Smashing Magazine has a new post today about using jQuery and GD to manipulate images to upload an image, crop it and save that version to the remote server.

One of the numerous advantages brought about by the explosion of jQuery and other JavaScript libraries is the ease with which you can create interactive tools for your site. When combined with server-side technologies such as PHP, this puts a serious amount of power at your finger tips. [...] Sure, there are plugins out there that you can use to do this; but this article aims to show you what's behind the process. You can download the source files for reference.

They walk you through the little bit of setup you'll need before things will be working and then move right into the upload form and PHP handling that goes with it. The Javascript that goes with it is all home-grown (not a plugin) and cleverly uses a DIV to simulate the bounding box for the crop.

On PHPBuilder.com today there's a new tutorial about creating editing PDFs with the help of the FPDF library.

Because the Web has become the primary mechanism for distributing PDF documents, it's common to encounter questions on various web development forums pertinent to the dynamic creation of PDF documents using languages such as PHP. [...] Thankfully, such a demand for PDF manipulation capabilities exists within the PHP community that numerous alternative open source solutions have long been available, including notably FPDF.

They help you get the library installed and show you how to create a basic PDF with some simple text inside. They build on this and show how to add multiple text sections, images and watermarks.

New from the php|architect blog, there's a tutorial from Mike Willbanks about using Imagine to transform images dynamically in a more object-oriented way.

Image processing in PHP is a necessary evil but is needed more often than not in just about every web application. With the various preferences in image processing libraries (think ImageMagick, GraphicsMagick and GD) it is difficult to find a library that provides a unified object oriented interface as well as implementing the general tasks in a simplistic fashion. Imagine is an open source image manipulation library built with PHP 5.3 that implements an object oriented interface to ImageMagick, GraphicsMagick and GD

Mike gives a quick sample script that uses SPL autoloading to pull in the classes as they're needed (with the "imagineLoader" method) and make a basic thumbnail from a PNG file.

Padraic Brady has a new post on his blog talking about a new proposal he's made for the Zend Framework about filtering and sanitizing HTML content.

For a while now, I've been keen to build a HTML Sanitisation solution for PHP. Where else would I end up putting it other than in Zend Framework? As I've explored in past articles [1] [2], HTML Sanitisation in PHP is a very inconsistent practice. [...] Isn't it possible to create a sanitiser that is both secure by default and performs well?

He talks about his Wibble tool that's become the base of his idea for a filtering feature built into the framework. It mainly uses the PHP DOM functionality and HTML Tidy for speed and parsing and was benchmarked as performing better than the HTMLPurifier tool. If you're interested, check out his proposal for its inclusion in the Zend Framework 2.0.

Jeremy Cook has put together a guide for installing Imagick on Windows so it can be used in your PHP applications..

After a few weeks of experimenting on and off I've just managed to get the Imagick extension installed under Apache on Windows (my development environment). While discovering how to make it work was not at all simple the final process of getting all the pieces to play together nicely was pretty easy. In this post I'll briefly discuss what ImageMagick and the Imagick extension for PHP are, why you might want to use them, how I got them up and running and finally a very simple piece of example code. I'm hoping this post will help people avoid the frustration and effort I went through to get them to work!

He explains what the tools (ImageMagick & Imagick) are and why it's a bit more difficult to install them on Windows than just a point and click sort of thing. He walks you through an eight-step process that will have you up and working in no time and includes a simple PHP script you can run to ensure things are working as they should.

On NETTUTS.com there's a recent tutorial - the ninth part of the "CodeIgniter from Scratch" series - posted (by Burak Guzel) for all of the users of this popular framework out there. It looks at, starting from the very beginning, how to create an upload and image manipulation script for use in the framework.

In lesson nine of our CodeIgniter series, we'll build a small image gallery that allows you to upload files, and automatically create thumbnails

He links to the previous eight parts of the series if you need to catch up as well as the source code for this installment so you can follow along with the screencast. For those more on the go, you can also download the screencast and watch it whenever.

The Zend Developer Zone has a new tutorial from Vikram Vaswani on working with GraphicsMagik to create and manipulate images in your PHP scripts.

Based on the robust, multi-threaded GraphicsMagick library, aka the "Swiss Army knife of image processing", PHP's GraphicsMagick extension allows developers to add street cred to their image (sorry, I couldn't resist!) with some fairly powerful API methods. This article discusses the extension in detail, introducing you to its key functions and showing you how to rotate, resample, transform, crop, carve, and otherwise mangle your images until they roll over and beg for mercy.

The tutorial looks at how to get the package installed (both from source or as a pecl package) and how to check and make sure it's up and working. The sample scripts included show you how to grab the info about an image, resize it, write it out to a file, rotate/flip it and do a few other fun tricks (including using built-in filters).

Vito Chin has announced the release of a new image manipulation extension that was ported from Imagick - Gmagick.

The extension seeks to make the image processing capability of GraphicsMagick accessible from PHP. GraphicsMagick is forked from version 5.5.2 of ImageMagick and had since developed with important differences and improvements. [...] In terms of Gmagick and Imagick, we try to keep the method interface similar so existing Imagick users will find converting to Gmagick a breeze.

You can grab the extension from its PECL page.

PHPBuilder.com has posted the seventh part of their "ABCs of PHP" series - a look at arrays and hashes.

An array is a list of a certain variable type, where each item in the list can be referenced by a unique index number, usually starting at 0. [...] Like any other variable type, PHP will automatically define a variable type and set it up for you when you start using it, however in most cases (and it's good practice) you should usually pre-declare your intention to use an array, especially if you don't know in advance what your going to be storing in it.

The article talks about what arrays are, how to create them, manipulating them with functions like array_splice and creating subarrays.

Harry Roberts has a quick post to his blog today showing a method he's come up with to handle PHP arrays from inside of SQL statements (a port of the JsonSQL library to PHP).

Trent Richardson created a very small and simple JsonSQL library for JavaScript which allows you to run an extremely limited subset of SQL against a Json array/object. I quickly ported it over to PHP 5 and it works like a charm, although the syntax for the WHERE clause isn't exactly the same but the rest ported across properly.

He's included some sample source code of it in action - selecting information out of an array of user information, once changing their order and the other grabbing a username. Complete source for the library is included too.