Well, it looks almost like the folks over on DevShed have gone PHP-crazy. They have two new articles this morning, both dealing with two different PHP topics. The first one, User Authentication With Apache And PHP, deals with working together with Apache to authenticate your users on different pages. They use an .htaccess and .htpasswd file to actually store the information (along with an encrypted password) for easy access, but use PHP to do the login and sessions to keep that login constant. As always, they give you all the code that you could possibly need to make this thing work...they even follow up the .htaccess part with database validation and the strangly bizarre socket-based validation. This last one could be kinda neat for web-based apps that require getting info from a remote server (P2P, messaging, etc).

Their second article is something that, while there are tons of them out there, most of these are overbearing and have way too much in them for the ordinary users. That's right, I'm looking at you PHPNuke. Building A Quick-And-Dirty PHP/MySQL Publishing System talks more about a general "content publishing" system than a weblog similar to PHPNuke though. They give the example here of a press release system. They give you the table structure that they've broken things down into and the key elements of a press release that need to be taken care of. It's a pretty simple system, using several of the PEAR functions to get things done (especially with the database). In the later part of the article they even give you the scripts to add/edit/delete these press releases so that you can manage them quickly and easily.

Also, on a side note this morning - apparently there's an independent group doing a review of PHP to check it for potential problems, mainly as it deals with OpenBSD. They hope to provide a more stable, better PHP for the world to use - free from bugs and potential security risks. (Thanks to PHPEverywhere for the link)