YAML, or YAML Ain't Markup Language, is a "human friendly data serialization standard". It's essentially a very basic format for storing data, and uses far less syntax than standard PHP. [...] It's almost like English; it's as basic as you want. Of course, that's not to say it doesn't support complex structures - this example demonstrates the power of the format.

He also points out the spyc extension that makes working with the files in PHP a breeze.

Everyone is talking about Facebook and their new Application Platform and I have to admit I think it's pretty cool too. So I decided to create an application that uses the Facebook Platform. I'm writing the application in PHP and I thought it might be useful for others to know how to write their own Facebook applications with PHP.

They show you where you'll need to go to set up an ID with Facebook to develop with, the developer application you'll need to add, where to grab the Facebook developer API and, finally, creating a simple application.

Their example is just of the "Hello World" sort, but it gives you a good foundation to start from. They also include pointers to the Facebook Markup Language and a reference for the Facebook REST-based API interface.

If you've ever encountered the same need, or if you're just curious about the YAML format and how it can be used with PHP, then today is your lucky day. Over the next few pages, I'm going to give you a crash course in YAML and in PHP's ext/syck extension, showing you how it can be used to efficiently translate data structures from PHP to YAML, and vice-versa. Come on in, and let's get started!

The tutorial starts with an example of a YAML file before getting into the application portion. He shows how to grab the Syck extension, install it, create a simple YAML file and create a configuration file (and parser) for a simple form application.

For a current project of mine I had to find a way to decode html into textile markup. Why? Because we are using tinyMCE to process our textareas as wyciwyg editors, which generate HTML. However, we want all output controlled via textile to allow only the textile tags. Yes, we could do it with strip_tags(), but textile is much more elegant. Plus, it was a requirement by the client. Come on and find out how to detextile html.

Code is included to work on the transformation: detextile, processTag, detextile_process_glyphs and detextile_process_lists. An example is included as well, showing how to input a block of HTML content to be "textile-ized". The full code is available for cutting and pasting at the bottom of the post.

After setting up my application settings, which were all straight forward, I set about creating a simple 'Hello World' page. Following the step by step guide to creating an application provided by FaceBook I wrote a simple index.php page. [...] This is where I encountered probably the only major issue of the day.

In the end, his issue was caused by the SimpleXML he had installed locally. Once his application was uploaded, it worked just fine. With this problem down, he moved on to working with the Facebook Markup Language and how he integrated it with the database.

One of the more challenging things I've run into while doing PHP development is effectively separating presentation from program logic. In many projects, I felt I was doing a great job until I had to do a markup change and jump through a lot hurdles to make it happen. In my recent projects, I've starting using the HTML Template IT extension in PEAR, and its made things a lot easier.

By way of example, he gives code blocks - one showing an example template and the other how to populate it with your own data. You can get more information on the extension from it's PEAR page.

I was curious how this works, as it seemed pretty different from previous similar libraries (PDFLib, FPDF), that offered a programmatic API to generate PDF DOMs instead of a markup language.

They describe how it works, what's included with the download and how it uses output buffering to get the job done as well as a few updates and further tips on its usage.