Welcome back to this series of articles which teach you how to localize your PHP applications using gettext and its PHP extension. In Part 1 you took your first steps towards towards this by installing gettext and Poedit, creating a translation file, and writing a Hello World script. In this part you'll lean about each of the function used in the script, and dive more into the gettext library and its usage.

The explain some of the naming conventions gettext uses for things (like "domains" and "codeset") as well as the shorthand "_()" you can use to retrieve translated values. There's also a look at supporting multiple locales via multiple directories of .po and .mo files.

This was a very social event from day one, warm and funny with a horde of geeks trying to mix with "normal people" (yes, that can happen if you attend the PHPNW conference, so try not to miss it next year). The best thing about PHP conferences is knowledge-sharing; you won't leave without a hundred different thoughts and ideas of how to do things better. Once again - definitely a good time, both personally and professionally. If you weren't there, you missed out!

The sessions he specifically mentions include the "Security" talk from Arne Blankerts, "Maintainable Applications in PHP Using Components" by Stuart Herbert, "PHP Extensions, why and what?" by Derick Rethans and "Acceptance & Integration Testing Using Behat" from Ben Waine.

So, dear readers, I received some nice emails and comments from those you have used Zend_Service_Audioscrobbler, along with having a nice email conversation with Wil Sinclair from Zend.

He still wants to "rip things up and start over", but has decided on a slightly different route - mapping the older function calls to the new ones via a __call catch and including a message stating that the older function call would be deprecated.

I decided to clarify and also explain some of my thoughts and ideas that an e-commerce framework should hold. These thoughts and ideas may be a little rough around the edges but I wanted to give a definition to the meaning of what I feel a framework is in this case as well as items that would potentially be a part of this framework.

Some of his requirements are things like reusable design, useful/easy to use components, functionality for both payment processing and courier handling as well as a catalog system to help manage items.

A nice feature that I first noticed as being received positively by the Internet community is the auto-complete feature in Gmail. [...] The next example will show you how to do the same thing - although it's not quite as in-depth as the Gmail solution.

They start with the CSS and Javascript to make the application work, including a simple XMLHttpRequest object for the Ajax connection. The "autocomplete" function is called via an onKeyPress event in the form on the page, grabbing the content and firing off a request to the backend script. The also include a series of screenshots that show the different steps of the process from entering the information down to outputting the results.

In my previous post on this topic I described the method we used to convert a legacy MySQL PHP database to a Rails conformant PostgreSQL hosted version. In this article I will tell a bit about how we converted the HTML of the application to Rails layout templates and partials.

It's a quickpost this time showing how to extract the rendered HTML from the page's output, writing out some of the business logic, and a mention of test driven development versus write test after developing methods.

These two sample feeds are loosely based on some of the feeds supplied by Independent Online. Note that unlike last month's simplified example, each article item has a publication date. We'll call the two feeds africa.rss and southafrica.rss.

They give the contents of the feeds to be parsed and what the info (as parsed by the code from the previous article) spit out the other side would look like. They also give the schema for the database table you can push all of the content into to store it. The rest of the article is the code listing to get this system working (including the code to parse the feed itself).

Provided that you understand the basic concepts of the adapter pattern, in this final tutorial, I'll show you how to use it in conjunction with the "DirectoryIterator" class, bundled with PHP 5, and with a couple of MySQL wrappers as well.

They jump right in (as was said, assuming you read the previous article) to using the directory iterators and the adapters together to make a class that gets information about the files in a directory. They take this and show a sample use that's then transformed into a class capable of using the same logic on MySQL results.

Taking into account the group of characteristics that I mentioned [a few lines above], in this second tutorial of the series, I'll be taking a look at some of them. This will give you a clearer idea of how to use them as part of your existing and -- why not? -- future PHP applications.

They take a look at the hows and whys of working with the unbuffered queries and well as some examples - counting rows and fields in a database table and looking at the use of more "row-processing methods" to get different sorts of data out.

In part one, they talk about things where all good projects should start - with the planning and what it will take to get the project done. This includes the structure of the application, the usability, and the extensions you'll want to use.

Part two goes a step further into the planning stage by looking specifically at the design and usability of the application. They start with the base HTML and add some styling and images to make it easier to use.