But we can start from somewhere. Here are 7 areas of your own PHP code that you can modify for performance.

PHP static Keyword

Usage of the static keyword on functions is often programmer’s first choice for optimization. It allows methods within a PHP class to be accessed without the need to instantiate it.

<?php
class Foo {
public static function staticMethod() {
// put codes here
}
}
Foo::staticMethod();
?>

The process of instantiating an object is always expensive and as we can see here, the function staticMethod() can be called without creating a new Foo object. This optimization could lead almost up to 4 times speed improvement.

PHP switch Statements

Most programmers prefer the general if-statements, but some performance gains can be achieved if we use the more specific switch-statements, especially when we have to deal with a lot of conditions.

<?php
$value = 1;

switch ($value)
{
case 1:
echo "Number 1";
break;
case 2:
echo "Number 2";
break;
case 3:
echo "Number 3";
break;
default:
echo "No number between 1 and 3";
}
?>

String Manipulation

Many casual programmers interchangeably use the single and double quotation marks in PHP. Knowing when and where to use them not only encourages proper coding technique but also faster execution in the long run. All you need to know is this, single quotation marks between a string mean that the PHP interpreter doesn’t have to scan the string for variables, as opposed to double quotation marks.

Another frequent string manipulation practice happens when we want to replace a string with another string. There are about 4 ways a programmer could achieve this, using functions sprintf, preg_replace, str_replace or strtr, albeit different low-level implementations between them. It is enough for us to know that using strtr whenever possible takes lesser time to complete than the other three, almost by a factor of 4.

Data Structures

With PHP 5 comes support for Object Oriented Programming (OOP). While OOP does promote scalability while minimising the amount of code you write, not everything has to be in OOP. Often these OOP practices, such as creating a new object or calling methods within it take a massive overhead and a lot of memory. For example, lists might be useful to store data, but arrays in PHP work the same way too. Assess how big your PHP project would be – my bet is if it is just for your personal website, you might want to stick to simpler methods.

Variables

Variables in a PHP code can be declared in many places within the entire scope, some can be a local variable contained within a method or a global variable, declared outside of the scope of methods within a PHP class. When it is not required of you to use global variables, change them as local variables as this could bring almost as much as double speed improvements.

Remember OOP? Incrementing an object property for example, is 3 times slower than a local variable.

PHP Output

Like string manipulation, there are multiple ways to output results. The general consensus point that echo is faster than print. Although the justification is pretty academic, it comes down to the design between echo and print in PHP. The former does not return a value while the latter does.

Error Handling

Although error handling could promote robustness, it is better to ensure that such erroneous outcomes never happen. Error handling, mostly used during debugging purposes, is an expensive process within PHP. For instance, avoid using the @ operator to suppress errors.

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If you want to setup your own forum, you can go for either open source forum scripts or commercial forum scripts such as Invision Power Board. Should you choose a commercial forum script or open source forum script? It is depends on your requirements and also you or your forum’s administrator experience.

Today, we are going to share 12 Free And Open Source PHP Forum Scripts where you can easily build your forum and online community with them.

1. phpBB

phpBB is the most popular and wide-used open source PHP forum script. It has an easy to use administrator control panel and takes only few minutes to install. phpBB is very customizable, you can easily create your own themes and modifications to the script. If you face any problem with phpBB, you can always refer to the documentation.

2. bbPress

bbPress is a free and open source PHP forum scripts by the creators or Wordpress. It has a complete documentation, plugins directory and also an active community. Similar with Wordpress, bbPress is easy to customize and has a pretty URL structure which is good for SEO purpose.

3. SMF: Simple Machines Forum

SMF is a powerful forum script which you can integrate and connect your forum with various CMS such as e107, Mambo, Xoops and iGamingCMS. The SSI( Server Side Includes) lets you interact your website and forum easily. Beside these, SMF also support multiple languages and has an advanced permission and user management. More features and be implemented through the Modifications/plugins.

4. MyBB

MyBB is yet another promising free open source PHP forum script. You can easily switch to MyBB from vB, IPB, phpBB and SMF through the official MyBB Merge System. The plugin system lets you easily extend the forum functionality.

5. SEO-Board

SEO-Board is a free, fast and search engine friendly forum script. It comes with simple interfaces and doesn’t have fancy festures. What it has is the core and main features of a forum application such as anti-spam protection, multi-language, bsic BBCode, RSS/Atom and etc. It is free for both personal and commercial use. SEO-Board is very suitable simple forum which focus on speed and search engine friendly.

6. PunBB

PunBB is a lightweight PHP-powered discussion board. Its primary goals are to be faster, smaller and less graphically intensive as compared to other discussion scripts. PunBB has an extensions repository where you can download, install and add extra functionality to your forum.

7. FluxBB

FluxBB supports different types of databases such as MySQL, PostgreSQL and SQLite. FluxBB is a fork of PunBB and they decided to fork the project when PunBB was sold to a commercial company.

8. Vanilla

Vanilla is an open-source, standards-compliant, multi-lingual, theme-able, pluggable discussion forum for the web. It requires PHP5 and above to use. Currently, they have more than 450 addons for you to choose, which including themes, plugins and applications.

9. Phorum

Phorum has a very flexible hook and module system, which allows developers to easily create modules for customization. The pure HTML template system is easy to understand and designers can create templates that meet the client requirements.

10. IceBB

Ice is a powerful and fast PHP forum application. It has a powerful admin control center and the PHP skinning system lets you customize the look and feel of your forum easily. You will have private messages system, search, inline moderation and multi-quote in your forum. Furthermore, you can have unlimited subforums with IceBB.

11. UseBB

UseBB is a light and open source PHP4 and MySQL based forum application. It is ideal for small to medium sized websites which need a clear and efficient forum package.

12. XMB: eXtreme Message Board

XMB offers key features you need to get your message board up and running. Is had easy to use Member Management system, theming interface and anti-spam image verification system.

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There are a lot of ways for you to display your Delicious saved counts. But today we are going to show you how to use Delicious API together with Wordpress custom field to save and display the Delicious saved counts.

What you need to know before start writing the code?

1. MD5 – You need the URL’s Md5 hash value in order to lookup its Delicious saved counts. You can read more by reading the PHP md5() function.
2. serialize() and unserialize(). We will need to serialize the data before storing to the database, and then unserialize them after retrieve from database.
3. Custom field. We use the custom field to store the Delicious saved counts to the database. By saving the Delicious saved counts to the database, we can reduce the number of calls to Delicious’s API and also drastically speed up your post loading speed. Imagine, if you have 1k visitors per hour, then you will have 1000 requests sent to Delicious per hour. So, we have to save the counts in our database in order to reduce our server load too.

Step by step to create your plugin

1. We will have a function called delicious_count() and everything will be inside this function. We need the global $post variable and also another variable $count to store the Delicious saved counts.This is the initial setup for the function, which will return the saved counts when being called.

   function delicious_count() {
   global $post;
   $count = 0;
   
   return $count;
   }

2. Here, we would like to introduce another variable called $old_del, which is an array that will contains the Delicious saved counts together with the “lastcheck” timestamp. We will look into more details about $old_del later.
3. As i explain before, we save everything in the custom field called “_delicious”. The reason why i include the “_” in front of the custom field is to make it “invisible” so that nobody can go and edit the value, unless you login to your database server.

   $old_del = unserialize(get_post_meta($post->ID, '_delicious', true));

   After retrieve the value from database, we need to unserialize it into an array and pass to $old_del.

4. Now, let’s look into the details of $old_del. It is a key-value pair array with 2 elements inside. the first one is “count” and the second one is “lastcheck”. The “lastcheck” indicates the time (in Unix timestamp) before the array being serialize and saved into the database. We will then use the mktime() method to get the current timestamp, and then subtract 600(600 seconds). This is to make sure we will not call the Delicious API within next 10 minutes.

   if($old_del == null || $old_del['lastcheck'] < (mktime() - 600)) {
   }

5. Now, we reach the most important part – how to get the Delicious saved counts from the API.

   $jsonurl  = "http://feeds.delicious.com/v2/json/urlinfo/" . md5(get_permalink());
   $json = file_get_contents($jsonurl,0,null,null);
   $json_output = json_decode($json, true);
   $del_count =  $json_output[0]['total_posts'];
   $del['count'] = $del_count;
   $del['lastcheck'] = mktime();
   <$del = serialize($del);

   The first line is to construct the JSON URL while the lines 2-4 will retrieve the counts and saved into the variable $del_count. After that, we save both the Delicious counts and “lastcheck” into the variable $del and serialize it.

6. After we get everything, it is the time for us to save them into the database. Here, we will need both update_post_meta() and add_post_meta(). You can refer them through Wordpress Codex if you don’t know how to use.

   if($old_del != null) {
   update_post_meta($post->ID, '_delicious', $del);
   }
   else {
   add_post_meta($post->ID, '_delicious', $del, true);
   }

7. We almost reach the final stage. Before we see how to use this function, let’s see the complete code here.

   <?php
   /*
   Plugin Name: Delicious Counts
   Version:     1.0
   Plugin URI:  http://www.webdesignbooth.com
   Description: Simple Delicious Counts Plugin For Wordpress
   Author:      Dicky
   Author URI:  http://www.webdesignbooth.com
   */>
   function delicious_count() {
   global $post;
   $count = 0;
   $old_del = unserialize(get_post_meta($post->ID, '_delicious', true));
   
   if($old_del == null || $old_del['lastcheck'] < (mktime() - 600)) {
   $jsonurl  = "http://feeds.delicious.com/v2/json/urlinfo/" . md5(get_permalink());
   $json = file_get_contents($jsonurl,0,null,null);
   $json_output = json_decode($json, true);
   $del_count =  $json_output[0]['total_posts'];
   $del['count'] = $del_count;
   $del['lastcheck'] = mktime();
   $del = serialize($del);
   
   if($old_del != null) {
   update_post_meta($post->ID, '_delicious', $del);
   }
   else {
   add_post_meta($post->ID, '_delicious', $del, true);
   }
   $count = ($del_count == null) ? 0 : $del_count;
   }
   else {
   $count = ($old_del['count'] == null) ? 0 : $old_del['count'];
   }
   
   return $count;
   }
   
   ?>

8. Ok, now you have the complete code.Simply call delicious_count() within the Wordpress loop and you will have your Delicious saved counts. I hope you enjoy this tutorials as i think this method is pretty helpful and it demonstrates how to make use of the Wordpress custom field.

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Since we had looked into 22 open source PHP frameworks, i decided to do a roundup of 20 Open Source PHP Content Management Systems so that readers who don’t have strong PHP knowledge can easily create their website using free and open source CMS.

1. Wordpress

Wordpress is a powerful yet easy to use content management system. Initially it was designed as a blogging platform. However, it slowly become popular and can be customized into a powerful CMS with some tricks and plugins. I had wrote an article about Wordpress SEO plugins and also talked about things that you should know about Wordpress 2.8.

2. Drupal

Drupal is a free and open source modular framework and Content Management System (CMS) written in PHP. It is used as a back-end system for many different types of websites, ranging from small personal blogs to large corporate and political sites.

3. Joomla

Joomla is an award-winning content management system (CMS), which enables you to build Web sites and powerful online applications. Many aspects, including its ease-of-use and extensibility, have made Joomla the most popular Web site software available. Best of all, Joomla is an open source solution that is freely available to everyone.

4. Frog CMS

Frog CMS simplifies content management by offering an elegant user interface, flexible templating per page, simple user management and permissions, as well as the tools necessary for file management.

5. SilverStripe

SilverStripe is a PHP CMS built with Sapphire framework, and it uses MVC design pattern. you can view example sites that built with SilverStripe from the official webpage.

6. Mambo

Mambo is a full-featured, award-winning content management system that can be used for everything from simple websites to complex corporate applications. Although some Mambo sites had already migrated to Joomla, but i think i should include Mambo as it is still a great CMS.

7. TYPOlight

TYPOlight is a PHP 5 CMS and it has a lot of features such as live update, cross-browser CSS framework generator(IE7 compatible), templated based front end output, use Ajax and Web 2.0 technologies. You should check out the main page for more info.

8. Concrete5

Concrete5 is an open source content management system with simple administaror interface. You can edit a web page live by using the editing toolbar provided after you log in as administrator.

9. Textpattern

Textpattern is yet another very popular content management system. It requires PHP 4 to run and has a lot of plugins that you can use for various customizations.

10. Symphony

Symphony is a CMS that uses XML/XSLT as its templating language. Symphony lets you customize anything you like, from the website’s URL structure to your publishing environment. For a non programmer, this CMS might be complicated to learn.

11. MODx

MODx is both a PHP application framework and content management system. MODx is the first free PHP CMS to offer an API that fully supports Web 2.0 Ajax technology. It is SEO friendly CMS, and allows you to configure the meta content for each page.

12. Habari Project

Habari is a highly recommended open source blogging platform. It is being written specifically for modern web hosting environment, and uses modern object oriented programming techniques.

13. CMS Made Simple

CMS Made Simple is highly customizable and there are a lot of Modules for you to download. The Documentation is pretty complete and easy to follow.

14. ImpressCMS

ImpressCMS is a community developed Content Management System. It is highly scalable and is extremely useful for managing online communities.

15. Exponent CMS

Exponent uses an intuitive and flexible content editing system that allows website pages to be edited on the page as it is displayed. You can download modules and themes from the official website too!

16. MiaCMS

MiaCMS is a fork of the Mambo CMS. It has a powerful and extensible third party entension system, and also a flexible site theming capabilities. MiaCMS supports OpenID and can consider to be a stable and mature CMS.

17. Jojo CMS

Jojo is a search engine friendly CMS. You will have SEO friendly URL to your article, and Jojo will handle www/non-www domains for you. Beside SEO friendly, Jojo also lets you extend the functionality by adding product databases, blogs, image galleries or whatever takes your fancy.

18. TYPO3

TYPO3 is a free Open Source content management system for enterprise purposes on the web and in intranets. It offers full flexibility and extendability while featuring an accomplished set of ready-made interfaces, functions and modules.

19. Elxis CMS

Elxis CMS comes with a lot of features such as Search Engine Friendly URL, strong security, adjustable member list and complete user profiles. Its automated tasks, modern design, AJAX technology and multi-lingual interface helps you be more productive.

20. Chyrp

Chyrp is a lightweight blogging platform and it uses Twig as the templating engine. The documentation is quite complete and you can download a lot of useful modules from the main site.

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So, what makes PHP so popular? PHP is so popular because it is relatively easy to learn compare to other language. Furthermore, there are a lot of great tutorials for beginner to get started. Although there are a lot of resources for us, but coding a site from scratch is very tough. Luckily, there are a lot of reliable PHP Framework which can shorten the development time. These frameworks are supported by huge community and they are willing to help if you face any problems.

Without talking much, let’s start to look into these 22 open source PHP frameworks:

Most Promising Frameworks

1. Zend Framework

Zend Framework is an object oriented framework written in PHP 5. It is based on simplicity, corporate friendly license, and a rigorously tested agile codebase. The loosely coupled architecture also allow developers to use Zend components within other framework.

2. Symfony

Symfony is a PHP 5 framework which provides an architecture, components and tools for developers to build complex web applications faster. The official site provides a practical tutorial for Symfony beginner too.

3. CodeIgniter

CodeIgniter is another popular PHP framework. It has the advantage of having a wiki for easier navigation. New users can get started easily by referring to its documentation. It supports PHP4, which makes it can’t take full advantage of PHP5.

4. CakePHP

Using commonly known design patterns like MVC  and ORM  within the convention over configuration paradigm, CakePHP reduces development costs and helps developers write less code.

5. Prado

Prado require PHP5 and above to run, and it is a component-based and event-driven programming framework for developing Web applications. There is a quick start tutorial for beginner too.

6. Kohana

Kohana is a PHP 5 framework that uses the Model View Controller architectural pattern. It aims to be secure, lightweight, and easy to use. Kohana is originally based on CodeIgniter, but it is strict PHP5 OOP, which i think is more suitable to use in building new and large scale projects.

7. Solar Framework

Solar is a PHP 5 framework for web application development. It is fully name-spaced and uses enterprise application design patterns, with built-in support for localization and configuration at all levels.

8. Fuse

FUSE is a Model View Controller framework for PHP. Taking influence from other web frameworks such as Ruby on Rails and CakePHP, then adding in custom, intuitive features of our own design, FUSE has developed into a robust, stable platform for MVC development using object oriented PHP.

9. Yii PHP Framework

Yii is a high-performance component-based PHP framework best for developing large-scale Web applications. It has a full stack of features and written in strict OOP(require PHP5 and above).

10. Akelos PHP Framework

The Akelos PHP Framework is a web application development platform based on the MVC (Model View Controller) design pattern.

Other alternative PHP frameworks

11. Recess
12. Agavi
13. Qcodo
14. Zoop
15. QPHP
16. Seagull PHP
17. PHPDevShell
18. PHPOpenBiz
19. WASP
20. evoCore
21. Lion
22. Flow3

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