PHP: Best of Breed

I’ve been meaning to write this article for a while now, mainly to point to some really good PHP applications and spread some kudos.

There are many good applications and classes out there, but I’m limiting to those that I’ve had hands-on experience with. Even so, this is hardly a comprehensive list; I may do some follow-up articles highlighting more good PHP.

phpMyAdmin: Database (MySQL) Administration

If you’re doing anything with MySQL on a webserver, phpMyAdmin is the gold standard for administering it. I use it everywhere. It’s solid, relatively easy to set up, and comes with a bunch of extras like bookmarking SQL queries and tracking key relationships. Incredible.

phpAdsNew: Banner Ad Management

This has probably the easiest and smoothest installation and configuration procedure of any PHP application I’ve used, and it has one of the best user interfaces and documentation packages out there. Once I set it up and started playing with it, I was sold. Now I need to find reasons to run banner ads on sites :)

NetOffice: Groupware/Project Management

Aside from the session problems I fixed, this is a pretty impressive system. It’s about the cleanest and easiest to use of the several project management apps I’ve tried, so it gets my support.

Gallery: Photo/Image Management

Second only to phpAdsNew in ease of setup. This is another system that once I started using, I was instantly hooked. Huge bonus points for the Gallery Remote app, a Java application that runs locally and allows you to manage your albums from the client. Awesome.

Snoopy: Web Client

I’ve used Snoopy in several projects, and it’s a top-notch utility. I could writes articles just on Snoopy alone, for web fetching, spidering, etc.—in fact, I may do that. Note also that this is not a stand-alone app like the others I’ve listed here, but a class that can be integrated into other projects.