On DZone.com there's a new post from Giorgio Sironi with some of his tips for PHP developers that want to use VIM in their development - some handy tricks to help make you a more effective developer.

In the case of PHP development, you'll need to add some configuration and plugins to speed up your activities. Most of the responsibilities of an IDE - like testing and version control - are outsourced to the terminal while running Vim; however, there are some tweaks that make writing and editing code faster, along with aiding in discovery classes and methods in a PHP codebase.

He includes settings for your .vimrc to detect and load the right PHP functionality, using Command-T, functionality for autocompletion and the snipMate plugin for managing and using reusable code snippets.

In this new tutorial from Script-Tutorials.com they show you how to combine PHP, jQuery, MySQL and XML to create an auto-complete box with drop-down suggestions.

Today I have new article for PHP. I will tell you about implementation autocomplete for your sites. Data can be located in different sources - directly in the JS code, in the database, and even in the XML file.

All of the code and markup you'll need is included - the HTML for the page containing the field, CSS to style it, the Javascript (jQuery) to make the field work and the SQL/PHP/XML for the backend. You can check out a live demo of the script in action here or download the source in a single package and get started.

In a new post today Martin Sikora has points out a Google Chrome extension he's created that lets you view some of the basics of the PHP manual without leaving the browser.

Finally, I released my extension for Google Chrome called PHP Ninja Manual (Ninja - because I like Avinash Kaushik'sblog and he always call people who are very skilled in something as "Ninjas"). I was always lazy to open PHP documentation every time I had to look at some method definition and its parameters so I made this extension which is actually preparsed official PHP manual available instantly in a popup window.

You can see a screenshot of it in action here including the auto-complete searching and the example of the function's summary details. If you try it out and have feedback, go over to the forum for it and leave your comments.

In this new post to his blog Gonzalo Ayuso looks at building an ORM (don't worry, he recommends something like Doctrine first) as an exercise to understand how they're constructed and how one could fit his goals.

What's the motivation for me to build this ORM? The answer is a bit ambiguous. I like SQL. It allows us to speak with the database in a very easy way. [...] So the idea I figured out was to create a set of classes based on my tables, in a similar way than traditional ORMs to help me to autocomplete the fields and table names.

He creates a simple example with a "test" table with three columns with a mapped class (in the "Orm" namespace) that will allow IDEs to follow down the path to fetch the data from the "id", "field1" and "field3" columns. The complete code listing for his example is at the end of the post - PHP 5.3 friendly, of course. Some trigger and scaffolding examples are also included.

New from ZendCasts.com today there's a new screencast taking their integration of jQuery with the Zend Framework to the next level - creating an autocomplete control.

In the last video, I discussed ZendX_JQuery integration. Now we're going to take it a step further by developing our own jQuery autocomplete control, using a country list, PHP 5.3 and anonymous functions.

You can watch the video via the in-page player and you can download either a copy of just the project or browse the whole repository for this and other projects.

For those Komodo users that are working with CakePHP and have thought "there has to be a better way", Matt Curry has created a screencast showing a few helpful hints on developing in popular IDE.

I suck at screencasts; I know this. If I keep doing them, I'm bound to get better, right? Is it possible to get worse at something the more you do it? Anyway, I made a quick screencast showing off some CakePHP features with Komodo IDE. Leave a comment with your favorite CakePHP related IDE trick.

He talks about the "automatic" auto-completion the IDE can do once its scanned the CakePHP source, how Komodo knows about properties in the classes as well as helpers and how to set up the Bake and Cake commands as shortcuts for quick access.

The Zend Developer Zone has a new tutorial posted (from Vikram Vaswani) about adding in an auto-complete input field to your site. His example uses a PEAR class, Dojo and some components of the YUI libraries.

Fortunately, modern programming toolkits like Dojo provide ready-made widgets that have the necessary client-side functions for autocomplete. Add a little bit of server-side glue, in the form of a PHP script that talks to a database to generate valid suggestions, and enabling this functionality in a Web application now becomes a matter of hours, rather than days. In this article, I'll show you how to do this using three different libraries: PEAR HTML_QuickForm, YUI, and Dojo. Come on in, and find out more!

He shows how to combine Dojo, YUI and the HTML_QuickForm PEAR package to create a field that, based on what they enter into the input field, searches a database to find values in that table.

On the SitePoint PHP blog today Kevin Yank takes a look at a recent version of the NetBeans IDE (version 6.5) that comes bundled with improved PHP support.

Long dismissed as a "toy Java IDE", NetBeans - Sun's open source Integrated Development Evironment (IDE)-has really grown up in recent years. No longer is it just for Java, either: for web developers, NetBeans 6.5 now supports Ruby and PHP out of the box. Surprisingly, that support is so good that it now compares favourably to more established competitors like Eclipse, Komodo IDE, and Zend Studio.

He mentions the built-in/user-defined auto-complete the has built in as well as code templates, support for phpdoc documentation blocks, and other functionality for helping with Javascript, HTML and CSS.

Matthew Weier O'Phinney has put together a guide to answer some of the questions he's been getting about combining the Zend Framework and Dojo functionality for autocompletion.

I've fielded several questions about setting up an autocompleter with Zend Framework and Dojo, and decided it was time to create a HOWTO on the subject, particularly as there are some nuances you need to pay attention to.

He shows how to set up the correct Dijits and how to create the default form element in a Zend_Form instance. He creates a data store and a QueryReadStore to hold the information. The then modified that default Zend_Form element (a ComboBox) to include the storeType and storeParams for these instances.

The NETTUTS.com site has a new tutorial posted today showing how to combine jQuery and PHP to add auto complete functionality to a simple search engine.

This tutorial will show you how to use the "Popular Queries" feed from your Google Custom Search Engine (CSE) as a data source for a jQuery autocomplete.

They walk through the creation of the search page and provide the code for the jQuery half that calls the autocomplete() method on the search field. The PHP script that's called loads the XML file from Google's server with the latest from the "Popular Queries" page. This is then parsed and sent back out as Javascript back to the waiting jQuery. They also include a brief look at caching the results by writing them out to a file that's checked and updated based on the results of a filectime() call.