Well, I'm back home and back on the beat, so here's the news for today:
For those out there that love the PEAR package that comes with PHP and want to keep on top of all of the latest advances in the libraries that it is providing, check out the PEAR Weekly News. There's not a way to subscribe to it (yet) so I believe you'll have to visit this page to view the information - but what a load of info it is. They detail all of the new changes and discussions for PEAR modules that are happening at the moment. I think this is great that they're doing this (a la Zend's Weekly Summmary), and I know it will help PHP developers get more in-tune with how PEAR is developing and what's in it that they can use. (Thanks to PHPEverywhere for the link)

Just a few things that were missed from Zend.com and I thought you might like to know about. They have two new books in their "Publisher's Corner": Professional PHP4 XML and Programming PHP (Rasmus's book) - and, of course, both are reviewed for your perusal.
Also from Zend, they had the latest Weekly Summary for last week. There's mainly just some small mentions in this one and some good suggestions that might help more with the command-line PHP that is becoming more and more popular.

Over on Builder.com they have an article posted called Six MySQL/PHP functions to streamline development. It looks like most of these functions that they give you are just simple checks that you can do against a MySQL database and various ways that you can get the result set from your query (HTML, XML, plain text). These are practically musts in any databse library, and I do find myself using the ones that I have over and over again to parse the results that I get from my queries. The XML example is nice and could be used pretty effectively with an XML-RPC kind of thing for a website.

I don't know the number of people that have emailed me or asked me in #php about a login system for their website using PHP and MySQL. Well, the wait is over and it's DevArticles.com to the rescue. Their latest article, PHP, MySQL and Authentication 101, shows you how to creat just such a login system. They not only show you one kind of authentication, but two - HTTP and Form auth. The HTTP authentication is the kind built into the HTTP protocol and uses the popup box to get the username and password. The Form Authentication just uses a standard web form and sessions to keep the user logged into the site. Most people opt for the second one - it's usually just simpler to implement and is a bit more transparent for the user coming into the site.