In PHP 5 and greater there is a magic function called __autoload (note: two underscores). __autoload allows us to load a class on the fly so to speak. It only gets called when a class can not be found, then it has a chance to load the class. If the class still can not be found, you get your regular error stating so. __autoload can be really useful if all of your classes happen to be in one directory, but what happens if you are managing a large project with many packages of classes? We will look at some different options.

Mint is a new product recently released to track the statistics on your website. It has gotten much attention from several areas, and I thought it would be worth it to check it out.

A little trick to create a logout from your site if you are using HTTP Authentication.

AMFPHP (Flash Remoting written in PHP) is almost ready to hit a stable version 1.0 release! I’ve been looking forward to this for a long time. We’ve already used it at 4.4 million posts to a remoting service in one month.

One of the simple and very useful pieces of code in Pherret (a PHP 5 framework) is the setProperties() function in the base Object class. The name originally came from Java Beans and works in a similar manner. I’m sharing it because it could be used in any code with PHP 5 or PHP 4.