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.

Gareth Heyes has a recent post pointing out the port of a project of his, CSSReg (a filtering tool for user-provided stylesheets) over to PHP.

Just a quick post to mention the excellent work by Norman Hippert aka @thewildcat, he successfully converted my Javascript based CSSReg into PHP. I was meaning to do this but never found the time so it's pretty awesome that not only did thewildcat convert the code but found some nice bugs in my code and fixed them. Great work Norman thanks very much!

You can see a demo of it here and grab the source as a download here. You can find out more about the origins of CSSReg (and some of its siblings) in this other post from Gareth.

In a recent post to NETTUTS.com, there's a new tutorial that will walk you through the creation of a basic Twitter client that uses their OAuth system for authentication. All of the code is provided so you can follow along.

OAuth can be a tricky concept to wrap your head around at first, but with the Twitter API now requiring its use, it is something you need to understand before creating a Twitter application. This tutorial will introduce you to OAuth, and walk you through the process of creating a basic application.

They show you how to register your application, where to grab the OAuth library from and the code you'll need to make the connection and send tweets. There's also a few other code snippets showing profile image downloading, updating and cached version generation. You can see a demo of the application in action here.

On 9Lessons.info today there's a tutorial posted by Srinivas Tamada about creating a simple "tag my friends" system (like Facebook's) with PHP, jQuery and a bit of Ajax magic.

I received a request from my reader that asked to me how to implement Facebook like tag friends in your status or update box. It is great feature to adding friends start with @ symbol. I had tried this with Jquery, Ajax and PHP, it's simple just collaboration of my previous posts.

If you want to skip to the good part, there's a demo and code download otherwise you can follow along with his code that creates a database table, includes the HTML for the interface, a backend PHP script to connect to and some CSS to make it all look a bit nicer.

As is mentioned in this new post by Paul Jones the Solar framework project has reached its "beta" status on December 18th, 2009 and has just hit another milestone - beta2.

Along with the release comes updates to the manual including a new blog tutorial that walks you through the creation of a simple blog that shows you how create the basic application structure, add actions/views for the CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) of articles and work with local strings.

If you're looking for what changed in the two betas, check out the release notes for beta1 and beta2 (download link for the beta2 release).

Debugging resources being used by your script has always been a pain, and many developers have come up with their own libraries to handle the process. Ryan Campbell has his own entry in the category - the PHP Quick Profiler.

In our company, code reviews play an integral part in the development process for making quality software. We opt for a mentor style approach with Wufoo, where a developer works on a segment for a period of time and then passes it up to a more experienced developer for review.

[...] To reduce this repetition of checking the same requirements over and over], we invested some time creating something we've called the PHP Quick Profiler-we call it PQP for short. It's a small tool (think Firebug for PHP) to provide profiling and debugging related information to developers without needing them to add a lot of programmatic overhead to their code.

The post gives several screenshots of the tool in action and code to get you up and running quickly. The Profiler can keep track of memory usage, "runaway" includes, execution time and database activity. There's also an online demo so you can try it out yourself.

Here's the link to the latest version's download.

Federico as mentioned the support that the Google App Engine has added for Java. This also means that you can run PHP in it through Quercus (a Java implementation of PHP).

Google App Engine now supports Java, this means that you can write PHP applications using Quercus: Demo script

You can find more information about this setup in this blog post from the Webdigi blog.

Christoph Dorn has posted a guide to integrating the FirePHP tool into your application to aid in Ajax debugging.

My purpose in this column is to introduce you to FirePHP, the problem it solves, and how it is intended to work within your application for maximum benefit. I will present some useful high-level knowledge to make it easier for you to integrate FirePHP into your application. This is not a step-by-step tutorial. I have made a complete demo available for download, along with some useful libraries illustrating all the concepts covered here. I want to emphasize that the demo is only one possible implementation. There are many other possibilities.

He sets up his problem - figuring out a good way to debug Ajax applications without resorting to alert boxes - and the solution he found worked best for him. By using the FirePHP library he could send back the results (or any other information) from the backend call without needing to go through any more hassle than installing Firebug and the FirePHP tool. (Obviously, this only works in Firefox. Internet Explorer users might want to try out Fiddler.)

On the Liip blog today Christian Stocker has posted about a few common issues developers seem to have with the upload progress meter extension and a few answers to help them out.

After I released uploadprogress 1.0.0 some days ago and finally declared it as stable, it's time to write that blogpost about some of the limitations and caveats one has to know.

The post links to a demo and answers a few different questions on issues such as:

• Running it on other modules than mod_php on Apache ( like fastcgi)
• Checking if files are too big
• The position and content of UPLOAD_IDENTIFIER within the form is important
• Why not use $_SESSION for the info?
• It segfaults, when I don't include UPLOAD_IDENTIFIER

See the PECL page for the extension for more information.

On the NETUTS.com website they've posted a part of their "Dive into PHP" series (part thirteen) cross-posted from the ThemeForest blog (subscribe here). In this edition the vidcast looks at how to handle file uploads in PHP.

By posting short ten minute episodes, beginners can easily digest each lesson, rather than become overwhelmed with more information than their minds are able to consume. [...] In this lesson, you'll learn how to upload files, and how to use regular expressions to ensure that inappropriate file types aren't uploaded to your server.

You can follow along with the vidcast and check out the demo or just skip straight to the source code to get going right away. Links to some of the other video tutorials are also included for things like working with variables, regular expressions and getting started with MySQL.