imagettfbbox() [function.imagettfbbox]: Could not find/open font

The solution is to use neither relative nor absolute path to the font but to use a path like this:

$font = './arial.ttf';

Hope somebody will find it useful.

The poll will probably get closed in few days so hurry.

Personally, I have voted for ZF classes to enforce MixedCasing. I find it much more readable than ACRONYMCasing. XmlHttpRequest is prettier and more readable than XMLHTTPRequest, don’t you think?

This plugin will serve HTML 4.01 Strict as text/html to IE and XHTML 1.0 Strict as application/xhtml+xml to other browsers.

The only thing you need to do is to register the plugin to the front controller during bootstrapping:

And it will take care of content negotiation. The plugin will also set a boolean view variable $view->xhtmlAllowed so you can use different markups in layouts and views if needed (<img> in HTML and <img /> in XHTML).

You will need few things in order to develop Java applications:

• Java SE JDK (download here)
• IDE (I recommend Eclipse)

You might also need to edit your PATH and CLASSPATH environment variables but more about that later.

Java source code is saved in files with a *.java extension. Once you compile a java file, a compiled *.class file is created. Java compiler outputs platform-neutral Java bytecode which is a bit different than *.exe executable files you are most likely used to. To run a class file you need Java Virtual Machine (JVM) installed on your machine. You should already have that if you downloaded and installed the JDK linked above.

Let’s write your first Java application then.

Open Eclipse and go to File -> New -> Java Project. Call it “Hello World”, for example. Once you have created a project, right click on “src” folder in the left part of Eclipse called Navigator and select New -> Class. Call it “HelloWorld” as well and write this code in the editor that appears next to the Navigator:

That’s it. The above Java application will simple print “Hello World” and do nothing more but you have to start somewhere

To compile and run the application, select Run -> Run As -> Java Application. The program output will appear in the bottom part of Eclipse under Console tab.

PATH & CLASSPATH

If you want to be able to compile and run Java applications from Windows command line, you will need to add/edit PATH and CLASSPATH environment variables first. In Windows 7/Vista, right click on Computer and select Properties. Go to Advanced system settings and click on Environment Variables button in bottom left corner. A window similar to the picture bellow should appear.

You need to add (or change if it already exists) CLASSPATH to your user variables and PATH to both user and system variables. Set PATH variable to a bin directory of your JDK installation (i.e. C:\Program Files (x86)\Java\jdk1.6.0_20\bin) and set CLASSPATH variable to a directory where you store compiled class files of your Java applications (you can see in the picture I set it to D:\java-projects\HelloWorld\bin). You can set multiple paths separated by semicolon. You might also want to set a system variable JAVA_HOME to a JDK installation directory (i.e. C:\Program Files (x86)\Java\jdk1.6.0_20).

Now you should be able to compile and run Java applications from Windows command line. To compile a java file, type:

javac D:\java-projects\HelloWorld\src\HelloWorld.java

To run the compiled class file, type:

java HelloWorld

If you haven’t set the CLASSPATH variable, you could use an optional cp parameter to specify it in cmd:

java -cp D:\java-projects\HelloWorld\bin HelloWorld

You can find more about PATH and CLASSPATH variables here.

The sign up form should have at least these fields:

• email
• username
• password

There are few tiny things you will probably need to modify according to your application. I chose Slovak language (‘sk’) and GMT+1 time zone (’1.00′) which is a time for central Europe. I also used a controller action helper PhpbbHash above. The helper is here:

Few comments:

1. The above code is taken directly from the phpBB codebase, I only made a couple of necessary changes to make it work with Zend Framework.
2. For those of you asking why didn’t I just use phpBB API and call its native functions, there is a reason for it. The phpBB code is written to be available with PHP 4. Zend Framework requires at least PHP 5.2.4. There are lots of globals and other scary stuff in the phpBB codebase which makes it impossible for its functions to be called from ZF controllers.
3. If you think I should have done something differently or I completely forgot to do something, please let me know.

http://www.example.com/home

http://www.example.com/about

http://www.example.com/contact

Instead of URIs like these:

http://www.example.com/index.php?page=home

http://www.example.com/index.php?page=about

http://www.example.com/index.php?page=contact

It’s actually a trivial problem but surprisingly people still keep asking it. I guess there are not enough examples around the Web so bellow I will show you probably the most primitive front controller implementation.

What I have described above is called a front controller. To put it differently – a central script accepting all traffic and displaying different content based on GET parameters. Let’s get started!

First, I have created  a simple directory structure for my front controller:

/path/to/root/
    .htaccess
    404.php
    footer.php
    header.php
    index.php
    /path/to/root/pages/
        about.phtml
        contact.phtml
        home.phtml

.htaccess

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^([A-Za-z\-]+)/?$ index.php?page=$1 [L]

What it does is it will redirect you from http://www.example.com/page to http://www.example.com/index.php?page=page silently. This is not necessary but URIs with index.php are ugly and have no semantic meaning.

404.php

<h1>Error 404</h1>

This is just a template for a 404 Not Found page. You can put any HTML you like there.

footer.php

</body>
</html>

All pages will finish with the same HTML written down in the footer.php file.

header.php

Similarly, all pages share the same header.

Notice the <?php echo $title; ?>. We will set a dynamic title based on a current page in the front controller.

index.php

The most important file. This is the already mentioned front controller:

I have added some crucial comments above so you ca understand what’s going on there.

about.phtml

<h1>About</h1>

A template for http://www.example.com/about page.

contact.phtml

<h1>Contact</h1>

A template for http://www.example.com/contact page.

home.phtml

<h1>Home</h1>

A template for the home page: http://www.example.com/home or just http://www.example.com/.

Final thoughts

You can add as many new pages as you like by adding new templates to the pages directory. Just remember only alphabetical characters and the “-” character are allowed in their names.

1. Facebook
2. Wikipedia
3. Flickr
4. Yahoo! Answers
5. Yahoo! Bookmarks
6. Delicious
7. Digg
8. Friendster
9. SourceForge
10. Photobucket

There are several other big websites powered by Drupal (see Drupal sites link) or other PHP based scripts/content management systems. IGN uses Zend Framework for some of its subdomains as well. Symfony powers lots of websites (some of them pretty large) as well.

I am not saying that PHP is the better option compared to other languages used for web development. All I wanted to prove by this post is that PHP can be successfully used for huge and scalable websites. How reliable, maintainable, secure or fast a website will be is mostly language-agnostic and depends on how much thought is put into design and whether developers adhere to best practices.

Which would produce this markup:

<!--[if IE 8]> <link href="/path/to/some/styles.css" media="screen" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" /><![endif]-->

Adding a conditional JavaScript file is similar:

And that would produce markup like this:

<!--[if IE]> <script type="text/javascript" src="/path/to/some/script.js"></script><![endif]-->

It can pretty useful when you need to use IE conditional comments just for a single controller action. Otherwise, if it applies site-wide, it’s better to just put conditional stylesheets and/or scripts in a layout file.

1. Creating an index and updating it regularly.
2. Searching the index with a powerful query language.

First, let’s create a fresh search index. I know it’s already tiresome but I will use a simple blog application for my example implementation. To simplify it even further, it will only be possible to search blog posts. The posts schema looks like this:

CREATE TABLE posts (
id INT NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
title VARCHAR(255) NOT NULL,
body TEXT NOT NULL,
created_at DATETIME NOT NULL,
updated_at DATETIME NOT NULL,
user_id INT NOT NULL,
INDEX (created_at),
INDEX (user_id),
FOREIGN KEY (user_id)
REFERENCES users(id)
ON UPDATE CASCADE
ON DELETE CASCADE,
PRIMARY KEY (id)
) ENGINE = INNODB;

Creating the search index is easy:

Pretty straightforward. You can see I have used three different static methods for adding fields to the document:

• UnIndexed: unindexed and unstored (therefor unsearchable) but they are returned with search results. Unindexed fields usually store primary keys, timestamps or file paths.
• Text: indexed, stored and tokenized. Text fields are searchable and are returned with search hits. Titles, first and last names, cities and states, post codes and street names are all good candidates for keyword fields.
• UnStored: indexed and unstored – ideal for large texts.

There are more types of fields you can use (keyword, binary) but you can read about them in the documentation.

Next thing you need to do is update the index every once in a while so the search hits return up-to-date information. There are two ways to get around this problem. The most obvious is to update the index every time a new post is published or an existing post is edited. Another approach would be to set up a cron job to run every now and then and rebuild the index. Which way you choose depends on many variables such as expected index size (a very large index can have few GBs in size).

Secondly, the index is already taken care of, so let’s search it:

That was possibly the simplest possible example of a Lucene search query. You can, however, create very complex queries with the powerful Lucene query language. You can either build queries manually in PHP or you can use Zend_Search_Lucene methods to build them. It’s so easy a baby could do it.

To search for posts with words ‘hello’ and ‘word’ in the contents field you would write this query:

hello

To search for a post that must contain ‘hello’ and may contain ‘world’:

+hello world

To search for a post that must contain ‘hello’ in the contents field and may contain ‘world’ in the title field:

+hello title:"world"

And those were just basics. You can use boolean operators, wildcards, ranges and even perform a fuzzy search.