Technology and Development
Handpicked Handy PHP Libraries
Do you ever wondering how to do certain things in PHP like generating graphs, generating pdf or parse RSS efficiently and easily. I found myself rewriting these codes every once in a while and was lucky enough to find these wonderful libraries/framework that are completely free and easy to use.
There are more, but I will only listed my handpicked best one out of these categories
RSS Parser
Normally I would use Jquery to do this stuff, but meh. When it comes to PHP, it’s all the way PHP
SimplePie: Very fast, easy to use, PHP driven RSS Parser
Demo | Documentation | Screencast (Yay!!)
I once used MagpieRSS for performance, but SimplePie offers a greater deal of functionality and when web servers are getting stronger days by days, the performance difference is not that big. One thing I love about this SimplePie is that it is actively being developed and actively updated.
Also, SimplePie got an integration with Codeigniter, my favourite PHP framework
Graph Generator
pChart: an Object Oriented framework that is capable of generating charts, graphs and best of all, it’s free. Data is grabbed from SQL Queries or CSV Files or just manually put them in.
Screenshots | Demo | Documentation (Very detailed!)
However, this library requires GD Library to be installed onto your web server and have PHP compiled with it. If you don’t have GD installed, better check for my second alternative: Libchart, a little bit old but suffice.
PDF Generator
FPDF: This little baby works splendid. It can stand alone or with zlib for compression and GD for GIF support.
It can be easily integrated with Codeigniter
Excel Generator
php-excel: very easy and fast way to generate excel spreadsheet using PHP on the fly
The approach is to convert a 2 dimensional array in PHP to a spreadsheet in Excel. However, because of it’s easy to use and fast performance, it does not have quite a few of features like cell styling, functions creating, sort…. If you need those (I don’t!), your choice is PHPExcel
Payment System
PHP-OpenID: for paypal, authorize.net and 2checkout (2CO). Yeah, the 3 most popular ones, who needs the lesser unpopular ones?
Checkout the links, it’s very detailed with code examples and all other stuff that you need to know. Scrap those you don’t need to know 
This guy, Emran, is my hero by delivering this wonderful library to us
| Print article | This entry was posted by dekarvn on October 15, 2009 at 10:37 am, and is filed under PHP/MySQL. Follow any responses to this post through RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site. |
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Handy PHP Code Snippets
about 11 months ago - 17 comments
Send Simple Mail 12345678910function send_simple_mail($from,$to,$subject,$body) { $headers = "From: $from\r\n"; $headers .= "Reply-To: $from\r\n"; $headers .= "Return-Path: $from\r\n"; $headers .= "X-Mailer: PHP5\n"; $headers .= ‘MIME-Version: 1.0′ . "\n"; $headers .= ‘Content-type: text/html; charset=utf-8′ . "\r\n"; @mail($to,$subject,$body,$headers); } List a Directory 1234567891011121314151617function list_files($dir) { if(is_dir($dir)) { if($handle =
about 10 months ago
Hello from Russia!
Can I quote a post in your blog with the link to you?
about 10 months ago
you certainly can
about 10 months ago
One thing about SimplePie:
http://simplepie.org/blog/2009/09/26/simplepie-is-ceasing-development/
It is not “actively being developed and actively updated.”
about 10 months ago
Thanks Evan for pointing out my mistake. Too bad though because I’ve been using SimplePie for so long. It’s still a powerful library that is easy to use…
about 9 months ago
Hi There,
Thanks for keeping my payment library in your list. You have a small mistake in naming the link though, it should be “PHP Payment Library” instead of “PHP-OpenID”
Again, thanks for mentioning.
Emran