In this new tutorial Smashing Magazine shows you how to create a mini "Christmas List" application with PHP, HTML and CSS (and a little bit of database help) to display a list of what you or your family wants this holiday.

'Tis the season to be jolly, and how much jollier could we make it than with a helpful Christmas wish list crafted for your family to ensure that you get maximum presentage this holiday? In this article, we will focus on creating a very simple system that allows you to add gift ideas to a Web page, and for your family (or whoever) to view the list.

They walk you through the setup of the basic PHP file structure, the HTML template for the list output, CSS to make it look nice and the actual PHP backend - working with a MySQL database to pull out product information and use a simple login method.

In a new tutorial from PHPMaster.com Jason Pasnikowski takes a look at sending emails with PHP - an introduction to what the language offers and how it can be used to send an HTML version.

In most cases your installation of PHP will be capable of sending emails. If you are using a shared host, or if you installed PHP using a package management system like apt-get, more than likely you're all set. You'll really only need to worry about extra configuration if you're compiling PHP from source or if you're running it on Windows. In either case, there are plenty of resources available online to help you out. Because that's all beyond the scope of this article, I'll assume you're set. If not, Google will be your friend.

He starts with a simple example using the mail function but quickly moves on to sending a multi-part email with an attached zip file and HTML content. He includes the all code you'll need and explains each part in detail so you'll know exactly what's going on.

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.

On PHPBuilder.com today there's a new tutorial from Vojislav Janjic about using a simple DOM parser in PHP to edit the markup even if it's not correctly W3C-formatted - the Simple HTML DOM Parser

Simple HTML DOM parser is a PHP 5+ class which helps you manipulate HTML elements. The class is not limited to valid HTML; it can also work with HTML code that did not pass W3C validation. Document objects can be found using selectors, similar to those in jQuery. You can find elements by ids, classes, tags, and much more. DOM elements can also be added, deleted or altered.

They help you get started using the parser, passing in the HTML content to be handled (either directly via a string or loading a file) and locating elements in the document either by ID, class or tag. Selectors similar to those in CSS are available. Finally, they show how to find an object and update its contents, either by adding more HTML inside or by appending a new object after it.

On PHPBuilder.com today there's a new post from Vojislav Janjic with three methods (sans-framework) that you can use to create a multilingual website - some a bit easier to maintain than others.

Fast internet growth has brought many opportunities in the global market. Businesses can reach their customers across many countries, and information sharing is not limited to a local area or country anymore. This is why there is an increasing tendency for multilingual websites. By having a website in multiple languages, you can target local markets more easily. Also, it is more convenient to use a website in your native language.

His three methods are all relatively simple, but they all have their good and bad points - making separate HTML/views for each language, creating XML files with different versions of the content or storing the translations in a MySQL database. He gives quick code snippets showing how to implement each of them, some basing the language on a cookie value, others on a GET variable passed to the page.

In this new tutorial from Tutorialzine.com, Martin Angelov shows you how to combine a bit of PHP, CSS3 and HTML to create a more functional "About" page for your site that shares contact information in multiple formats.

In this tutorial, we will be creating a simple about page that is powered by PHP, HTML5 and CSS3. It will present your contact information to your visitors, with an option for downloading it as a vCard (useful for importing it in third party applications). You can use today's example as a placeholder for your upcoming personal website, or as an actual about page.

He includes all of the code, markup and styling you'll need to get it put together. The PHP is used to store the contact details and, based on a flag in the GET request (easily modifiable to any other method, like a HTTP header) it returns the basic page, a JSON set or a vcard of the contact data. The page also includes spots for linking to Facebook and Twitter accounts.

On the Script-Tutorials.com site there's a new article showing you how to use XPath to parse web pages, complete with screenshots of the page and the code to make it happen.

Today I will tell you how you can make parsers of remote HTML pages (in PHP). In this article I will show you how to perform xpath queries to Web pages. XPath - a query language to elements of xml or xhtml document. To obtain the necessary data, we just need to create the necessary query. For the work, we also need: browser Mozilla Firefox, firebug and firepath plugins. For our experiment, I suggest this webpage Google Sci/Tech News. Of course you can choose any other web page too.

They provide two demos and a downloadable package with everything you need. The script pulls in the page as a DOM document (which works as long as it's correctly formatted XML) and spits back out the matches from a few different XPath expressions. There's all sorts of sites out there that can help you with examples of other XPath expressions and syntax.

On the ServerGrove blog today there's a new post showing how you can set up Dreamweaver to be able to edit Twig templates directly, complete with syntax highlighting.

If you are a designer working with Symfony developers you will soon encounter Twig. Twig is a template engine for PHP that has been adopted by Symfony 2, and from a designers perspective, it's a major improvement over the way things are done in Symfony! For designers who have used templating systems like Smarty before, Twig is going to be a walk in the park, if you have not used a templating system before, Twig is a great place to start.

It's a simple two-step process to get things up and working. You just need to tell Dreamweaver that ".twig" files should be recognized as code and set up the syntax highlighting in the "MMDocumentTypes" XML configuration file (might be a little tricky for non-development types). This change tells the program to open them with HTML syntax highlighting.

On the SitePoint PHP blog today there's a new post from Craig Buckler for the WordPress users out there. The HTML that this popular blog/CMS tools spits out can sometimes be not-so-semantic. Craig shares a tip on cleaning up one aspect of it - the methods returning lists for menus or sitemaps.

love WordPress. I also love clean semantic HTML. Unfortunately, several of the standard WordPress theme functions return code that is a little untidy. For me, the primary culprits are wp_list_pages() and the newer wp_nav_menu(); both return an unordered list of page links.

He gives an example of a sample list generated by wp_nav_menu() that's full of badly formatted and unnecessary elements. To help fix the issue, he shares his regular expression-based call to strip out things like extra tabs, empty classes and all title attributes. Obviously you can customize this as you need, but it's a good start towards something that's a bit cleaner and up to code.

Joshua Thijssen has written up a new post for the Enrise blog today about using REST-style context switching in Zend Framework applications with the help of a handy "RestContextSwitch" helper.

In the first part of this blog post we've talked about the theory behind REST services. In this post we put the theory into practice with the help of some code snippets you can implement in your own application.

He starts by helping you create a simple REST controller (well, cut-and-pasteable code, really) that can handle multiple output formats/contexts - XML, JSON and HTML. Next up is the helper (Service_Controller_Action_Helper_RestContextSwitch) that's not much different than the normal context switching helper. With that in place he moves on to the plugins - an accept-hander that sets the correct format based on the Accept HTTP header information and a media-format plugin to check "permissions" on the context to see if that type is allowed in that environment.