On the Zend Developer Zone there's a recent article about using APIs, specifically on how to use the Digg API with the Services_Digg2 PEAR package.

A few weeks ago, a client asked me to add a feed of interesting news stories to his Web application. Naturally, my thoughts turned immediately to Digg, which invariably has something interesting to read and which also offers a Web service API [...] A little Googling, and I found the PEAR Services_Digg2 class, which exposes a neat little PHP interface to the Digg API. As you might imagine, with all these tools to hand, it didn't take long to quickly integrate a feed of Digg stories into the application.

He walks you through the installation of the package (a one command step) and a secondary package you'll need due to Digg's authentication, HTTP_OAuth. He includes a request and response example (returned in JSON) as well as several code examples for sample requests, searching, working with comments on posts, post comments, "digg" stories and follow other users.

If you're constantly hungering for more PHP news, there's a new resource (a Digg-like one, too) that wants to give PHPers the latest from the community and give them a way to show which they like the best - abcphp.

abcphp.com is a social news website made for people to discover and share PHP related content from anywhere on the Internet, by submitting links and stories, and voting and commenting on submitted links and stories.

The site lets you vote (with a registered account) on the PHP-related articles they've posted ala Digg.com and breaks them up into categories like "New Releases", "PHP Dev Tools", "Database" and "Security". You can even create groups of people that share the same interests. Check it out and maybe submit a story while you're there.

PHP is always thought of as an open source free spirit that survives on the work that's done by the community around it. While there's no denying the massive amounts of work done by developers of the language, there's also another group that is doing their part to help the language flourish - commercial entities. Scott MacVicar takes a look at a few of them in this new post to his blog.

I thought I'd start with a quick thank you to all those groups and entities involved indirectly with PHP. The PHP project relies on donations to provide our service infrastructure, this is in the form of hardware and hosting from both individual companies and hosting companies to provide collocation.

Besides the hardware support there's also companies willing to allow their employees time to work on the project (such as Pierre from Microsoft). Other companies that have made large contributions include IBM's large amount of testing, Sun's work to improve PHP on Solaris and, of course, Zend's support of the project and the time its employees spend developing the language.

On the PHP::Impact blog Federico offers a brief tutorial on creating a simple web service client with the help of the Zend Framework.

The Zend Framework puts heavy emphasis on Web services. This is a good thing, considering the amount of Web services out there that can help lower costs and increase the value of your site. [...] In this example, I'll develop a Web services client to Digg, a real-world Web services provider.

He steps through the process - finding the provider information, locating their endpoints, setting up query string interfaces, making code to handle the responses and, finally, making the actual client as a Zend_Rest_Client interface.

If you're on the fence about coming to this year's php|tek conference, you might want to check out these three things Marci Tabini has mentioned that will be happening this year.

February is usually when the many fun and interesting activities that surround our spring conference php|tek start taking place - and this year is no exception. In fact, this year that are more people working - hellbent might be a better word, given their enthusiasm - on making |tek a memorable occasion for PHP developers from all over the world to meet up, learn and network.

The three events/happenings he mentions are the keynote being given by Andrei Zmievski (Open Source Fellow at Digg), the webcast/unconference being organized by Keith Casey and the Hackathon being put together by Matthew Turland (both of Blue Parabola).

You can get more information on what sort of talks will be happening and how you can reserve your spot on the main conference website.

Andrei Zmievski has posted about updates that have been made to the memcached extension for PHP:

The first project the I've been working on since joining Digg has seen the light of day. It's a new PHP extension for interfacing with memcache servers and it is based on the libmemcached library, which is becoming the standard client library for this task. [...] There is another memcache PECL extension, but this one offloads the intricacies of communicating with memcache onto libmemcached and instead concentrates on exposing a sensible API and some cool features like asynchronous requests and read-through caching callbacks.

You can find out more about the extension on its PECL project page and more about the memcached library from the project's website.

On the Developer Tutorials Blog today, there's a new post aimed at WordPress users to help them on the path to becoming "power users" with five tips.

If you're a wordpress power user, you'll inevitably have some questions about how you can improve your blog or add new features. Here are five tips that will make life easier for people wanting to maximize their use of Wordpress.

The list is:

• Quickly Find Page/Post ID
• Custom Front Page
• Password Protect Wordpress
• Protect from the 'Digg Efect' with HTML
• Stop Hackers

Each of them with their own explanations (and links to other resources detailing how they're done).

On his blog, Michael Kimsal talks about a presentation he sat in on at this year's MySQL Conference given by Joe Stump from Digg.com:

One key thing he's repeating is using a service layer to access data asynchronously. His advice right now is to group data requests at the top of a user request, do them asynchronously, and then use the data in the rendering when it comes back.

They've published a PEAR package as an example of this asynchronous method that interfaces with Digg's API (http://services.digg.com). You can read more about the subject of his talk on the MySQL Conference website.

Ever through about starting up your own custom version of a Digg-sort of site? Well, check out this new tutorial from the Developer Tutorials blog showing how to start it in "five minutes flat".

So, you want to start your own Digg or Reddit? Look no further. With PHP and MySQL, you can create your own Digg site in just five minutes. All you need is a PHP web server and MySQL database server; follow these instructions and you'll be up and running in time.

They use the Pligg software to do all of the hard work and describe its installation, configuration and use - simple and easy. You can find out more about Pligg on its website.

From the Venture Skills blog today, there's a tutorial that aims to help you develop a Digg-like site without any of the messy programming that can be involved - with a little help from Drupal.

Digg is a user content driven site, users submit links to article and sites that interest them and other uses either give it the thumbs up or the thumbs down. The most popular sites get onto the front page and can have literally thousands of hits this is reffered to as the Digg effect. We are going to go step by step how you can develop such a site using Drupal CMS which is available from drupal.org if your unfamiliar with Drupal we have an overview here.

The real key to it all comes in with the plugins you install into your Drupal setup:

• Vote Up/Down module
• Links module
• Voting API
• Actions
• Voting Actions
• CRE recommendation

They walk you through the set up of Drupal first (screenshots show a Windows environment, but it can be any supported OS) before going into the admin for it and installing the plugins.

This article is just the first part in the series - check out part two and part three for the rest of the installation.