The PHP Throwdown gauntlet has been thrown down! We're in the planning stages of the competition, so if you're interested in being involved as a volunteer, drop me a note. We're also looking for some interesting ideas for our sample apps so if you have one of those, then visit the site and leave a comment or drop me a note.

The event will be happening at the beginning of next year (January 27th, 2007) and will be a competition to hack together the best application in twenty-four hours in one of the four (yet to be determined activities).

The idea is to give the owner of the blog the ability to manage the blog by being able to remove users and articles as required, or to alter the status of users by upgrading them to admin status or banning them. It is also a place where the administrator can start new topics that will then garner their own replies.

They go through the creation of the main admin script (functionality managed with a switch statement, including other external PHP files) and the functions that go in each of those individual files to make things work - managing messages, managing users, and managing categories.

He populates the tags for the entries in a simple way - a SQL query that goes through and updates the tag table with the current category for the entry.