About one year ago, I had to create animated GIFs as a preview of a video for a media portal. I recently stumbled upon the code I wrote and thought it was probably worth sharing. It makes a rather unconventional use of the SPL Iterators, proving how flexible they are.

His method combines Imagick, FFmpeg and a a Thumbnail_Extractor class that extends the SPL Iterator. The script runs through the frames of the movie file and allows you to define multiple places to pull thumbnails from. Complete code and output examples are included.

In the Day 0 post he just mentions arriving at the conference and getting things ready, but Day 1 sees him giving his "Future Deployment of PHP Applications" talk and his upcoming "Migration to PHP 5.1".

He also mentions videoing the presentation from today ("Deployment" talk) and is hoping to get a Flash video of the presentation up for all to see post-conference (a great idea for non-attendees).

You might have been in a situation before where you had a list of items in your database that needed to be output in a specific order. These items could be anything: perhaps a listing of your favourite movies or your favourite books. For whatever reason, you want them ordered in a custom way that can't be determined automatically (such as alphabetical).

This article covers the implementation of a system that lets you easily define the order of such a list.

They use the example of a movie listing to fill out the data items. They show you both sides of the setup - using Prototype and Scriptaculous to create effects/handle the Ajax, PHP to interface with the database, and a little CSS to make it all look nice. The end result is a list that saves its status from page load to page load, and can be modified just a simple click and drag.]]> Fri, 24 Feb 2006 13:17:49 -0600