The PHP Group has announced some big updates to one of the finest manuals for an open source project out there today - the manual found on the PHP website.

Updates to the manual include:

• an improved, XSL-based build system that will deliver compiled manuals to mirrors in a more timely manner (goodbye dsssl)
• manual pages can now contain images (see imagearc() for an example)
• updated function version information and capture system (fewer "no version information, might be only in CVS" messages)

Of course, help from the community helps things even more, so they request helping out or just submitting bug reports for problems found in the documentation or user comments.

As spotlighted by the folks over on PHPClasses.org, there's a developer, László Zsidi, who has contributed several packages to the repository - including some that work to create 3D images with just the built-in functions PHP provides.

He has developed several pure PHP components that implement impressive 3D animated graphics, like a 3D objects rendering engine, emulate a waving flag or the reflex of an image near a lake. The generated frames are combined into a single animated GIF with another pure PHP component also written by László. All these components were nominated to the PHP Programming Innovation Award for the evident creativity, demonstrating that PHP can be used for non-trivial software applications.

Some of the libraries in the listing include:

• Animated GIF into images
• Image Flag Effect
• Text 3D
• FXLake effect
• Convex 3D

From the SpinDrop.us blog, there's a new tutorial on combining the power of dynamic HTML and PHP to create an image cropping script for your website.

Years ago when I was working on a photo gallery for davedash.com I got the art of making tumbnails down fairly well. It was automated and didn't allow for specifying how the thumbnail should be made. With dozens of photos (which was a lot back then), when would I find that kind of time.

Flashback to today, for my company... we want users with avatars... but nothing too large. Maybe a nice 80x80 picture. Well the coolest UI I've seen was Apple's Address Book which let you use this slider mechanism to crop a fixed sized image from a larger image.

They create a pretty slick little app, using symfony to handle the framework for the app, some Javascript in the form of Prototype to make the controls, and plenty of CSS/HTML to make it usable. You can check out the demo here.

Ryan Malesevich points out a very simple, one-script solution to the common need for an image gallery for your website - SimpleView Gallery - that a friend of his has written up.

In my post that I wrote that I would be back for good this time, I mentioned that I was going to be working on a gallery script. My good friend Chris let me know that he also wrote a simple script viewer that works quite while. His script is SimpleView Gallery and it requires to modification for it, just upload the script to a directory that contains images and that's it.

He also mentions a small change he made to make it work with WordPress and it's automatic thumbnailing system (to hide those thumbnails).

The International PHP Magazine has posted the results of their latest poll today, asking the question "what's the best way to speed up your site?"

Options included:

• Reduce overall latency by reducing HTTP requests
• Save your images properly
• Strip extraneous PHP calls

With the option of "Miscellaneous thoughts" coming in at the number one place. The next step down was a tie between "Save your images properly" and "Reduce overall latency by reducing HTTP requests" with "Compression" following close behind.

Be sure to cast your vote in this week's poll asking "What is the Top Criterion for Scaling PHP?"

Paul Stamatiou shares with us today five ways to speed up your site, some quick and easy recommendations to making your site fly.

Throughout the blogosphere I'm always seeing these blogs, that while they look great, are horribly slow and overburdened. Over the past few months I have become somewhat of a website optimization specialist, bringing my own site from an over 250kB homepage to its current 34kB.

I will help you achieve some of the same success with a few, powerful tips. Most of these are common sense, but I can't stress their importance enough. I will concentrate on the website and not the server in this article, as there are too many things to discuss when it comes to server optimization.

The five tips mentioned include "Reduce Overall Latency by Reducing HTTP Requests" and "Compression", each with a paragraph or so of explaination as to what it is and how to implement it. There's even a PHP-specific one that talks about a paring down of the bits of functionality that really aren't needed.

In his new post on "Yet Another PHP Blog" (a blog documenting his participation in Google's Summer of Code), William Candillon talks about some issues he had when working on his aspect-oriented framework.

The original PHP compiler doesn't use AST representation of a source code so in the previous versions of phpAspect I had to fill the php grammar with my own AST constructions. It was a painful job and moreover I had to do it in each major version of PHP. For this new version, I'm using the yaxx project written by Dr. Yijun Yu. The yaxx tool is a yacc skeleton which build an xml ast representation of a source code according to his grammar.

He includes two images, one showing the simple class code and the other showing the tree that's obtained from the XML generated by the yaxx tool for that class structure.

In this new post on Tim Priebe's blog, he looks at a variety of the content manage ment system offerings out there on the web today, including several PHP-based options.

The list includes:

• PHPNuke (general)
• Drupal (general)
• Coppermine (images)
• WordPress (blogging)
• phpBB (forums)

Tim includes links to all of the resources and screenshots of each package in action. It's interesting to have a summary of some of the more major offerings lined up like this - a good starting place to branch from for other CMS research.

From Cal Evans over on the Zend Developer Zone today comes two links for beginner guides the "wished he'd had when he was starting PHP".

Everybody starts somewhere. I started (officially) with my Commodore 64. I wrote my first commercial program on it and it started a life-long obsession with programming. Being a self-taught programmer, there are gaps in my education. The 2 biggest areas I have trouble with are Recursion and Graphics. Thank (generic deity reference) for the Web.

While surfing around today, I stumbled upon 2 tutorials covering those two areas. They are well written, informative and free so I thought I'd share them with you on the off-chance you struggle with them as well.

The two he shares are this guide to recusion from DevShed and a guide from Builder.com on the creation of graphics on the fly.

Davey Shafik has an interesting use for the recently released Zend Framework - an app that grabs 50 random images from Flickr and combines them.

As you most likely know, I have been working with Zend on the Zend Framework for a couple of months now. The bulk on my tasks there have been working on the Zend_Service* set of classes. This includes the Amazon, Flickr and Yahoo! APIs.

So, as I'm getting more and more into flickr (see http://flickr.com/dshafik for my photo stream) I have been exploring and I saw a very neat set of images which were composites of 50 random flickr images for a given tag.

Well, I liked this enough, I decided that I could do it on-the-fly using PHP, ImageMagick? and of course... the Zend Framework.

You can check out the actual application here, and for those that love getting the background story, the source is here.