Article by Alis Nerses of CSCL2002

With all of the hacks occurring on the internet currently, it was only a matter of time before the Wikipedia PHP security was compromised. Recently, hackers were able to break through various layers of security protocols and steal wiki account credentials and have made a serious threat to the integrity and safety of the PHP source code. Perhaps the only good news is that no other machines in the PHP infrastructure were harmed or attacked.

With the PHP source code being under attack and possibly compromised, those who write said code have taken a very hard look at the situation. After auditing the code and looking back at previous code products from older PHP versions prior to 5.3.5, no malicious injections or backdoors had been left by the hackers. This is great news, because often after the first attack occurs, the hackers leave themselves a way to get back into the system with relative ease; something that can lead to even greater security compromises. Fortunately, this does not seem to be the case, and the compromised machine has been erased and a password change universally is being implemented to hopefully block out the hackers for good.

While PHP compromises are a scary notion, everything on the internet is subject to attack and sadly nothing is fail-proof quite yet. That being said, the amount of people that use PHP and work on its security is such that it is one of the safest open source codes to use on the market today

Article by Raymond Zakari of Computer Science Resources 4 U (csr4u)

For those looking into PHP, lets start with the basics first. PHP is a general use scripting language that is used to design web pages or produce dynamic sites online. With this use, the code is embedded into the HTML source document which is translated and put up by a web server that supports PHP code. PHP is extremely common today, and is accepted and used on any major operating system.

The history of PHP dates back to 1995, when the language was invented by Rasmus Lerdorf. As Lerdorf’s request, there is still not formal specification for the language and is completely free software. One change is what the acronym PHP stands for; original meaning “Personal Home Page”, I now stands for “PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor”.  With that in mind, PHP has never strayed far from its original purpose of editing and serving a personal website that Lerdorf ran himself. Early feature included displaying his resume online, and recording his web-page traffic; nearly 15 years before modern analytics came into existence! As time moved on, other coders made additions and changes to PHP that allowed it to be universally accepted and used as a script processor. Currently, the PHP update process is on round number 5, with PHP 5.3 being the current and most up to date inundation of the software available.

Working in open source software is a great way to experience the rapid change in the computing field today, and PHP is one of the great pioneers  in that area.

One of the best ways by which you can receive or send payment over the internet is by using Paypal, and is considered to be an inexpensive way by which e-commerce transactions can be conducted. And if you are interested in this method, all you have to do is visit the Paypal website and set up a business account with them.

However, in using Paypal as a third party shopping cart you only have two options when a customer wants to make a payment, and they are:

Option #1: You can pass the entire list of shopping cart items and show detailed payment information.

Option #2: You can only pass a total.

The problem with Option #1 is that the customer will have to re-enter the details once more when using Paypal, which can cause the customer to bail out on the sale due to annoyance of this repetition. Moreover, it makes more sense that the customer’s detailed information remains with the merchant rather than with Paypal.

And even though the approach with Option #2 means that the customer will not obtain the order details along with the Paypal invoice but this can resolved by sending them an email with the details of their purchase.

And this is done by creating a PHP page that will provide the customer with a ‘Confirmation” screen just as soon as he or she is viewing order details and is ready to complete his or her purchase. The advantage of using PHP in this case is that it collects the information required for Paypal, and submits it automatically without the customer having to do so.

The PHP Group has recently released an updated version of the web scripting language primarily to fix security issues as well as to provide application-based and server enhancements to its users. At least two of the five vulnerabilities considered to be critical by the US National Vulnerability Database have been fixed in the PHP version 5.3.6 while the others remain unclassified until now.

The first of which is a format string flaw in the phar extension which could allow a denial of service condition or a remote code execution while the second flaw, the shared memory read functionality which if exploited could also lead to a denial of service condition while also giving access to sensitive areas of system memory as well.

The other fixes included high values for precision INI settings, ZIP archive handling and the reading of EXIF data, and which were all discussed by senior security advisor from Sophos Canada, Chester Wisniewski in a blog post.

The importance of updating your PHP at the earliest, if you do use PHP code for you website, was also considered to be an important task for users that would contain these fixes, and thus alleviate any security issues that might arise in the future.

While Windows users could download these updated from www.php.net, LINUX users would soon gain access to these updates from RSN (Real Soon Now) from your distributions’ update repositories.

There is no doubt that the best developers in the world of programming are the ones who can write large amounts of codes in the shortest amount of time possible.  And a large part of becoming an efficient developer stems from the ability to master integrated development environment (IDE).

For PHP developers in particular, the PHP Developer Tools framework for Eclipse has become the most popular form of IDE that is being used in order to achieve maximum efficiency when it comes to programming.

So, here is a list of tips, tricks, and tools that you can use to reduce the amount of time of your code input:

#1: Configure the Zend Framework Completion or any other framework that you might use.

#2: Install the Zen Coding Plugin which is instrumental in rapidly generating CSS and HTML.

#3: PHP Templates can save you a lot of typing, which in turn, saves a lot of time.

#4: Using the PHP Functions Menu is a good idea!

#5: Integrating a Local PHP Manual will help you look deeper within a function’s capabilities.

#6: PHPDoc and PHPUnit are useful and can be used as external tools.

#7: Do not think twice about installing the Zend Debugger Plugin.

#8: Add Git Integration if you want a stable and unobtrusive version control system.

#9: You can manage MySQL databases with QuantumDB without leaving the PDT environment.

#10: Downloading the Eclipse cheat sheet will help you navigate the environment quickly.