In a new tutorial from the IBM developerWorks site starts off a new series looking at creating some games, from start to finish.

PHP is an easy-to-use, easy-to-learn, widely accessible programming language. It's well suited for developing simple scripts you can use to help you in all kinds of games. Whether you play simple pen-and-paper games by yourself, complex tabletop role-playing games with a group of people, or online games of any kind, this series will have something for you. Each article in this "30 game scripts you can write in PHP" series will cover 10 scripts in 300 words or less (3d10 stands for "roll three 10-sided dice") simple enough for even a beginning developer, but useful enough for a seasoned game player.

The ten scripts they walk you through are things like a die roller, a name generator, a deck builder/shuffler, a poker dealer and a crossword helper.

WebReference.com continues their series looking at user administration in content management systems. This time they look at the importance of user roles and some code to add to help manage them.

Although the operations are simple, it is vital that they be handled correctly. It is generally a poor principle to allow access to the mechanisms of a system rather than providing an interface through class methods. The latter approach ideally allows the creation of a robust interface that changes relatively infrequently, while details of implementation can be modified without affecting the rest of the system.

Their code includes methods to get all roles for a user, check to see which they are permitted to use, add a "permit" role and remove it back out. The tutorial is an excerpt from the Packt book PHP5 CMS Framework Development (Martin Brampton).

Douglas Clifton has put together a series of blog posts looking at several different types of categories that PHP applications and tools can fit into:

Rather than spending the time and effort to implement paging, I took another approach. And that was to get down to specifics. This was really a taxonomy problem, and the key was to break the page up into a top-level (general) category, and then divide the rest into sub-categories.

His series of articles covers:

• Frameworks
• Wikis
• Content Management Systems
• Debugging
• Blogware

The PHPro.org website has this new tutorial posted today - a step further into the would of OOP in PHP with a look at abstraction, hierarchies and polymorphism.

The PHP Object Oriented method of programming brings many exciting possibilities to application code. Many of the theories surrounding PHP Object Oriented code comes from some simple concepts. To the new comer, some of these concepts seem a little abstract, and with good reason. Abstraction is a key concept on Object Oriented code, but to the un-initiated, may seem rather vague.

Kevin looks at creating abstract classes as a foundation for types other classes can work from, overriding built in classes (like extending the DirectoryIterator to make a DirectoryReader class).

In a new article on the Hiveminds website, one of their columnists, Carl shares his skewed perception of PHP - mainly that it's just not a profession (like .NET is).

I have to say that I am more in agreement with this line of thinking now than I was a couple of years ago. Regardless of how many Facebooks and Diggs show up on the web PHP will always only be given the same importance as HTML or JavaScript. PHP is something that is part of a skill set not something that you can say you do and be taken seriously as a web programmer. This was true 3 years ago is true now and quite honestly will be the case for many more years

He provides some results to back up his assumption, but they seem a bit tainted by his Microsoft slant on things (popularity rankings of 51.5% for ASP.NET but only 6.0% for PHP). He favors Visual Studio for development and suggests that there are no commercial CMSes for PHP.

Here's what was popular in the PHP community one year ago today:

• Gergely Hodicska's Blog: What is new in PHP 5.3 - part 3: mysqlnd
• DeveloperTutorials.com: Upload Files to MySQL using PHP Tutorial
• KillerPHP.com: The Zend Framework: Writing Object-Oriented PHP with Ease
• Developer Tutorials: Introduction to PHP Programming
• Dennis Chung's Blog: Server Core + IIS7 + PHP + MySQL (and Wordpress)
• Make Me Pulse Blog: PHP 5 Design Pattern : Singleton
• Roy Ganor-Shwaartz's Blog: PDT Gets Smarty
• ProDevTips.com: Ajax, ZF and Smarty feed reader: part 3
• Web Development Blog: First steps within the Zend Framework
• Lorenzo Alberton's Blog: Book review: "PHP Oracle Web Development" by Yuli Vasiliev
• PHP Discovery Blog: Dangers of Remote Execution
• Alex Netkachov's Blog: Jamp! is Updated
• Zend Developer Zone: PHP Abstract Podcast Episode 26: PHP in Action
• Mindoop Blog: SEO Warning : Zend framework and duplicate content
• Jason Sweat's Blog: PHP Oracle Web Development (Review)

New on the Zend Developer Zone there's a tutorial written up by Wil Sinclair looking at building dynamic PDF files in PHP with help from Haru.

This incredible versatility also applies to the topic of today's article: the PDF, or Portable Document Format. Not content with just one, PHP actually comes with two different extensions that allow developers to dynamically generate PDF documents: the PDFlib extension, and the libHaru extension. Over the next few pages, I'm going to take a quick look at the Haru extension, providing you with a brief overview of its functions and demonstrating how you can use it in your PHP development.

The tutorial walks you through the installation of the extension and several examples of it in use - everything from simple text input out to text transformations, drawing shapes and adding annotations.

Jani Hartikainen has followed up on a post from David Otten about standard classes in PHP and how they provide the base for much of what the language does.

David Otton posted a short but thought-provoking post about stdClass, which many think is the "base class" all PHP classes automatically inherit from. I have to admit that I had this misconception as well. [...] This [difference in PHP from other OOP languages] presents some room for analysis in how things are handled in dynamic and static languages, and how those differences affect things...

Jani talks about dynamic and static typing in languages and how that effects the base types things are extended from as well as some of the benefits that having a standard base class affords developers.

The PHP Quebec conference has posted the official schedule for this year's conference (happening March 4-6th, 2009 in Montreal, Canada).

Speakers include Matthew Weier O'Phinney, Derick Rethans, Sara Golemon, Sebastian Bergmann and many more. Topics include software lifecycles, unit testing, extensions and PHP in the enterprise. Talks will be given in English and in French.

You can still register to save your spot for the event. Early Bird pricing comes in around $500 CAD and a regular ticket after that it's bumped up to $600.

• PHP Cat Nested Model Category Class
• ubNode
• ubData
• RC4 Cypher
• ubDate
• Relevant Search in MySQL
• classtailfile
• PHP Fancy Directory Browsing
• CSS
• Eyesis Data Grid Control
• vladzur Database
• MVC Like Modular Framework
• JS
• XML Parser (XML to array)
• Percent Russian Text Encoder