Basically, this allows us to have one piece of code to trigger an event and to have one or more listeners listening to this event. When the event gets triggered, the listeners are called and then we can do *something*, like caching or logging. Logging or caching. [...] See, that's my problem. All the event examples stop at logging and caching. Truly there must be some other example for which this event stuff can be used for.

In his example code, he's used the EventManager in one of his models to add listeners to validate the post and "slugify" the post's title for use on the URL. You can find his code on github if you're interested in the full implementation.

At the moment he placed the Idea in my head that i want my testsuite to run every time a file changes anyway, let someone else figure out how that is triggered. Well, someone did figure that out, thank you. It's called "PyWatch" and is a simple python script that monitors files for changes and executes a script if one has changed.

Obviously you wouldn't want to keep this going for larger code bases (the potential for overlap is horrible) but it could be quite useful when doing test-driven development to save yourself some hassle at the outset. He includes the commands you'll need to get things running and a simple PHP script that points the PyWatch instance to the correct files.

Many of you already know that managing session is a critical task for web applications, specially when you want to avoid I/O hop and also a significant load over your database by writing a custom session handler. [...] This is why a central session manager is very important for your application to scale.

He walks you through the whole process - installation, setting up memcached instances and getting the extension installed and working with your PHP installation. By adding two lines to your php.ini file, the sessions can quickly and easily be stored in memcache instead of on the local server.

If you're looking for an easy way to output your data from a PHP script into a Excel file, you've got to check out this script which I came across at the PHP Classes site. What this script essentially does is to implement a stream handler interface to write Microsoft Excel spreadsheet files.

Code snippets are included showing how to structure the data for the import and how to push that generated Excel file out to the user's waiting client.

As you may know, PHPExcel is built using an extensible model, supporting different input and output formats. The PHPExcel core class library features a spreadsheet engine, which is supported by IReader and IWriter instances used for reading and writing a spreadsheet to/from a file. Currently, PHPExcel supports writers for Excel2007, Excel5 (Excel 97+), CSV, HTML and PDF. Wouldnt it be nice if we could use PHPExcel to store a spreadsheet on Google Documents? Let's combine some technologies.

The two technologies in question are a standard install of the PHPExcel library and the Zend Framework (with its Zend_Gdata component). Using the component, a save() method is created and hooked into the IWriter interface of PHPExcel. When this save method is called, the Zend_Gdata component connects to the Documents service and uploads the resulting information for the account you supply.

A nice "hidden" feature that Textmate has, is to check the syntax of the php files you are writing, and display a popup with the result. [...] Each time you save, a syntax check will be done, and a popup will show you the result

You'll need to edit the PHP bundle slightly to get things working, but that's as easy as going through the UI and changing a drop-down value to activate the check. You'll need to have a php binary where the editor can use it, but most OS X installs will have that in place anyway. Check out this image to see the end result.

One of the most annoying things on the Internet for me is when I click on a link to an Adobe PDF file. For me this is annoying to the extreme because the PDF file is openened directly in your browser because of the Adobe PDF Plugin that almost all browsers have installed. [...] For me an ideal solution would be to offer me choices.

His solution uses mod_rewrite in an .htaccess file to push the visitor to a PHP file. This file grabs the filename they want and pulls in the content, pushing it back out the other side with the "attachment" header that forces a request box on the browser.

Just got bitten by this one when updating to the latest version of CakePHP. If you use code [checking to see if the return from a save() is true] in your app, you're in for a surprise. Because as of revision 5895 Model::save() now returns Model::data on success if its not empty.

He notes that most developers don't seem to do it this way, but it tripped him up enough to where he wanted to share it with the CakePHP community so they'd know. Check out the comments on the post for other issues that might be caused by the change.

mysqlnd saves memory. It consumes half as much memory as libmysql. This is what we have been convinced of. This is what we taught you. Then I tried to test it and made Andrey get nervous for a few hours'¦ Meanwhile he is fine again and we can announce: mysqlnd saves memory, not only in theory, we tested it - we can proof it, can we?

The proof comes in the form of a few "tricks" and some of the settings that the software can use to optimize buffer sizes. Benchmarks (and the code to run them) are also included to show what the differences are between mysqlnd and libmysql.

Now I've written actions like the one above in the past as well. It's just that I've not had many MySql errors since I've switched to CakePHP. The Model class usually handles all the DB operations flawlessly and it's probably been over a year that I've written a custom MySql statement in my code somewhere. However, even CakePHP or, what's more likely, the database can fail or deny operations.

He shows some code snippets of what he sees as less beautiful versions of database insertion code, methods that either don't check the response/errors or make a messy job of it. His solution works by returning the result into a switch statement to check the results and handling it there (versus a series of ifs). There's a class you'll need to make it work (Common), but he shows how to use it and creates a simple "add" example with it and a new Controller to handle the request.