New from the Script-Tutorials.com site there's a guide to getting a modern looking animated login system working on your PHP application. It uses jQuery to do some of the "modern" bits when the user logs in.

Today we will continue PHP lessons, and our article will about creating modern php login system. Possible you already saw similar ways to display login forms, and today we will repeat this by self. In result - it will some small element in your page layout, and after clicking on it - will appear some area, where we will see some welcome message, login form and another useful information. All very user friendly. So, its time to try demo.

You can start with the live demo or grabbing the code in a package to investigate or you can follow along in the post - full code and styling are provided.

Lorenzo Alberton has posted a new item to his blog with a code snippet showing the combination of FFmpeg and features in PHP's SPL to make a GIF preview.

About one year ago, I had to create animated GIFs as a preview of a video for a media portal. I recently stumbled upon the code I wrote and thought it was probably worth sharing. It makes a rather unconventional use of the SPL Iterators, proving how flexible they are.

His method combines Imagick, FFmpeg and a a Thumbnail_Extractor class that extends the SPL Iterator. The script runs through the frames of the movie file and allows you to define multiple places to pull thumbnails from. Complete code and output examples are included.

At the request of another developer, Mikko Koppanen has written up a post for his blog today showing how to create animated GIFs in PHP with Imagick.

Today's example was requested by a user called Devo. This example illustrates making an animated GIF image by creating the frames from scratch. It's been so long since I've really drawn anything so I decided to use text as the base for this animation.

His example ends up as a string ("Hello World") that's animated to show one more letter at a time as each frame loads.

On the Technobabbler blog, there's a quick look at their creation of a (weather) radar loop they could view on their cell phone.

I used the great mobile site from the NWS, but it still didn't give me the effect I wanted. And hey, I'm already filling a database with weather observations and radar images! So I decided to see what it would take to make a custom radar loop that I could get to at any given moment. The Treo can display animated gif files, so that seemed like the most efficient solution. The question is, how do we create an animated gif using PHP?

To answer the question, he found this script ("GIF images into animated GIF with native PHP class") and used it to create a simple script to grab the GIF images and combine them into a single animated image suitable for viewing in any browser. He includes the script used to generate it as well as an example of the result and how it looks on the phone.