Life of a developer

It has been a while since I have posted here, mainly due to the time consuming period that is the festive season and also because I am discovering that I am getting fairly annoyed by Drupal as a blog tool and am trying out the new WordPress as an alternative.

For now I have a small post on something that many people aren’t aware of but is VERY handy, the ternary operator.

Basically it is a shortcut to do a simple if-then-else statement in one line when you are performing fairly simple checks for a single value. I tend to use it a lot when checking for GET or POST variables.


$getContents = (isset($_GET) ? $_GET : array());

would check if the $_GET variable array is set, if it is return its contents to $getContents and if not return and empty array to $getContents.

Much easier that coding:

$getContents = array();
if (isset($_GET)){
$getContents = $_GET;

P.S. Just on a side note, if you are new to PHP and want to use this code to check for and receive your $_GET contents, dont forget to sanatize your data as well (hmm I think I see a new post topic)


Last day of the month

Here’s one line of code to get the last day of a month:

$last_day = date(‘t’, mktime(0, 0, 1, $month_variable, 1, $year_variable));

How much more difficult do you want it to be ???




Anyway today I was asked about how to do a IN LIST type comparison in PHP. (similar to the mysql IN statement).

A few google searches later revealed that there exists no such PHP command, however the in_array function can be used to perform the task:

$myArray = array(1, 2, 3, 4, 5);

if (in_array($var, $myArray)){
// do some code.

I guess one could also combine the two as follows:

if (in_array($var, array(1, 2, 3, 4, 5))){
// do some code.

I’ll have to test that one, but you get the idea…


Simple PHP increment function

Whenever I have to output a numbered list of data I usually run the following code to achieve the required result.

$counter = 0;
// for loop that does all the required code
// end for

but I have discovered a lovely little function that does all this for me.

function increment(&$counter){
return $counter

now I simply call


and it automatically outputs the next numeric.

Great! Simple and easy to use…..that’s the way to code.


My first published article.

Something of a first for me. I recently started playing around with the CakePHP framework again. I have had some (little) experience with it in the past and with the launch of two CakePHP books I decided it was high time I learned how to use this awesome framework properly.

A few days later I was trying to find a way to integrate my favourite html editor into the framework itself and after a lot of googling, trial and error and a little luck I managed to find a simple, reusable way to integrate the editor into the framework. As this was very helpful to me I posted an article on the CakePHP bakery, and the chaps over there deemed it worthy enough to be published.

You can read it here . Please feel free to send me your comments.

I’m just kinda chuffed the published it. 😉