On PHPBuilder.com today there's a new tutorial walking you through the creation of a simple WordPress plugin that shows the latest YouTube video from your blog's channel.

Think of plugins as components where you put your functionality and widgets as components of your user interface. Building your own WordPress plugins and widgets will make your blog truly original, and all you need is basic PHP and HTML knowledge - and your imagination.

They help you get started with defining a few constants, registering the actions with WordPress, building the widget (with complete cut-and-paste-able code) and including it in your WordPress blog. You can download the complete source if you want to get started quickly.

In response to one of the constant claims about the Zend Framwork - that it's large and bloated - Juozas Kaziukenas tries to dispel three things that people use to reinforce this belief.

Zend Framework is always considered as being the slow/bloated one. I don't think this is right, so I decided to prove that it's not correct and in fact ZF is as good as other frameworks are. This post doesn't cover any benchmarks though; this is more like a architecture review and some misconceptions disproof.

He counters the following with a bit of logic that makes the points a bit more shaky than they first seem:

• Large installation footprint
• Unnecessary features
• Use more system resources

If you're still not convinced, he offers two other tips to help streamline your Zend Framework install - profiling to find the bottlenecks and using Zend_Application sparingly as it can be a bit of a resource problem.

On the EllisLabs site there's a recent post talking about some of the big changes that've happened to their development process surrounding CodeIgniter and its future version.

EllisLab today announces changes to our internal development processes, including dropping Subversion in favor of Mercurial and adopting Assembla as our agile software development management tool. Along with these changes, CodeIgniter 2.0 pre-release code is in development, and is now hosted at the Mercurial-focused social coding site BitBucket.

They also talk about their move to the Scrum method of software development and how this (and their change of version control system) can help the future of CodeIgniter (version 2.0) come even sonoer through contributed updates and bugfixes made much simpler through the features of BitBucket (similar to Github). If you'd like to contribute, you can follow the CodeIgniter project and get busy contributing back to this great framework.

A recent tutorial (screencast) has been posted to the ZendCasts.com site looking at creating custom Zend_Form elements when you need something more than just the usual, simple elements.

This video should help you build your own composite Zend_Form element. We'll be building a phone element. The phone element will have 3 textboxes, one for geographic location, area code and local code. In the following videos will add a custom cell phone validator and some ajax validation.

You can grab a copy of the source if you'd like to follow along or you can just look around the repository to find the source for this and other great lessons from the site.

As mentioned on Solar blog and a few other places on the web, the stable 1.0.0 version of the Solar PHP framework has been released, marking a significant milestone in the framework's development.

Yesterday, I announced the release of the 1.0.0 stable version of the Solar Framework for PHP on our mailing list. (I tagged the release four days ago on Monday, but wanted to time the announcement to go along with my Solar presentation at ConFoo.)

The Changelog for the release can be found here and some of the latest updates include improved CSRF features, named actions and optimized queries.

This stable release is the culmination of about five years of development effort, with important contributions from several others in the PHP community. My many thanks to everyone who helped make this release, and all the previous releases, better than I could have made it on my own.

On the Ibuildings techPortal they're posted the latest podcast in their Dutch PHP Conference 2009 sessions series - Boy Baukema's talk on why every PHP developer should love Javascript.

In this talk these and more comparisons will be drawn between the two languages. The main weaknesses and strengths of JavaScript will be discussed and compared to PHP. Examples will be given of closures and lambda functions in JavaScript and they will be compared to the implementation of these same features in the upcoming PHP 5.3. And through comparison the speaker will demonstrate that the two languages are quite similar.

To listen you can either use the in-page player or you can download the mp3 directly and listen offline at your leisure.

If you've been looking for a good way to get introduced to the latest version of the Zend Framework but didn't know where to start, you might grab a spot in this upcoming webinar from Zend about the Zend Framework 1.10.

Zend Framework 1.10 sports a ton of new features, as well as completely revamped online documentation. In this webinar, Matthew Weier O'Phinney, Framework Project Lead, and Ralph Schindler, Zend Framework Software Engineer, will present a synopsis of the new features, discuss the new online documentation system and how it's built, and answer your questions about the new release.

The webinar will be happening this coming Wednesday, March 17th, at 9am PST and will be happening via WebEx. Matthew Weier O'Phinney and Ralph Schindler will be talk about the new features, current functionality that was enhanced and will answer your burning questions. To reserve your spot, head over to the registration page and enter your info.

• Net_SMTP 1.4.2
• Mail_Mime 1.6.1
• HTML_QuickForm2 0.4.0
• OpenID 0.1.1
• Archive_Tar 1.3.6
• Services_Facebook 0.2.10
• Services_Facebook 0.2.11
• HTML_Template_IT 1.3.0
• pearweb_channelxml 1.15.1

Matthew Weier O'Phinney as a new post to his blog today looking at a few "do's" and "dont's" when it comes to working with module boostraps in your Zend Framework applications - an apparently somewhat confusing topic for several developers out there.

In Zend Framework 1.8.0, we added Zend_Application, which is intended to (a) formalize the bootstrapping process, and (b) make it re-usable. One aspect of it was to allow bootstrapping of individual application modules -- which are discrete collections of controllers, views, and models.

He talks briefly about why module boostraps are run on every request (getting into some detail on Zend_Application), how you can properly set up your boostrapping process and how you can use plugins to initialize only the things you might need and, as he openly admits, that there's just not a really good way to handle this sort of module funcionality.

Pablo Viquez has put together something that all of the Windows-based Zend Framework developers might find very useful during their next offline (or online, really) development session - a Windows Help file version of the Zend Framework manual.

As you might now, you can view and download the Zend Framework reference manual from the Zend Framework site and download it from the download section, however what I wanted was the Windows compiled version of it (CHM file). In order to get this version you need to compile the documentation, after running into some small issues, I manage to do it, and to save you some work.

He only had to fix an issue with one XML file to correct some escaping in the Zend_Feed_Writer.xml and zend.feed.writer.html files. You can download both the English CHM and the Spanish CHM files depending on your needs.