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As a way to find inspiration and improve my PHP skills, I am looking for some beautiful PHP source code to read, preferably an open source "standard" web site rather than a more tool-like project such as phpMyAdmin.
So, where can I find some beautiful PHP code?
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PHP is a server-side programming language, meaning it is executed at the web server before the website is sent to the end-user. This is why you can't see the PHP code when you view the source code.
A PHP script can be placed anywhere in the document. The default file extension for PHP files is " .php ". A PHP file normally contains HTML tags, and some PHP scripting code.
PHP is a widely-used open source general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for web development and can be embedded into HTML.
In order to start PHP, MySQL, PHPMyAdmin and Apache in a single attempt, XAMPP should be installed. Scroll over to XAMPP for Windows and download should begin shortly. Click the .exe file to start the installation procedure. Select the components which you want to install and click “Next”.
CodeIgniter code is beautiful. There are many projects written in CodeIgniter which are publically available and you can check out the source code.
Have a look at the Getting started page of CodeIgniter's tutorial and read through. I can gaurantee you'll be inspired and want to fire up your IDE and get coding straight away :).
You can also download and have a look at the source code of Bamboo invoice. When I need inspiration I also search for 'php code' on youtube :)
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Not all opensource projects are great examples as of how things are done.
Take a look at PEAR, ezComponents and the Zend Framework. All three are pretty popular in the PHP world, they solve a ton of different problems [each sometimes with a different approach] and they all follow great coding standards.
Also, there is often a trade-off between beautiful/elegant code and code that is very optimized. For example, if you want to see code that is powered to run a large website which needs to handle a lot of traffic, check out Mediawiki. It's build on very efficient code, but it's not very pretty.
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Try looking at the source of the best PHP frameworks - Zend's, Symfony and CakePHP. They are very well documented and generally well designed.
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