In a new post on phpRiot.com Quentin Zervaas shows you how to use ionCube Encoder to help protect the applications you've written and their source code.

One of the issues PHP developers face is that PHP is an interpreted language, meaning PHP source code is readable by anybody who downloads your applications. In this article I will show you how to protect your intellectual property by encoding your PHP source code.

With the help of the encoder to can convert your plain-text PHP files into something that only the end user with the correct loader setup can use. He includes a simple "hello world" example showing the before and after of using the encoder. Also included are the commands to encode and decode the scripts manually if you want to handle it that way.