In a new post Gennady Feldman has listed out some beginner resources to help those just getting into PHP:

I know that some of my last blog entries were a bit too technical for the web designers who are just starting out and curious about using PHP for their website. I thought I'd do a blog post with links for the newbies who are just starting out and making their first steps in PHP.

He points out the videos on the KillerPHP.com website, links to the PHP manual and the PEAR and PECL home pages.

On the ThinkPHP Blog, there's information posted about a new help center for their Chorizo! scanner with lots of information included already.

Go and check out Chorizo!'s new Help Center. We extended the existing tutorials and provide a smooth overview about the current documentation. Included is an overview about all the scanner plugins Chorizo! is using and explain a bit what each plugin does.

There are "Getting Started" guides offered, video tutorials, details on each of the plugins (PHPversions, XSS plugin, Session injection, etc), some of the features of the scanner, and some general troubleshooting information.

In another report from this year's O'Reilly Open Source Convention, Kevin Yank has covered Rasmus Lerdorf's talk - "Getting Rich with PHP 5" - a look at building rich web applications in PHP5.

PHP's creator, Rasmus Lerdorf, gave a surprising talk on building PHP rich web applications using PHP5-suprising, because fully half the talk focused on low-level PHP optimization techniques. The slides are available online.

Kevin gives an overview of the talk, mentioning some of Rasmus' examples, the bottlenecks he defined, and the time spent on the new functionality in the PHP 5 series.

This new post on the Sitening.com blog (written up by Tyler Hall) today takes a look at PHP and databases (MySQL specifically in this case) and "getting real" with them.

many of the ideas behind Ruby on Rails are spot on. I particularly like how well it abstracts database queries into separate objects for each table. That's very cool and can save having to write a lot of repetitive code. But having to run a Rails script to generate new files is a little too cumbersome for me. Like I said, I prefer to keep things simple. Can we do the same thing with PHP? Using just one file?

Yes.

He proceeds to show a class that can perform operations similar to those styled in RoR - creating the object, applying proterties to it and performing the action (inserts/delete/etc). It's all made possible through the use of the __get and __set functions offered in PHP5. From there, it's just a simple matter of defining the functions for the actions.

To bring the point home, he also includes some examples of how to use this kind of functionality with a bit more than the previous example - selecting, updating, deleting, and inserting a new record (including the action function for each). Lastly, he gives an example of extending this base class, as mentioned in his first example (creating an object like "Animal" or "User" to abstract out the connections even more.

Derick Rethans has a new post on his blog today with some great news about the eZ components software he (and many others) have been working on.

Just a couple of hours ago we released the first release candidate of the eZ components. The components are the first step in porting eZ publish to PHP 5.

In this release we overhauled the way we are using Exceptions and implemented them consistently in all the Components.

eZ components is an "enterprise ready general purpose PHP platform" that work like building blocks to speed application development...