Danne Lundqvist has a new post where he shares a bit of code he's written to "come to grips" with an existing XML structure.

Very often I find myself writing input filters for large XML files using PHP. Common enough task; and PHP offer a great variety of tools to do this effectively depending on the situation. Unfortunately, almost as common is the lack of documentation for the aforementioned XML files. [...] I have looked around for a simple tool but I didn't really find a tool that gave me the quick and dirty overview I wanted. A year or so ago I finally wrote a small PHP class to analyze large XML files.

He includes an example XML file, the HTML output of the parsing and a sample of how to use the class to parse and output the XML structure, complete with some CSS.

On Dzone.com there's a book review from Ivan Ilijasic covering a recently released title from Packt Publishing, the "PHP Ajax Cookbook" (by Milan Sedliak, Rajesh Jeba R. Anbiah and Roshan Bhattarai). His review gives a "one minute bottom line" about the book and its contents.

I've been in PHP development for more than 10 years and this book is really useful material. I could recommend it to beginners and experienced developers. From my point of view, there are three types of developer books - complete byte-to-byte fat books, introduction books and cookbooks. I want my cookbook to have useful and simple to use recipes. This book fulfilled my expectations.

He mentions some of the topics that the book covers including javascript libraries and frameworks (mostly jQuery) and recipes for things like form validation, dynamic content, pagination and drag and drop functionality. He also points out some coverage of testing and debugging content as well as web service "mashups" and mobile app development.

On PHPMaster.com today there's a new tutorial showing how to do some form validation using some basic PHP (no external libraries or tools here). This is a beginner level tutorial to help you get familiar with the concepts behind doing validation (and

In this article you'll construct and validate a simple form using HTML and PHP. The form is created using HTML and validation and processing of the form's contents is done with PHP. The goal is to teach you some basic HTML form elements and how their data is accessible to you in your PHP scripts.

They start with the form itself, a basic setup with various kinds of fields - text, select, radio and a checkbox. Both the HTML markup and the PHP to do the validation is included. They check for things like "not empty", "must select one" and optional fields. Be sure to read the comments for some good tips on filtering the form's input too.

In this new tutorial Smashing Magazine shows you how to create a mini "Christmas List" application with PHP, HTML and CSS (and a little bit of database help) to display a list of what you or your family wants this holiday.

'Tis the season to be jolly, and how much jollier could we make it than with a helpful Christmas wish list crafted for your family to ensure that you get maximum presentage this holiday? In this article, we will focus on creating a very simple system that allows you to add gift ideas to a Web page, and for your family (or whoever) to view the list.

They walk you through the setup of the basic PHP file structure, the HTML template for the list output, CSS to make it look nice and the actual PHP backend - working with a MySQL database to pull out product information and use a simple login method.

In a new tutorial from PHPMaster.com Jason Pasnikowski takes a look at sending emails with PHP - an introduction to what the language offers and how it can be used to send an HTML version.

In most cases your installation of PHP will be capable of sending emails. If you are using a shared host, or if you installed PHP using a package management system like apt-get, more than likely you're all set. You'll really only need to worry about extra configuration if you're compiling PHP from source or if you're running it on Windows. In either case, there are plenty of resources available online to help you out. Because that's all beyond the scope of this article, I'll assume you're set. If not, Google will be your friend.

He starts with a simple example using the mail function but quickly moves on to sending a multi-part email with an attached zip file and HTML content. He includes the all code you'll need and explains each part in detail so you'll know exactly what's going on.

Script-Tutorials.com has a new article posted today showing you how to combine PHP, some CSS, a dash of SQL and some HTML (oh, and jQuery) to create your own commenting system from scratch that could be used anywhere from a simple blog to a more complex social site.

Today I prepared new interesting article - I will tell how you can create own commenting system (AJAX) for your items (any units at your website) with PHP. For our demonstration - I prepared two SQL tables: first table will keep records of our items. It contain several fields: title, description, time of adding and comments count. Another table will keep records of comments. We will use jQuery too (for better interface behavior). One of features will spam protection (we can post no more than one comment every 10 minutes)!

The tutorial includes all of the code, markup and styling you'll need to make the system work. If you'd like to get right into the code you can download it as a package or you can try out their demo.

In a new tutorial from NetTuts.com today they show you how to combine a CodeIgniter-based backend and a jQuery frontend to make a simple Ajax data grid of data pulled from a database.

In this lesson, we will create a CodeIgniter library that allows us to generate data grids automatically for managing any database table. I'll explain each step required to create this class; so you'll likely learn some new OOP techniques/concepts in the process! As a bonus, we'll proceed to write some jQuery code that will enable a user to update the data grid's content without having to wait for a page refresh.

The tutorial's broken up into a few different steps, each complete with descriptions and plenty of code ready for cut-and-paste:

• Build a Data Grid Generator Class (a helper in PHP)
• Testing the Datagrid Helper Class with a CodeIgniter Controller
• Implementing Ajax (jQuery to the Rescue!)
• Check All or Nothing!

You can also download the source for all of the scripts if you'd like to dive right into the code.

New from NetTuts.com today there's a tutorial for those using the CodeIgniter framework for their application. It shows how to upload files with Ajax and a simple form (with jQuery and AjaxFileUpload).

Uploading files asnychronously can be a pain at the best of times, but when coupled with CodeIgniter, it can be a particularly frustrating experience. I finally found a way that not only works consistently, but keeps to the MVC pattern.

They help you create a database table to store the file information in (filename and title), make the controller to handle the request and build the view (with the form). Also included is the javascript you'll need to get the AjaxFileUpload script working for your file upload field. They extend the controller to handle the file upload and make a model to handle the upload and fetching of file information. The tutorial is finished off with a simple "delete" action to remove any file that's been uploaded.

On PHPBuilder.com today there's a new tutorial from Vojislav Janjic about using a simple DOM parser in PHP to edit the markup even if it's not correctly W3C-formatted - the Simple HTML DOM Parser

Simple HTML DOM parser is a PHP 5+ class which helps you manipulate HTML elements. The class is not limited to valid HTML; it can also work with HTML code that did not pass W3C validation. Document objects can be found using selectors, similar to those in jQuery. You can find elements by ids, classes, tags, and much more. DOM elements can also be added, deleted or altered.

They help you get started using the parser, passing in the HTML content to be handled (either directly via a string or loading a file) and locating elements in the document either by ID, class or tag. Selectors similar to those in CSS are available. Finally, they show how to find an object and update its contents, either by adding more HTML inside or by appending a new object after it.

On PHPBuilder.com today there's a new post from Vojislav Janjic with three methods (sans-framework) that you can use to create a multilingual website - some a bit easier to maintain than others.

Fast internet growth has brought many opportunities in the global market. Businesses can reach their customers across many countries, and information sharing is not limited to a local area or country anymore. This is why there is an increasing tendency for multilingual websites. By having a website in multiple languages, you can target local markets more easily. Also, it is more convenient to use a website in your native language.

His three methods are all relatively simple, but they all have their good and bad points - making separate HTML/views for each language, creating XML files with different versions of the content or storing the translations in a MySQL database. He gives quick code snippets showing how to implement each of them, some basing the language on a cookie value, others on a GET variable passed to the page.