We're happy to announce the upcoming release of php|architect's Guide to Programming Magento, the first comprehensive guide for developers who want to learn more about the Magento e-commerce platform.

The book, by Mark Kimsal shows you how to install and successfully deploy a Magento installation on your website. The preorder is available right now for a 15% discount and the full PDF version will be released on May 15th, 2008 (print on May 31st). Check out the product page for more information and to reserve your copy today.

Again a somewhat belated announcement: PHP in Action is in print. [...] Strenuously objective as always, I have to say that it's a pretty good book. I've had to read it about fifteen times already, and I still sort of enjoyed it the last time.

You can get more information on the book from its page on the Manning Publishing website as well as purchase a copy - $39.99 USD for the print version (plus PDF ebook) or just $20.00 USD for the PDF ebook by itself.

Manning Publications has released the book PHP In Action as ebook in PDF format. I wrote it with help from my co-authors Marcus Baker and Chris Shiflett. The print version is due out June 30.

You can order both the ebook only or a combo of the ebook plus the print version directly from Manning.

Many PHP examples out there are designed for a linux/unix operating system. I am going to give some examples of some interesting functionality that only works with php running in a windows environment (IIS or apache).

Here's the list:

• Eject the CD-ROM
• Read and write from/to the registry
• Register and un-register phpscripts as a windows service
• Print pages/data
• List the current system processes

Each item has sample code and a simple explanation to get you started using it.

Essentially, what I plan to demonstrate here is how this pattern can be used to build different versions of a given web document on the fly, either for display on a typical computer monitor, or for printing.

This involves the creation of a class to define the styles for both sides - print and screen - and a class that will figure out which of these needs to be applied.

The web site I currently work on is going to be for the hotel where my step father is the manager of. One of the things that is going to be an important 'feature' for the site, is to make it printer friendly.

Since the new site has a very clean markup, I thought about simply creating an additonal style sheet for the media type "print". However, after thinking about it a little bit more today, I came to to the conclusion that I'm dealing with WYSIWYG visitors. So I decided to get a little fancier, and to create a PrintController, which would output printable versions of any site requested by /print/*

He gives the code for the controller and for the easy to use link to go over to the "printable version" of each page, hiding the none-printable information from the browser.

The tool takes in whatever text input you have and performs operations on it. For example, paste in some HTML and hit the button to submit it and out the other side pops HTML formatted to echo in PHP (using print). There are other options on the tool - the ability to use printf and echo along with print, to add in newlines, and to add parenthesis (depending on your preference).

It's nothing overly impressive, but if you have a large block of HTML that you need to work with, you might check into it...]]> Tue, 24 Jan 2006 07:11:39 -0600