Andrei DANEASA

PHP is one of my preferred languages. I’ve been using it for almost 10 years, since version 3, I witnessed the release of 4.0… in some words: I have a bit of experience.
I’ve been given by Packt one of the latest PHP books they published, called “PHP 5 e-Commerce Development“. The title sounds very promising and I expected to get an update on the latest technologies and techniques related to e-Commerce out of it.

First, the book is following what it says in the title, creating one e-Commerce site from the ground. From authentication to discount codes, everything is covered by the book. It touches also some APIs from payment gateways and Google. So who wants to have a ride in knowing how to build an eCommerce site with PHP 5 should read the book.

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Seems that my thumbnail generation tutorial was somehow appreciated by community and somebody posted an article on Zend Developer Zone describing my tutorial as “Advanced Thumbnail Trickery with PHP“.

First, thank you!
Second, I never had so many visitors coming from the same referred. When I saw my statistics I thought that my internal statistics tool went crazy and I checked my google analytics account. Seems that it’s true.

I promise I will elaborate the topic and make a class with it. I will also try to do the same thing with ImageMagick as a visitor suggested.

No, it’s not yet another PHP thumbnail generation tutorial! I recently needed a function to:

• create square thumbnails
• don’t crop the initial image, but scale it and fill with white background
• center the thumbnail in the square
• call the function in a loop to process an entire folder

I found no suitable example and I decided that instead of digging too much it’s better to create my own function and a class for it.

Let’s start with a photo that we need to create a thumbnail for:

Nice kid, huh?

First step would be the thumbnail generation snippet:
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