for several micro-site development in 2008 in addition to delivering a nice look. Let’s look at my 5 simple requirements for CMS:
1. We should be able to easily embed custom code (php) to embed widgets (or snippets as Modx likes to call them) in certain pages.
2. We should be able to easily modify the pages, preferably from the page itself (think AJAX editing).
3. Ability to create micro-sites which differ structurally and functionally from main sites
4. Flexible hierarchy and menus
5. Automate Sitemap (Google & regular) & RSS feed generation, nice permalinks & SEO optimized URL
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