A new tutorial on the Zend Developer Zone shows you how to use PHP's "younger cousin" PHP-GTK to make a simple widget.

With PHP's younger cousin PHP-GTK's recent step to maturity with the 2.0 stable release it is a good time to give this project some more attention. In this article I will show you how to create a re-usable IPv4 Entry widget using PHP-GTK's excellent OO structure.

The end result is an interface that lets the user input an IP in a familiar way (blocks of three, automatically advancing to the next block). They talk about the code first, describing how all of the parts fit together before giving you an easily cut-and-pastable block of code (the class) that creates the widget.

Ken Guest, in a response to another post from a different blogger, has posted some of his own validation replacements for the regular expression method the other blogger chose.

I've noticed that Richard Heyes, who professes himself to be a php guru, deleted my comment on his "Some common regular expressions" posting which simply pointed out his expressions didn't quite do the job and suggested a few PEAR packages that should be used instead of the expressions that he proffered

His examples have the benefit of what he calls "defense in depth" - the functionality to catch a bit more than just a regular expression can alone. His examples include PEAR_Validate for email addresses, Net_CheckIP2 for IP addresses and the Validate_UK package for the sort code and telephone numbers.

Derick Rethans has posted a method he's come up with to try to figure out the user's timezone based on the IP address they're using:

Through Planet PHP I found an article on Pre-populating forms with the timezone. I'd normally add a comment instead, but the comment would almost be larger then the original post, so I am instead writing up an entry myself. The post describes several ways to obtain the user's timezone and use that to pre-fill a form. None of them are working properly though.

In Derick's method combines a bit of Javascript with some PHP to correctly find the timezone.

On his web development blog, Joey has posted a new list of eight handy regular expressions you can use in your code for common validations.

Here are eight examples of practical PHP regular expressions and techniques that I've used over the past few years using Perl Compatible Regular Expressions. This guide goes over the eight different validation techniques and describes briefly how they work. Usernames, telephone numbers, email addresses, and more.

Each of the regular expressions comes complete with an explanation of what it is and the kinds of strings it's looking for. Comments on the post have helped even more, finding places where they might break or not catch all possibilities.

Damien Seguy has kept up the good work and has posted this month's PHP statistics for the past month's data (April 2007).

Here are the PHP stats for March 2007. To learn about methodology, read la section phpversion. 10.1 millions servers hosted on 2.3 millions IP were surveyed during December, and 22.8 were used for stats : domaines without web sites, those unreachable, ISP, shared hosters or domain parkings were not considered.

Highlights for the month:

• 5.2 is about to be the 3rd most popular version
• PHP 5 is more often chosen on larger domains
• In April, web sites are bracing for the next versions
• Doesn't seem to be much impact from MOPB : have to wait for this month's to see it.

Stats cover a wide range of topics including:

• PHP on the Internet
• PHP Versions with dropping usage
• PHP5 adoption by country
• PHP versions by IP

Also, be sure to check out the evolution stats for the past month, showing some of the trends for the past months as compared to April.

DynamicWebPages.de has posted their new statistics for PHP usage in the community for this past month:

After the small decrease in the last month, PHP made it back up easily. For the first time since April 2006, the 20 million mark on the number of domains has been passed. In contrast to the previous month that means a jump of nearly 800,000 domains. The number of IP addresses, on which PHP is installed, also has numbers worth checking out. With 1,332,514 IP addresses on record, this month's numbers are the highest conditions since September 2004.

You can check out the graph and the statistics for the last year in their statistics page of their site.

As mentioned by DynamicWebPages.de, the latest PHP usage statistics have been released for November 2006.

Overall, the spread of PHP seems to have settled down this month to a more stable value. For this month, the number of domain using PHP came in at 19 million (19,404,533) and the number of IPs using PHP is at 1.3 million (1,319,743). This drop can be somewhat attributed to several hosts being made aware of the "expose_php" setting in their installations and turning it off for security reasons.

You can check out this month's numbers as well as how it relates to previous months (and years) in this graph.