Lorna Mitchell notes that PHPNW tickets are on sale and can be purchased on the PHPNW conference website.

This is a conference aimed at bringing together and promoting the amazing wealth of local talent and activity in PHP within the North West and wider area. The schedule is online already and tickets are priced at a very reasonable and credit-crunch-friendly £50 (with discounts for students and OAPs).

The PHPNW conference is happening November 22nd and includes talks from speakers like Rob Allen, Derick Rethans and Adrian Hardy.

WebReference.com has the second part of their CakePHP introductory series posted, this time focusing on the actions in the controllers.

They talk (briefly) about how the call to the page is passed off to the controller's action and how you can get more information into it via POSTed values.

There's also a look at redirection, from action to action in a controller (or even to another one) and a look at a very handy method of sharing functions between the child controllers - a "master" parent controller (in their case, AppController).

At the end, they throw in a bit about components - module and reusable bits of functionality that can be passed around from controller to controller, action to action.

This series of articles are excerpts from the Packt book CakePHP Application Development.

Spam is a constant burden for anyone on the web, be it through email or via something like comments on a website. The NETTUTS site can't help so much with the first one, but they've come up with a new tutorial that can help with the second with a few methods.

Deciding on the best method of spam prevention on your blogs, forums, or even contact forms can be difficult. In this article we will take a look at a service called Akismet and how it can help. We will also look at why some other methods of fighting spam fail.

They give a few ways to waylay the spammers including:

• Disallowing multiple consecutive submissions
• Keyword Blacklist
• CAPTCHA
• and a service called Akismet

They go into a bit more detail on this last one, even going so far as to included code (this class) and examples of how to let the Akismet service see if something is spam or not. Links to libraries for other languages are included too.

Using the Zend_Pdf component of the Zend Framework Jani Hartikainen has created a simple way to make a PDF generator class that uses templates and content arrays/XML to create the new files.

There are some expensive libraries that you can use to generate PDF files...but why bother with them, when there are good free alternatives like Zend_Pdf? [...] Since this is a quite repetitive task, let's also create a PDF generator class to help us. In case you don't have Zend_Pdf, just download Zend Framework to get it.

He shows how to set it up to work with basic PHP arrays to pull the content from as well as an XML structure with the same sort of information. You can download his class here.

In this new post Jeremy Johnstone looks at creating a class to add that's missing from the basic datatype set of the language - enums.

I stumbled across a blog post on how to implement Enums in PHP via userland code written by Jonathan Hohle. I liked the concept he had, but the implementation was a bit unappealing because it used eval() among other more minor issues. You shouldn't need to generate Enums at runtime, so I took that as a challenge to find a way to do it at compile time, thus making the code much more efficient.

His enums would support type hinting and would, ideally, be iterable. He gives the code he's worked up - a base class, another than extends it to make a basic enum structure and some handy changes to support comparisons. A few more changes (and a few other extended classes later) he has some pretty well functioning enums that can even bee iterated through.

• Console_CommandLine 1.0.3
• Services_Trackback 0.6.2
• Crypt_CBC 1.0.0
• Services_Atlassian_Crowd 0.9.3
• Net_Vpopmaild 0.3.2

• Job Posting: Software International (Recuriter) Seeks Sr. PHP Developer (Toronto, Canada)
• Job Posting: White October Ltd Seeks Technical Project Manager (Oxford, UK)
• Job Posting: NacreData L.L.C. Seeks PHP Developers (Telecommute, Contract)

On the Solar blog Paul Jones has posted about a new database adapter they included in the latest Solar framework release - one that lets you connect to master/slave MySQL setups.

With Solar, you connect to SQL databases using the Solar_Sql factory class, which returns a Solar_Sql_Adapter class for you. Most developers only need to connect to a single MySQL server. [...] However, when you get into a situation where you need to scale up, you might need a replicated MySQL database setup. In such cases, there is one "master" server that handles reads and writes, and there are one or more "slave" servers that are read-only.

The Solar_Sql_Adapter_MysqlReplicated adapter does all of the switching for you, making it as simple as dropping it in and changing your configuration to point to the master and slave servers (examples included).

The NETTUTs site has a new tutorial posted today with instruction of how to create a simple shoutbox-style mini-app for your site.

In this tutorial, we will be creating a basic 'Shoutbox' system with PHP. Aimed at beginners to PHP development, this allows you to get your feet wet working with databases before moving on to some of the more advanced PHP tutorials here at NETTUTS.

You provide the environment and they provide everything else - the code, the database structure and an explanation of how they all fit together. There's even a demo of the end result in action.

Mohammed Berdai has a quick tutorial posted about getting a full installation of PostgreSQL and phpPgAdmin up and working in an XAMPP environment.

XAMPP is an easy to install Apache distribution containing MySQL, PHP and Perl, plus many additional modules. The whole package is well integrated and can save a lot of time and hassle for the inexperienced web developer. [...] phpPgAdmin is a web-based administration tool for PostgreSQL, exactly as phpMyAdmin for MySQL.

It's a simple three step process (with a few sub-steps inside each) to get the system up and running - basically: install XAMPP, install PostgreSQL and install phpPgAdmin.