DevShed has started a new series off today with this new tutorial, a look at a few image galleries written in PHP and how to get them up and working on your site.

In this article, we are going to tackle this subject and present some real-world applicable solutions.First of all, this article presumes that you either have a web server of your own or one that you pay for (as a web space) with the necessary server-side services already running and configured appropriately (PHP, MySQL, Apache, etc.). Second, we are going to consider free options for the applications we'll present throughout this article.

The two pieces of software they look at are 4images Gallery and the Coppermine Gallery. Simple installation instructions are included (more can be found in the project's documentation, though) and screenshots show some of the end results.

Mikko Koppanen has a quick post today showing how to use PHP and Imagick to create an image of text filled with another image layer behind it:

The fill pattern is used to annotate text but the named pattern could also be used to fill any shapes that allow fill to be specified (include circles, ellipses, rectangles, polygons etc etc).

His example is pretty simple (with a "Hello World!" output) that pulls in the background image, creates the composite layer over it, adds the text to it and sets the fill to the background image's layer. The whole this is wrapped up and output as a PNG file.

DevShed finishes up their series looking at making a search engine with the Yahoo! web services in PHP5 in this last look at using the functionality they've created so far to make a more improved search.

This last installment of the series will be entirely focused on demonstrating how Inheritance can be used in a helpful way to build a set of child classes that will come in handy for consuming a specific Yahoo! Search Service.

They show how to use their current image search functionality and, with a few modifications, make a base class that can be used to support ech of the other search types (web, image, video) with common functionality and settings.

Mikko Koppanen has posted another quick hit ImageMagick hint to his blog - this time it deal with "seam carving", a process for cropping and resampling of an image to make a different composite picture.

Today I was reading trough the ImageMagick ChangeLog and noticed an interesting entry. "Add support for liquid rescaling". I rushed to check the MagickWand API docs and there it was: MagickLiquidRescaleImage! After about ten minutes of hacking the Imagick support was done. Needless to say; I was excited

You'll need to have the libqr library compiled into the ImageMagick installation, but the actual use of the functionality is simple - about three or four lines do the work for you. He includes the original image and the result from his test (as well as another example of the same result image scaled down automatically.

DevShed continues their series looking at connecting a PHP5 script to the powerful Yahoo! search backend with part four of the series today. This part focuses on reworking some of the previous examples to make them more modular using custom defined functions.

Logically, these examples can be really useful for learning the basic concepts surrounding the use of these search services, but undoubtedly, it's necessary to modify and improve their source code to make it more compact and completely reusable.

They start the overhaul with the web search (complete with example results) then push on to the video and image searches and work them over the same way.

DevShed has posted the third part of their series looking at accessing the Yahoo! web services via PHP5 scripts. This time it's a focus on using the image search capabilities.

In this third chapter of the series, I'm going to continue exploring in detail other helpful web services offered by Yahoo!, such as those focusing on searching images and videos. Also, I will demonstrate how they can be queried directly from a basic PHP 5 application and process the corresponding search results by utilizing the same group of array handling functions that you saw in the previous article of the series.

Just like in previous articles of the series, they make a simple class that connect to the Yahoo! web services and request search details back about their queries (like "Madonna").

Ed Finkler has pointed out a handy resource for those trying to cope with using the UTF-8 support included in several of PHP's functions - this page on the Web Application Component Toolkit wiki.

This page is intended as a reference for functionality PHP provides which can either help with handling UTF-8 or should be regarded as a risk when used in conjunction with UTF-8 encoded strings. Further information can be found on the Internationalization (I18N) and Character Sets / Character Encoding Issues pages.

It talks about the "dangerous" functionality PHP has (issues that the language has in current functions) when using things like the PCRE extension, the string extension, the array methods, handling variables, the XML extensions (DOM and SAX), image manipulation, and URL parsing functionality.

Cory Borrow has posted a tutorial he's created to show how to harness the power of PHP and GD to create thumbnail images out of the contents of a text file.

Today, I'll give a little info on how to achieve the process of creating a thumbnail using PHP, GD and the text from a text file. It is really pretty simple, so lets get started.

The trick behind the translation is in reading in the contents of the (plain) text file and pushing it into a string value of a newly created GD-generated image. He includes the code to make using it in your own app simple (a cut and paste version) - his method FileToThumb.