We previously covered how to authenticate an author to the blog, but we still have nothing ensuring only authenticated authors can access the new Administration Module. This is the domain of Zend_Acl, an implementation of an Access Control List system which limits access to resources by the roles assigned to a user.

He starts by helping you understand access control lists including roles and privileges. He plans out the different roles that he wants the application to have first (always a good first step) and then implements them in a class extending the Zend_Acl component. He wraps this all in a front controller to make it easy to use.

He also tosses in a bit there at the end about CSS and styling to handle the forms for login and the administration piece of the blog he created earlier.

In many companies, business logic resides in Excel. This business logic is sometimes created by business analysts and sometimes by business users who want to automate parts of their everyday job using Excel. [...] Did you know you can use PHPExcel to take advantage of the Excel-based business logic without having to worry about duplicate business logic?

He creates a quick example of a script that can take in an Excal file and pull it into a PHPExcel object, ready for manipulation. He fills in values for the already defined fields (like "carColor" or "leatherSeats") and uses the getCalculatedValue method to perform the action on the cell. The output is dropped into a variable that can be echoed out or used later on in the PHP script.

One point of flexibility [Zend_Form] offers has proved to be a pain point for many developers: decorators. This tutorial aims to shed some light on decorators, as well as provide strategies for creating your own decorators and combining them in creative ways to customize the output your forms generate.

Matthew starts with a little background behind the component to help you find your way around. Building on this, he shows how to use some standard output decorators and how to create decorators of your own. His example shows how to create a set of grouped checkboxes.

The fill pattern is used to annotate text but the named pattern could also be used to fill any shapes that allow fill to be specified (include circles, ellipses, rectangles, polygons etc etc).

His example is pretty simple (with a "Hello World!" output) that pulls in the background image, creates the composite layer over it, adds the text to it and sets the fill to the background image's layer. The whole this is wrapped up and output as a PNG file.

Starting any new application is like walking into a shop and being dazzled by the displays. You want everything but finally realise you only have so much resources to spend. So you isolate the specifics you must have, and focus on those.

This first part focuses on the planning stages of the application. He works through the features he wants the blog to have and some of the external libraries he's going to rely on (things like PHPUnit and jQuery). His goal for the series and the application is to have something he can replace his current blog with and to provide readers a step by step detail of the progress along the way.

The precursor to this article introduced some background and an overview of the design for the Phergie project as an example of the concepts involved in a PHP IRC bot implementation. This article will go further into the topic of plugins including descriptions of those that are commonly needed to make a bot fully functional as well as the commonly needed core features to support plugin development.

In part one he set up some of the foundation code and explained some of the thought behind the structure of the bot. In this part he gets more into the heart of the bot, showing how to define functions for common IRC actions (join/part/ping/etc) and how he made a plugin system to handle custom actions. He also mentions topics like memory usage, data storage methods and some of the "niceties" he included.

Adding an RSS feed to your site is quick and painless, and can be done with pure PHP (and some kind of data source). After the jump, 3 simple steps to building an RSS feed in php.

The steps are pretty simple - figure out what content you want to serve, set up the basic RSS XML structure, and loop through your data to push it in to the template and echoed out. Some simple example code is included.

Nothing's cooler than writing a bad-ass site or application and watching it gain popularity and a significant user base. By the same token, nothing's more frustrating that watching your app fall on its face when its running under high load. [...] Before you say, "throw more / better hardware at that mo-fo", why not take a moment and learn about APC: Alternative PHP Cache...

He describes the caching software - what it is and how it can help you and your application - and includes examples using a CacheManger class to store and set values quickly and easily.

As promised, orchid comes with real flexibility which lets you design your application in less time. [...] In this installment, we will learn how to achieve maximum speed and benefit by using the built-in model library of orchid with a toppings of the active record library.

He shows how to connect to the database backend through the framework (along with some dos and don'ts) and how to pull this connection into the Model functionality. His example inserts information into a "comics" table and shows how to pull it back out (with a call to the find() method).

Action Helpers in Zend Framework are often considered a fairly arcane subject, something for experts only. However, they are meant to be an easy way to extend the capabilities of Action Controllers, negating the need to create your own base controller with custom functionality. The aim of this tutorial is to show you how to quickly and easily create and use Action Helpers to your advantage.

He covers some of the basics - setting up a controller to extend Zend_Controller_Action - and assigning helpers to it. He looks hat hooking in events, registering and retrieving the helpers with a Broker and how to create your own custom helper. Their example is a form loader that lest you load the code for a form by submitting its class name.