On the Ibuildings techPortal today there's a new tutorial from Robert Raszczynski with his look at the lessphp project - a native PHP implementation of the LESS CSS framework.

In a nutshell, Less CSS is a tool that lets you simplify your CSS style sheet and allows you to extend limited CSS functionality by introducing variables, mixins, operations and nested rules. The original implementation is written in Ruby; however, there is a PHP solution based on LESS CSS called lessphp.

He mentions the good and the bad about using LESS - it can speed up your CSS development time by making it more familiar but it also comes with the caveat that the CSS files have to be generated each time an update is made. He covers some of the basic features of lessphp including variables, mixins, nested rules, operations (improving on already defined rules) and being able to use multiple .less files. He includes a XML snippet that can be dropped into your Ant (or Phing) build to run the generation at deployment time.

On the NETTUTS.com site today there's a new tutorial about using the LESS CSS tool to get the most out of the styling of your website. The tutorial uses the PHP implementation by Leaf Corcoran to accomplish the same things as the Ruby library offers.

During a sick day a few weeks ago, I got around to something I've been meaning to look at for about a year: LESS. If anything web technology is worth a look, I promise LESS is. In this article, we'll look at the amazing power of LESS and its ability to streamline and improve your development process. We'll cover rapid prototyping, building a lightweight grid system, and using CSS3 with LESS.

They use an output buffering trick to handle parsing and executing the ".less" CSS-based files through the library and spit the parsed version back out the other side. There's plenty of examples of how to use the LESS syntax ending up in their previously mentioned grid system using mixins, some cross-browser CSS3 and the CSS3 Pie tool.

On the php|architect blog Keith Casey has a new post that suggests something a bit counterintuitive to what a lot of developers think about their code - less code isn't always better.

Everyone says "I could build that in an afternoon/weekend/marathon session of caffeine-fueled code-debauchery" but to actually do something well, unsurprisingly, it usually takes longer.

He gives an example of this forum script that's under 1KB of code (949 bytes or so) and has some of the basic features of any forum software out there. Keith talks about the software - the features included, the included security, how it uses quotes to its advantage and how it only uses the basic functionality of PHP to make it all work.

Keith also includes a few criticisms of the code like how it uses short tags, the lack of linebreaks, using $_REQUEST and a few more.

To be blunt, it's not pretty and doesn't have many features, but honestly, I fluctuate between terrified and impressed by the feat. [...] More than anything, it's refreshing and fascinating to see what someone can do when they set clear, simple, direct priorities and focus exclusively on those.

New from his blog Brendon has a list of what he thinks are ten PHP functions you'll never use.

When scripting in PHP, we often restrict ourselves to a limited number of API functions: the common ones, like print(), header(), define(), isset(), htmlspecialchars(), etc. [...] The PHP API actually offers a lot of functionality, some useless and some useful; often seldom used. I have been looking through the available functions and was interested to find some really cool functions that I should have known about.

Here's his list of functions, some of which are more on the "special needs" list than the "never use" list:

• sys_getloadavg
• pack
• cal_days_in_month
• _()
• get_browser
• debug_print_backtrace
• metaphone
• natsort
• levenshtein
• glob

Alex Netkachov has shared six tips in a new post on his blog today for how you can write less PHP code and get more done with it. It's based around another post from Arnold Daniels talking about a temporary variable method in PHP.

This tip is useful to "lazy" developers who do not even think about variable names. They may prefer magic names like ${0} and 0 is good enough variable name, why not...

His list consists of:

• Use || (or) and && (and) operations instead of if.
• Use ternary operator.
• Use for instead of while.
• In some cases PHP requires you to create a variable. [...] To handle all these situation you can create a set of small functions which shortcuts frequently used operations.
• Explore the language you use.
• When it is better to write more and then read the code easily, do not be lazy.

Check out Vidyut Luther's response to Alex's comments as well as one from Richard Heyes.

Kore Nordmann has made a post on his blog with more details on the Image_3D package and some of the rendering times he noticed (and the improvements) with the Zend Guard product.

According to his results, the Zend Guard optimizer actually dropped the effectiveness and speed of rendering an image with his package - up to a 30% drop!

I enjoyed Friday's pro::PHP podcast interview with Andi Gutmans. With a name like pro::PHP how can I not like it? This was a less formal presentation than the Zend Framework webcast. Perhaps surprisingly informal for Andi, at least at the end. I thought Marcus Whitney did a great job selecting and asking questions. There were some technical difficulties in the live version. I hope those are worked out for the next broadcast, which I am looking forward to.

Now, the question is early February, or late February?

If you're confused about that last question, check out this post for the scoop. (According to a comment made by Andi, though, they're shooting for "mid-February")...