Lorna Mitchell has a new post to her blog with a quick example of how to get namespaced values with SimpleXML out of a properly formatted XML file.

Recently I was working with some google APIs and needed to retrieve some namespaced elements from the result set. This confused me more than I expected it to so here's my code for the next time I need it (and if you use it too, then great!) I was reading from their analytics data feed API, this returns a few key fields and then multiple tags, each with namespaced children.

The trick is to grab the current document's namespaces (via getNamespaces), finding the key for the ones you want and grabbing them as children.

WordPress users that have been interested to explore some of what HTML5 has to offer should check out the latest post from Sameer Borate. He shows how to embed a HTML5 Canvas element you can use to make a "drawable" area of your page. You can test to see if your browser supports it by scrolling to the end of the post.

Only if partially, but HTML 5 is slowly getting increased support from various browsers. Some of the HTML 5 features like '˜canvas' and '˜video' are supported by browsers like Firefox, Safari, Google Chrome and Opera. [...] The Canvas element consists of a drawable region defined in HTML on which you can dynamically draw graphics and animations using Javascript. The canvas API provides a nice set of drawing functions to play with.

His example detects to see if the browser has canvas support (using Modernizr), creates a div container to hold the region and creates a Javascript to define the canvas as a 520 by 220 pixel box. The animation should be loaded automatically.

A recent tutorial (screencast) has been posted to the ZendCasts.com site looking at creating custom Zend_Form elements when you need something more than just the usual, simple elements.

This video should help you build your own composite Zend_Form element. We'll be building a phone element. The phone element will have 3 textboxes, one for geographic location, area code and local code. In the following videos will add a custom cell phone validator and some ajax validation.

You can grab a copy of the source if you'd like to follow along or you can just look around the repository to find the source for this and other great lessons from the site.

Based on an example in a previous blog post (seen here) Matthew Weier O'Phinney wanted to clear a few things up on the "date of birth" element he had mocked up in his Zend_Form example.

In my last post on decorators, I had an example that showed rendering a "date of birth" element [...]. This has prompted some questions about how this element might be represented as a Zend_Form_Element, as well as how a decorator might be written to encapsulate this logic. Fortunately, I'd already planned to tackle those very subjects for this post!

To be able to use the element in its current state the key lies in the setValue method. More correctly in the overriding of the setValue method. He includes an example class that is smart enough to use that custom form element. It has get and set methods for each of the date fields (month/day/year) and the set/getValue methods that can interact using them. He wraps this all up inside a form decorator and creates an instance of the Date element to help create and handle the properties it has.

In this new post Jani Hartikainen shows a quick and easy method for creating a custom form element in your Zend Framework application. His example is a custom time element.

The alternatives would be creating custom view helpers to output the custom form elements, and using the viewscript decorator. Creating a custom view helper would also require a custom form element class, and it would be a bit tricky. [...] I think the viewscript approach is the most flexible and simplest to implement, so I chose to go with that.

His example defines a time field made up of three drop down lists, one each for hours, minutes and seconds. Included is the code to make the element (including a regular expression for validation) and the view script to display it.

In a recent entry to his blog, Neil Garb shows his method for creating compound elements in a Zend_Form object in your Zend Framework website.

Zend_Form can save you a lot of time. It almost completely abstracts away the most boring and error-prone aspects of developing secure and standards-compliant HTML forms. But one thing it doesn't do out of the box is compound elements, such as three-field dates. In this post I'll show you the easiest way to do this ZF-style.

He goes through the creation of the sample controller, an example of a custom element (the multiple date drop-downs he mentioned) and how to handle the validation in a "Zend Framework way" via an isValid call.

Tim Koschutzki has five quick tips for the CakePHP users out there to help make your lives just a bit easier:

• The prd() convenience function
• How to debug your CakePHP emails?
• Use elements where possible and make them belong to the controller
• Combine your h1 titles with Cake's page title
• Avoid long parameter lists

Each tip comes complete with code and a brief explanation of its use.

Michael has posted a simple script today that takes in XML data and spits back out an array on the other side:

The function takes the specified XML data (which must be in valid XML format) and converts into an array. Any attributes in the XML elements are dropped an only the element values are placed in the array.

The code uses a combination of XPath, DOM, and regular expressions to parse the given XML content.

Tiffany Brown shares a quick function she whipped up to create dropdown menus from the contents of a newline separated text file (or files).

I developed this PHP function for a project I'm working on. I'm posting it here in case I need it again, or in case you find it handy.

The function turns each line into an option tag making defining custom menus based on the contents of dynamically-given text files easy.

This could also be easily adapted to create navigations menus at the top of your pages with a few modifications to the HTML tags being used and some CSS to change the look of the list.

On the Tilllate Blog, there's a new post discussing the use of caching in applications, specifically for dynamic data.

Consider you have a set of data that is changing dynamically for each page request and you need to cache that data the fastest way possible. You can't cache dynamic and unpredictable data as a whole, can you? Hence, we would put each data entry into cache separately to be able to fetch it separately and dynamically. But this means bombing your cache infrastructure with with requests.

They break it up into a few different topics - caching text elements on the page, two-tiered caching (grouping cached items), incremental caching and cache versioning. They don't share an example of their code unfortunately, but they do mention something about a possible contribution to the Zend_Cache component of the Zend Framework.