Recommended Tools

Here are the PHP tools we recommend.
* Recommended for beginners.

phpMyAdmin *

A web based graphical interface for managing a database. If you are unfamiliar with using MySQL from the command line, I suggest installing phpMyAdmin. Anyone new to relational database systems and contemplating using MySQL should start by installing this application. Highly recommended.

(Get it from www.phpmyadmin.net)

Smarty

Smarty is a template engine for PHP. More specifically, it facilitates a manageable way to separate application logic and content from its presentation. This is best described in a situation where the application programmer and the template designer play different roles, or in most cases are not the same person. For example, let's say you are creating a web page that is displaying a newspaper article. One of the unique aspects about Smarty is the template compiling. This means Smarty reads the template files and creates PHP scripts from them. Once they are created, they are executed from then on. Therefore there is no costly template file parsing for each request, and each template can take full advantage of PHP compiler cache solutions such as Zend Accelerator (http://www.zend.com) or PHP Accelerator (http://www.php-accelerator.co.uk). (from the Smarty manual). Highly recommended.

(Get it from smarty.php.net)

Savant

Savant is a light weight PHP template system that uses the PHP language itself for presentation logic (nearly "self-templating" and very similar to Perl's Text::Template in philosophy). Comprehensive features such as plugins. Allows developers to maintain separation between business and presentation logic while staying as close to PHP as possible. Templates do not require compiling because they are already PHP.

(Get it from http://phpsavant.com/)

PHP Plotting and Graphing Support

PHPlot is an open source PHP based graphing and plotting package. It is a graph plotting library written entirely in PHP, so it installs easily by copying the package file to your server and including the package.
As simple as
include('phplot.php');
Fairly easy to modify. Highly recommended.

(Get it from phplot.com)