OpenID, a free, open-source framework for "single sign-on" across different Web sites and applications. The even better news? There already exist a bunch of PHP widgets that allow developers to easily integrate OpenID into a PHP application, and this article is going to show you how to use them. So what are you waiting for? Flip the page, and let's get going!

For those not familiar with the authentication method, he defines OpenID and shows how it can help with the "too many passwords, too many accounts" problem many users face. He uses the PHP OpenID Library and the Authentication::OpenID_Consumer PEAR package (as well as several other PEAR packages to help with the connections and message formatting). He builds two simple forms to use the service - one to authenticate a user and another to create a new account.

I've gotten around to releasing a new set of beginners video tutorials on PHP. This time around, I have a four part video on how to get PHP to talk to MySQL.

All four parts are there, bundled into a Flash presentation. Note: these are not installation tutorials - they only show how to get PHP talking to the MySQL backend, not how to set them up together.

There are times when you need more than just admin routing, how about something like http://blah.com/user/profiles/edit and http://blah.com/user/profiles/changepassword ? If this could be routed to an action like user_add and user_changepassword wouldn't it be great!! (eg: think ownership ACL checks)

Good thing the CakePHP developers already planned for something like this - they included the connect() method for Router objects that maps the URL request to a method with that same prefix in the controller.

My DSN just was not right and wouldn't play - my host string was off and any permutation I used wasn't working. Looked at the PDO docs, the DSN docs in the manual, connectionstrings.com and no love.

Her final fix involved setting up an "instance" of her SQL server to point to the host. Her code is included.