The PHPEveryDay.com website has posted some more tutorials recently - here's the list:

• PHP Network: Pinging Remote Hosts
• Web Content: Crawl Image Source a Web Page
• Web Content: Getting All URL in a Web Page
• Web Content: Reading Other Web Page
• Web Content: Forcing Browser Downloads
• Web Content: Calculating Script Execution Times
• Web Content: Protecting E-mail Address
• Web Content: Changing URL Text become Active URL

Check out the rest of the site for even more great tutorials and articles.

On the Developer Tutorials blog today, there's a new post talking about the "three easy steps" to making an RSS feed for your blog:

Adding an RSS feed to your site is quick and painless, and can be done with pure PHP (and some kind of data source). After the jump, 3 simple steps to building an RSS feed in php.

The steps are pretty simple - figure out what content you want to serve, set up the basic RSS XML structure, and loop through your data to push it in to the template and echoed out. Some simple example code is included.

Lars Strojny has posted about a the new element that's been introduced in the PHP 5.3 branch - NOWDOC:

PHP 5.3 introduces a new syntax element, NOWDOC. If you know HEREDOC, NOWDOC is easy to understand: it is in fact HEREDOC taken literally. Whily variables are expanded in HEREDOC, in NOWDOC they are not.

NOWDOC is basically a HEREDOC except for one thing - no parsing is done inside of it, making it good for echoing out PHP code (that would otherwise need to be escaped all over).

On the Developer Tutorials blog, there's a new post showing you what all you'll need to install to work with WordPress offline "like a pro" on your local machine.

I used to work off of my web server but the problem I've had lately is that when I'm not connected to the internet I haven't been able to code for Wordpress in a way that allows me to view my changes. Since I started using the techniques used in this tutorial my productivity has increased significantly.

His method has you install MAMP on your local machine (for the Windows users, WAMP is just about as easy to set up) and how to import content over from your remote server to the local machine. Of course, you could just set up a subversion repository, but that's another tutorial...

In a recent blog post Akash Mehta showed how to reach into a Microsoft document (a Word file) and pull out the content inside via a PHP script.

Communicating via COM in PHP is easy as ever; especially for people coming from a VB background where executing complex tasks in MS-applications is a piece of cake, you will feel right at home in PHP. In fact, VB COM calls can be converted to PHP COM calls in just a few simple search and replaces.

He shows how to use the COM extension in a (Windows) PHP installation to access the text inside the document and manipulate the contents however you'd like (even writing them back out to another Word file).

In some thoughts related to the just-passed religious holiday, Alan Knowles decided to come up with another series of 7 deadly sins one could commit in their PHP (CMS) development.

Among those on the list are things like:

• Defines for configuration
• Filenaming
• If your code is public, you should try not to ridicule yourself.
• Mixing PHP and HTML

Check out the rest of the post and some of the interesting comments that follow.

On his blog today, Matthew Weir O'Phinney offers some helpful advice about using the placeholder functions of the Zend_View component (like headScript or headLink) to make coding in the Zend Framework that much easier:

Somebody asked for some examples of how I use the headLink(), headScript(), and other placeholder helpers, so I thought I'd take a crack at that today.

He looks at the different categories of placeholders and illustrates with examples of each: Doctype Hinting, Content Aggregation, Capturing Content and finally, putting them all together into a custom layout that uses docType, headLink, headStyle and headScript.

The SitePoint PHP Blog has a new post from Matthew Magain spotlighting the release of the latest version of one of the more popular PHP CMS systems out there - Drupal 6.

The Drupal development team surprised everyone when they released version 6.0 last week, ahead of schedule.

Over sixteen-hundred issues were corrected and major changes (like usability improvements, security and an expanded development framework) were introduced. They've even created a screencast to help you set up your own CMS site even faster than before.

Find out more on the Drupal homepage.

Padraic Brady has put together a very comprehensive post on his blog today about using the Zend_Feed component of the Zend Framework to help with the aggregation of content from other sites (like RSS and Atom feeds).

In this entry I explore Zend_Feed from the perspective of someone aggregating RSS and Atom feeds with a view to building a database of uniquely identified content for later presentation in a "Planet" style application. [...] In fact all we create here is a simple command line script to aggregate content frequently (e.g. just set up cron to run it every hour or so) into a database for later presentation.

He guides you through each step of the way:

• Setting Up Database And Models
• The Aggregator Script Foundation
• Using Zend_Feed to get common data for RSS/Atom entries
• Putting It All Together

There's plenty of code (and SQL to insert) in the post and he explains each point well, helping to make the development process smoother. There's even a summary section to toss in a few extra bits of information just in case you missed them along the way.

Hasin Hayder asks a question in his latest blog post that some in the PHP community have been wondering for a while now - is the International PHP Magazine dead?

I am a subscriber of International PHP Magazine for years. I bought the subscription looking at the back issues. They were sexy, resourceful and yup, very good. But I think these guys don't care about the magazine anymore. It became just a funny stuff for them. All the readers/subscribers and viewers doesn’t bring any value to them. Look what they are doing actually...

He points out six things that the magazine and its staff are doing including RoR articles in an issue, content on the site that's way out of date and the smaller size of recent issues. Comments to the post point out that there has been issues released but that the magazine is published by a non-technical company that just might be pushing this particular publication aside.