On NETTUTS.com there's a (quite complete) tutorial posted that walks you through the creation of a forum using PHP and MySQL as a backend to store the posts.

In this tutorial, we're going to build a PHP/MySQL powered forum from scratch. This tutorial is perfect for getting used to basic PHP and database usage.

They start with the backend and move their way forward, setting up the MySQL tables - categories, replies, users and topics. They describe each of them in a bit more detail before getting into the code. They show how to create template for the site (with a little CSS) and include code to create users, authenticate them, set up their permission levels, making categories/topics and much more.

The full code for the forum application they've created can be downloaded here.

Richard Thomas has added two more quick posts in his "Solar Shorts" series spotlighting the Solar framework:

• Solar Framework Shorts - Model to Form the quick way - An example of creating an auto-generated form based on a simple user model (with the controller and view code included).
• Solar Framework Shorts - Talk with the Solar Gods - A pointer to the IRC channel and discussion forums where you can interact directly with the development team and other Solar fans.

You can find out more about the framework itself on SolarPHP.com and more community information (and a project wiki) on the SolarPHP.org website.

PHPFreaks.com has posted this new information about running PHP on a Windows 2008 Server instance and how you can give it a try for thirty days.

Microsoft has been recently engaging in a number of open source projects. They have been working on enhancing performance, security and stability of PHP applications on Windows Server platforms. [...] In cooperation with Microsoft, [we] invite you to trial a Windows based web stack consisting of IIS 7, PHP 5 and SQL Server. Via the PHP on WS 2008 website you will be able to request a 30-day trial with a Microsoft hosting partner

By signing up, you can request a trial of the IIS 7 software. They also provide a Q&A discussion board for those participating in the program that might need any help.

The PHP Women have announced the winner of their "I am..." competition - an entry coming from a user of their forums going by the name Rowd.

We're delighted to announce the winner of our "I am" competition. Entrants were asked to complete the sentence "I am a PHPWoman because..." Rowd wins a $50 gift certificate to spend over at php|architect - if you want to read the other entries then check out the competition thread in the forums.

So what was Rowd's entry? Short and sweet: "I am a PHPWomen member because...I enjoy coding in PHP and discussions with people who know what being a woman in IT means."

Robert Basic has put together an ever growing list of tutorials and other resources related to the Zend Framework (including several Twitter users to follow).

Besides the official documentation and the Quickstart, there are many useful resources for Zend Framework, like blogs and Twitter. I did my best to collect them. If you know something that's not listed here, but should be, please leave a comment and I'll update the post.

He has three categories right now - blogs of well-known developers of the framework and outspoken proponents of it, Twitter users you can follow that talk about/might help with issues that could come up and some of the books that have been published on the topic. There's also an "Other" category with mentions of IRC channels, the ZF wiki and the ZF forum.

Rob Allen has a quick update posted to the PHP in Action blog concerning the site's forum and errata sections.

Although I'm not posting here much at the moment, I am answering questions about my Zend Framework book in Manning's Author Online forums. [...] Also, I have started posting up the errata that we have found on the book's website. If something doesn't make sense, check there first!

Those forums are quite a busy place with topics about specific parts of chapters to more general Zend Framework questions.

The PHP Women have started up a new contest today - their "I am" competition:

PHPWomen is delighted to announce the arrival of a new competition here at phpwomen.org. To win, all you have to do is complete this sentence: "I am a phpwomen member because..." and tell us how you got to where you are today and what brings you to the site. You should put your entry into the forum thread before the end of February.

There's no limits on who can enter ("women, men, aliens and pets") but posts that aren't in the general spirit of the competition woul dbe in danger of being deleted. The prize for the winner (besides the glory, of course) is a $50 USD gift certificate from the fine folks at php|architect.

Not a member yet? Find our more about it here!

This new tutorial from the PHPFreaks.com website shows how to add text into a custom created image (they go with an Arial font in a PNG image).

One of the standard features of a message board is allowing members to have a signature, which is appended to the bottom of each post they make. Posters can put whatever they want into the signature (within forum settings). Putting quotes in one's signature is one of the more popular things to do. [...] Soon afterwards, I started receiving messages on a fairly regular basis asking me "What kind of sorcery is this?? How do I do that??" You know, I think it's kind of funny people should ask, because this is really nothing new.

His code (the full script is here) sets up the font size, the font face (Arial) and the quotes to be randomly pulled from first. The image manipulation comes next - making a PNG resource, adding a few colors and shapes, and dropping in the text.

Each line of the code is covered in detail so you'll understand exactly what's going on. The end result is a script that makes a simple image and can be easily expanded to work with other sources (like databases or flat text files).

Knut Urdalen has passed along the announcement about the 1.0 release of the Yii framework for PHP being released (by Qiang Xue).

The Yii Framework builds upon learnings and findings from over 5 years of development of PRADO. If you already know PRADO you'll get the hold of Yii quite fast. The framework is already documented quite well in The Definitive Guide to Yii (a good place to start for beginners), in addition to complete class reference and an active forum where you can meet other developers.

There is also an extension repository and a few benchmarks to help you compare it to some of the other popular frameworks out there.

The PHPClasses.org website has posted a new book review about the Packt Publishing offering "Drupal: Creating Blogs, Forums, Portals and Community Websites" (book by David Mercer, review by Zoltan Hunt).

This Packt book takes the reader through installing the Drupal software, configuring and theming, adding content and deploying a Web site. It is aimed at the end user who is looking to setup and customize Drupal's themes, but not actually write their own modules, which would be a topic for book on its own.

The review talks about some of the origins of the content management system, the contents of the book (use cases, introductions to the functionality, etc) and how to manage your site.