The Community Choice Awards are over! The SourceForge.net 2007 Community Choice Awards provided you an opportunity to recognize projects that stand taller than the rest. Everybody got to vote, and everybody's vote counted equally. The winning projects, each with superlative quality, productivity, and ingenuity, represent the cream of the crop on SourceForge.net.

phpBB made the cut in the "Best Project for Communications" category and phpMyAdmin won in the "Best Tool or Utility for SysAdmins". Congratulations to both projects on your achievement!

Earlier this week, I suggested PHP could be multithreaded. The sample I provided was very simple and at least one reader quickly wondered how to communicate with threads. If you haven't already, take a look at part 1 to get some basic information about threads in PHP.

It took a bit longer to get that part working that simple threads, but as of now, I have a functional prototype of an HVAC thread.

The post is broken up into five different files to make things work:

• an overall class for the main functionality (their example of running the heater or AC)
• a class to create and set up a thread
• a "thready utility" class to handle the response from a thread
• a thread library to handle creation/interaction/etc
• the example file of the system in use

CSVtoXLS is a utility that is used to convert CSV data into business class XLS spreadsheet files, and is compatible with OpenOffice 2.0 Calc and Excel 2000. The Spreadsheet_Excel_Writer module provides for a high level of formatting and also offers formulas. CSVtoXLS.php takes advantage of those features and provides meaningful formatting and a simple Column SUM is automatically generated at the bottom of any Decimal Column.

The utility is simple to use - they give you the command to execute and how to format your CVS data for optimal results. There's also some simple installation steps and a sample test script to get you started.

Heatmap suddenly became popular when webmasters want to know where did the user click or look at. Websites like Crazy Egg, provides a heatmap generation system for webmasters. But most heatmap costs more than average adsense supported website can earn, those sites need a alternative.

ClickHeat requires PHP (5.1.6 and higher) with GD enabled to work. The post includes a sample image to show you what the end result looks like.

Over the final two chapters of this tutorial, I'm going to guide you through the process of creating two real-world PHP applications. Not only will this introduce you to practical application development with PHP, but it will also give you an opportunity to try out all the theory you've imbibed over the past weeks.

The first application is fairly simple. It's a polling system for a web site, one which allows you to quickly measure what your visitors think about controversial issues.

They start with setting up the database to hold the votes - two simple tables, questions and answers. Then, it's on to the code - first displaying the form the users will vote with, then handling their response. Of course, what would a good application be without some kind of administrative utility to help manage and view the results - so they build one. It helps add/remove questions and check out the results of the polls.