Doug Boude (rhymes with 'loud')

PHP vs COLDFUSION

2010-07-13T12:43:00-05:00

I had the privilege of doing a short presentation at our local CFUG meeting last night, the topic being "Coldfusion Vs PHP", so thought I'd share the slides and some brief commentary on some of them. We didn't record the meeting, so what you're about to see is an abbreviated version.

After several hours of hair pulling, I finally rectified an issue sending mail via Smartermail 6.0 using PHP's "mail" function. The exact same (crappy) code worked fine on the old freeBSD box, running PHP 4.9 and Apache. But when I migrated the same code to Windows 2008 running IIS7, PHP 4.9 (just to save me potential hassle with upgrading to 5.x), and Smartermail 6.0, I would get delivery log entries like th

Locating Files Containing Specified Text in "*IX" Environment

2009-08-28T08:47:00-05:00

This is nothing revolutionary, but since it was new to me and it DID take me far longer finding the solution via Googling than it should have, I'm posting it here for my own and others' reference.

Let's say you need to do some search and replace of a specified email address within a BUTT LOAD of PHP files you inherited from your predecessor, but you don't want to have to download the whole can of wo

PHP Export to Excel Snippet

2009-06-30T13:06:00-05:00

For those PHPers out there who are doing an export to Excel, I thought I'd share the solution I came up with. I realize there are already a gabillion examples out there, but I merged some of the better approaches from a few of them that made it fairly elegant, I think (such as leveraging the implode, array_keys, and array_values functions).

Without further adieux...

Create Dynamic WHERE Clauses in PHP

2009-05-21T11:40:00-05:00

At times it is necessary to dynamically create delimited lists of items, such as in the WHERE clause of SQL queries. For instance, perhaps our query could have from one to N different OR statements in the WHERE clause based on selections a user makes on a search form, something like

"select userid, firstname, lastname from usertable

Basic Ajax Select List Filter in PHP

2009-05-20T14:02:00-05:00

I am a ColdFusion guy, without a doubt. At my new job, however, I have inherited the maintenance and enhancement duties of a large PHP application as well. One of the enhancements I was asked to make was to produce a select list of names that could be filtered on the fly as the user typed into a text box. Being somewhat new to PHP and having had to figure out a good approach to creating this feature, I thought I'd share it in ca