On the SitePoint PHP blog today Matthew Setter has written up a tutorial sharing the essentials of PHP with LDAP. He shows how to connect PHP to this industry standard technology and effectively query, update and delete information.

Ever wanted a simple way to store address book style information and network information actually next to any kind of ordered information? If so, then there’s a technology which has been around since 1993, one which despite not having the cool factor of such technologies as Node.js and Go, allows you to do exactly this. It’s called LDAP!

He starts off the tutorial by explaining a bit about what LDAP is (and isn't) for those not familiar with it. He covers some of the basic terminology, pointing you other articles if you need more than just his brief overview. Then he helps you get an LDAP server installed locally (using a package manager, apt-get) and how to verify the install is working correctly. From there he shows how to populate a few records and verify they exist. Following this, he gets to the PHP part of things, showing how to use the Zend Framework v2 Zend/Ldap component to access the server, query records and update/delete them easily.