DevShed has started up a new series of tutorials today with this first part of their "helpers in PHP5" series. They look at some of the first steps into creating these helpers and the handy methods inside.

Despite its seeming simplicity, building helpers can be a pretty challenging process, particularly for beginners whom are just starting to implement the object-oriented paradigm in PHP 5. [...] I'm going to introduce you as gently as possible to creating different types of helpers, which hopefully will make you understand the basis of this process and encourage you to create your own.

They start off with a text helper that gives you methods to change newlines to <br> or <p> tags. They extend the class a bit more by adding in a few other methods - convert newlines to <div> tags, and uppercase/lowercase/uppercase the first letter in a string.