As always, Zend is here with their latest Weekly Update on the PHP front. They mention the security update from this past week, a note about some mailing list problems (messages not getting through), and some neat new flags that allow for encryption between the MySQL client (script) and server.

Over on DevArticles this morning, they have a groovy little article that's an Introduction to PEAR. For those that are either just starting out or haven't really used PEAR before - PEAR is a framework and distribution for reusable PHP components. It is a set of packages (integrated classes) that have been cleverly designed to abstract most of the underlying work that is involved with several tasks including working with databases, logging, networking, XML and the file system, amongst others. So, basically, someone's already done some of the work for you on some things, you just need to use it.
They focus mainly on the PEAR::DB package and how to use it with MySQL. PEAR makes it a snap to connect to your database and get the info you need. Personally, though - I think you should know how to do it the normal way too (just in case).

Last, but not least this morning, Evolt has a new article posted about Using custom tags to ease content management. This is for those people out there (you know who you are) that want to manage content but don't want to know anything except English (heh). It's something I've worked with before, but never found a good way to really do it without just remaking some of the HTML tags. One note though, the sample code they provide is in Java, but the idea is the main point here.