Thanks to Zend, the CodeWalkers Contest has really been taking off. They have a new contest this morning - This new contest challenges you to create a program that will automatically play a game of Klondike. They give you the rules and everything that you need to follow (since there are variations of Klondike), but overall, it seems pretty simple. So, jump on in and get started on it!

Also today, there's all sorts of PHP-related articles over on Evolt.org. First off, there'a piece on Using MySQL and PHP to Present Excel Spreadsheets. Basically, this one shows you how to grab all the content from your MySQL database with PHP, format it, and make it Excel compatible and formatted. It's a pretty neat little script really, and can come in handy if you deal with a lot of numbers each day in your database (like the example, with inventory and sales). Imagine setting up a script where your sales people could grab the info they needed and have is save as an Excel document - what a load off of you.
Another article from Evolt.org this morning is the second part in the Creating a login script with PHP 4 series. In the first part of this series, showed you some of the basics about making the script and how to set it all up, but this one covers better coding, a user database, sign-up script, login/logout scripts and a little script we will use to check a user's login status. They do use the PEAR stuff to access thier database, but other than that, the scripts they provide are all home-grown. They give you the code, but it's up to you to get it all working together on your site and with your layout.
And, lastly from Evolt.org, they have a piece about the Storage and re-use of images using PHP/GD. Basically what they show here is a few scripts that will help you automate uploads, searches, and publishing your images on your website. This could be quite useful if you have a lot of images on your site that just seem to be getting out of control. They suggest the use of a database to help you track and store the filenames and alt-tag values for your images. This first part just shows you how to get it all set up and insert the information. The retreival comes later....in the next part.