Starting off a new series on his blog Giorgio Sironi has posted two new tutorials looking at PHP design patterns - specifically the Abstract Factory and Builder patterns.

[This series will] touch the majority of the known design patterns, with a special look at their application in a php context. A running code sample will be provided for each part of this series, along with the theory and the terminology of each pattern.

In the Abstract Factory (or just Factory) post he includes a diagram of the pattern's relationship with other "participants" and has a Zend Framework-based code sample to create a simple WidgetHelper. In the second article he looks at the Builder pattern and how it can make creating instances of complex objects a bit easier. As before a diagram and code are included.

You can keep up with the rest of the posts in the series as they're added by following along here.