On PHPRiot.com there's a new tutorial showing you how to use the Douglas-Peucker algorithm to make the pathing on your map the simplest possible (the fewer points the better) having serious benefits a wide range of users, most notably those on mobile devices.

When drawing a path on a map (for instance, the directions from point A to point B) it is important to consider the limitations of the device you're drawing the path on. In this article, I will show you how to reduce the number of points in a path so the path can be displayed with minimal loss of quality on devices such as iPhone or Android-powered devices that may struggle with an extremely large set of points.

Using the GTFS service's data, he's been creating maps for an iPhone application. Naturally, a path with 700 points would take a lot of resources to render. Using the Douglas-Peucker algorithm he can reduce it down to a much more manageable 70 points. He explains the algorithm briefly and hows how to implement it in PHP with three classes - ShapePoint, Shape and ShapeReducer. The resulting reduced dataset is then passed directly over to a Google Maps for plotting.

On the PHPMagazine.net site there's a new article about PHP user groups and some of the resources that can be used to help find one in your area.

Part of this community a lot of core developers, documentation editors, web application developers, hackers, Quality assurance team, tons of open source projects, PHP UG around the world, and many many other people contributing each one in its category, and even friends and family! Users Group are an active element of the PHP ecosystem, and I believe that everyone should be involved to contribute and keep these UG active around the world.

Some of the efforts that he's pointed out from the past are the phpgroups.org site, phpusergroups.com as well as the sharemymap.com effort to map the groups out. Unfortunately there's no single resource that you can point to that has a full listing.

On the SitePoint PHP blog today there's a new post showing you how to create a 404 page that will redirect people back to the page they're looking for (that used to be there).

It's often necessary to reorganize your site and change the URL structure but, assuming you have similar content, users should rarely encounter a "page not found" error. Producing unnecessary 404 pages is one of my top 10 development mistakes. In this article, we'll create an automated PHP redirection system that converts old URLs to a new address. It's not production code, but it will illustrate the basics so that you can adapt it for your own website.

They walk you through the creation of a 404 error handling PHP page, configuring your server to use it and making the mapping of new URL to old URL. There's even a bit to include if there's not a mapping for a requested page - returning a 301 HTTP header.

New on Developer.com today there's a new article looking at one of the more powerful ORM tools available for PHP - Doctrine.

Because of the relational database's pivotal role in driving Web applications, a great deal of time and effort has been put into creating tools that not only simplify the task of mapping database tables to a programming language's object-oriented class structure, but also facilitate the management of your data and schemas over the project lifecycle. [...] The PHP community also has a powerful database integration tool at their disposal: a project known as Doctrine.

They help you get started with this powerful tool by showing you how to get it installed, create a sample schema and loading some fixtures (base data). There's also a quick snippet of code showing you how to grab information from a sample user table and display the name of the user.

The Zend Developer Zone has a quick post from albeva about an extension from the default controller in the Zend Framework to map URL parameters directly to the methods.

This not only makes parameter passing intuitive (rather than calling $this->_request->getParam() ) but also automatically uses the default value if provided and if typehinting is provided either via phpdoc comment or before the parameter (array or classname) it will do the required instantiation or type casting.

The post includes a snippet of sample code, but you can learn more about the script here.

Jason Gilmore has posted the first tutorial in a series of tutorial combining PHP and jQuery, a look at creating a web site visitor map.

Have you ever wanted to create a map depicting the geographical origin of recent visitors to your website? In this tutorial I'll show you how to record these locations using the Google Ajax Search API, and then use a combination of PHP, MySQL, Ajax, and the Google Maps API to store these locations and build the map.

The tutorial shows how to use the Google Ajax API to locate the current visitor's spot in the world, store it into a MySQL database and then use a jQuery interface to pull the json-formatted details out of the system for display.

The PHP-GTK Community site has launched a new service to help PHP-GTKers out there find out other developers that might be in their area - a world map (based on Google maps) of other PHP-GTK developers around the world.

I reviewed the coordinates given by existing members and noticed a good number had visibly inverted latitude and longitude; so I inverted them again to place them where it appeared to make more sense (are there really PHP-GTK devs in the middle of the pacific, or near the South pole ?). So you may want to double-check your coordinates to make sure the values are correct, because it's likely I've not found every error.

He's also asking for the Brasil PHP-GTK community to include their information in the map as well as a request for anyone out there that might want to make a "prettier" icon for showing the developers on the map.

Since the Seven Things meme has been charging its way through the members of the PHP community (and some outside it), it's hard to keep track of who is tagging who and if those people have posted their "seven things" and tagged others. Michelangelo van Dam has tried to make things easier with his "Who Tagged Who" map mini-application that crawls through the posts looking for others who were tagged.

Trying to get a bit of overview of all people who have put up their "Seven Things" list, I created a little map that shows who tagged who with an overview of the most tagged persons.

You can also grab the XML source file if you'd like to manipulate it yourself.

Asvin Balloo has posted the second part of his geolocate with PHP tutorial series - using the mapping information gathered from the previous article to plot them on a map.

In the first part of this series I showed how you could get the country of a visitor via his IP address. Now with this precious information, I'll show you how to map the visitor visually on the world map using Google Maps.

The full code is provided - the PHP to pull the latitude/longitude information from the GeoIP library and the Javascript to get the Google Map to plot the point. You can check out the live demo for an example or just grab the source and try it out for yourself.

New from PHPRiot today, there's this new tutorial showing you how to combine a PHP interface with the Google Maps API to do some geocoding of your own.

Geocoding is the process of finding the longitude and latitude of a given address or location. The Google Maps service gives developers and web site owners free access to their geocoder, both using the Google Maps JavaScript API, as well as using the web service. In this article I will show you how to access the geocoder web service using PHP so that it can be used in your own applications.

The tutorial walks you through every step of the way - from getting your Google API ID to making a simple request all the way out to using placemarks to store locations to fetch later on.

This is a great, very detailed summary that anyone wanting to work with the Google API in PHP should definitely check out.