Over here: Lesson 3: You want a web portfolio? For a programmer?":

"I get it. PHP is largely used in the construction of websites so any PHP developer must have a portfolio ready to go, right? Wrong. If I pointed you to any of the websites I've worked on the likelyhood that you'd be judging me on a graphic designer's skillset rather than my own is fairly high."

Some time ago, I had a client requirement for continuous live testing of an online application process. It was a multi-step application for insurance, so it had a lot of server-side logic, as well as plenty of client-side javascript validation. Obviously, the best way to test this is to simulate a real browser session. This way you can detect obscure errors such as javascript validation errors stopping form submissions - things that would not show up in standard unit testing.

I've just posted a step by step guide on integrating FCKEditor with your site CSS styles over at nmglc.

Quite a few of my smaller sideline projects and client work involve low cost CMS-type solutions using PHP and various free and OSS packages.  For simple CMS jobs, whether I'm using Drupal or rolling my own, I use FCKEditor for WYSIWYG editing these days.  FCKEditor scores over my previous favourite, TinyMCE, because it has server-side file and image browsing capabilities out of the box.

A combination of two things recently combined to make me change the way I use FTP.

Firstly, I had started to use SmartFTP, but they stopped offering a free version and I was unwilling to upgrade to a product that seemed to have a very frequent upgrade cycle, with the newest version subtly altering the way you were used to working with it.

Secondly, I have lately needed to work with more Linux-based web servers than usual, which offer SSH access, and some of which block standard FTP access.

I've moved this article at nmglc.co.uk/content/overriding-drupals-mail-function.  It outlines a quick way to override Drupal's default mail function() with your own.  It came in handy when I was trying to send email from a Drupal site hosted on my ISP's shared server and fell foul of a security requirement that PHP calls to mail() had to include extra header arguments.