You've got your site all set up and working, and not you're looking to the future, wondering what might need to be done to make your site more "standards friendly". One thing that comes to mind is using XML for some of the content, making it easier to create, modify, and display the actual content behind your site. The only problem is, you've never parsed XML before and have no idea where to start! Well, this latest piece from DevShed might be just the ticket.

In Building XML Trees With PHP, they highlight a PHP class called XMLTree that they can use with the standard expat parser that just about every install of PHP should have (most of the later versions install it automatically). This class gives you an (almost) DOM kind of control over the XML documents, allowing you to add/remove/parse the contents of the XML docs on your site. They show you the sample code to create a new tree, add items to this tree, remove items, and grab the entire tree and drop it into whatever you might need (like an array). And, of course, they finish it out with a practical application to make use of what you've learned.