webdevgeeks

For the month of July, phpwomen.org is holding an article contest! They are accepting articles posted in their Best Practices forum for judging. Their prize lists includes…well, why tell you here, click on inside and I’ll give you the whole scoop.

What makes the web fun? Is it the cool applications like Google Maps, which are neat but not particularly fun? Is it social networks like Facebook? Sure, that’s a little fun. But what really gets passed around the web? Viral video. Nothing catches our interest like video and images, which is ironic, as the HTML technology for uploading media to web sites is one of the worst parts of browsers.

If you’ve been programming for a while, you probably already know the basic function of a template engine: to separate presentation and layout information from program code in an application. This separation lets designers and developers work independently on the form and function of an application, and it can substantially reduce the time and effort required in the maintenance phase of a project.

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The PHP community has an active twitter presence. If you use twitter, come and join us. Here I’ve listed all of the community memeber’s accounts that I have and that have given me permission to.

Lorna Mitchell, Senior Developer at Ibuildings, the senior member of phpwomen.org in Europe, podcaster for PHP Abstract and all around swell person, was recently interviewed at the Dutch PHP Conference. Here’s the interview plus a link to all the DPC videos.

Producing code that clearly conveys a developer’s intent is key to any well written application. That not only applies to PHP, but every programming language. Developers who emphasize the creation of legible code tend to create applications which are easier to both maintain and expand upon. After seven years of programming in PHP I’ve worked on a variety of projects where well organized and legible code were set aside for numerous reasons. Some of those reasons include time constraints, lack of experience, lost enthusiasm, misdirected pre-optimizing, and the list goes on. Today we’ll look at three simple methods which are commonly ignored by developers for some, if not all of the reasons described above.

So, what is wrong with Zend_Acl and the current MVC implementation in the Zend Framework? there is nothing wrong, it is just that it gets not too obvious for developers how to achieve an optimal integration between these two important parts of the framework.

"Object-Oriented Programming with PHP5" is aimed at beginning or mid-level programmers that want to expand their knowledge of object-oriented features in PHP. Although basic OOP support was present in version 4 of PHP, it wasn't until the introduction of version 5 that they caught up with object-oriented implementations of other popular languages, such as Java or Python. The book does a decent job of covering the main OOP topics in PHP; as well as, touching upon some of the peripheral ones. Hayder devotes whole chapters to such topics as unit testing, design patterns, XML, SPL, and working with databases.

Zend sponsors Webinars every Wednesday covering a wide variety of topics of interest to PHP programmers. If you look over on your left, you’ll see the last five that have been published. If you’ve not had the opportunity to watch one, here is one done a while back by Bill Karwin.

Here’s a screencast put together by Zend to show how easy it is to debug PHP scripts using the Zend Debugger.

According to the official OpenID Web site, OpenID is “a free and easy way to use a single digital identity across the Internet”. Fundamentally, an OpenID is a customized URL, chosen by you as your online identity and registered with an OpenID service provider. Whenever an external site needs to verify your identity for login purposes, you supply this URL instead of your username; the site then contacts your OpenID service provider for authentication.

HTML Purifier 3.1.0 has been released. This release fixes a security vulnerability, and thus users should upgrade as soon as possible.

The book is a tutorial guide to Joomla! 1.5 and was already written and published during the development of Joomla! 1.5. This is the final version and it aims for “web developers, designers, webmasters, content editors and marketing professionals” and is suitable for anyone starting out with Joomla! 1.5, for people who upgrade to Joomla 1.5 and for those who just want a good printed guide/manual at hand.

Let’s face it: Interactive graphs and dashboards have never been easy to put together on the web. Sure, there are graphing libraries out there for PHP, but to get something that looks really good and that a user can play with has been tough. Or at least, it was yesterday. Today, I show how to use a combination of PHP for the back end and Adobe Flex for the front end that will put interactive 3D within your grasp. Right now. Today. Let’s dig in.

Come learn about Kargo’s always-on mobile messaging architecture and mobile internet platform built using PHP 5 and the leading open-source Zend Framework.

The Zend Framework team is excited to announce a partnership between Dojo and Zend Framework. The goal is to deliver an out-of-the-box solution for building Ajax-based Web applications with Zend Framework. This is mainly targeted at users who rely on us to provide them with a best practice and an out-of-the-box experience for Ajax and don't want to have to deal with evaluating a solution (e.g. toolkits, licenses, etc.).

Below is an FAQ which sheds some more light on this announcement:

The Zend Framework team has just completed a reorganization of our subversion repository. The reorganization was necessary due to changes we are introducting both in our proposal system as well as project architecture. Specifically, we are introducing a new library, our 'Extras' library, which will contain contributions that are not officially supported by Zend but which still require successful completion of our proposal process. Additionally, we are merging our Laboratory repository.

Instructions on how to update your working checkouts or svn:externals pointers are included in this article.

This article is intended as an accompaniment to the podcast of the same name, it is a simple walkthrough of some examples of the techniques mentioned in the podcast. It is much easier to visualise queries and data structures if written down, so here we look at an example of each of the points mentioned. I’ve taken a classic example of an employees table which needs to be populated with the clients existing data, which arrives in a different format. Its a common scenario and the ideas illustrated here are also applicable to many other situations and types of data.

Today our special guest is Lorna Mitchell. Lorna is a Developer at Ibuildings in the UK, and is based in Leeds in the North of England. She is a Zend Certified Engineer and the senior member for phpwomen.org in Europe.

Today, Lorna is going to talk to us about data importing.

Attention all you Zend Framework junkies, Jochen Hartmann has uploaded a new video to youtube that demonstrates the basics of how to use Zend Framework with the YouTube Data API.