Attila Szabo has come up with a class that makes sending SMS messages from your site simple (through the smsBug gateway).

I wrote a simple PHP class for sending SMS messages through smsBug gateway. It can send a single SMS message and receive the number of credits left (see the UML diagram of the classes below). You need to include two classes into your PHP code.

He includes an example of it in use (sending a single SMS message to a phone) as well as a demo of it in action and a link to the download where you can grab the class for yourself.

Johannes Schluter has posted about an interesting little project he's worked up to find his own path to usefulness in Twitter - a PHP extension that tweets bugs to his account.

The other thing I see there are people telling me what errors in their applications they are currently fixing. I can't see why that's interesting. But as people seem to be interested I found out that I have stuff to say, too, or better my PHP has, since sometimes I have errors there, too. But well, I'm lazy so I don't want to "twitter" them myself.

His "little PHP extension" that automatically sends the reported error out to the designated account. Of course, it tends to slow things down (connection to a remote machine and all) but it could be useful for sending an SMS is something pops up.

Stuart Herbert has announced the release of a new site that takes the place of providing SMS messages to UK users from twitter, twittex.com - a site created with the symfony framework.

Last Thursday, twitter was forced to withdraw its free SMS alerts service to UK users. [...] Six days later, thanks to the power of symfony, PHP, mysql and q4m, we've built and launched a replacement service called twittex.com.

The site lets you prepay for the messages you want to use. Using the symfony framework made it easy to get a system up and running quickly and easily (in six days!) to fill the gap suddenly left by twitter's decision.

The Zend Developer Zone has a new tutorial posted today showing how to use the open source encryption tool GnuPG from inside PHP.

While GnuPG works very well as a standalone tool, it also plays very well with PHP. This integration is possible due to PHP's ext/gnupg extension, which provides a flexible and powerful API to access GnuPG functions for encryption, decryption, message signing and verification, and key maintenance. And your mission (should you choose to accept it) will be to accompany me over the next few pages, while I give you a crash course in this API, showing you how easy it is to integrate these functions into your next PHP application.

The tutorial walks you through some of the basic concepts behind the "lock and key" GnuPG implements and how to get the extension installed so you can follow along. His examples range from a basic encryption of a string out to a full encrypt/decrypt example, how to sign information with a key and even a method for sending an encrypted message.

On the PHP in Action blog Dagfinn Reiersol shares a method to send messages across a POST request that's followed by a redirect (versus a simple GET where it can be in the URL).

When processing a GET request, you can display whatever messages you want. The most simplistic way is to echo them directly; or if just slightly more sophisticated, set it in the template that's about to become the web page. When processing a POST request that is to be followed by a redirect, you can't do that. The response (redirect) sent back to the browser does not have any text or HTML content.

He points out two different ways to handle the problem - either manually append the message to the URL you're redirecting to or (a bit better method) store it in a session variable and remove it once its done. Several frameworks call this a "flash message". He gives examples of how to set this in two popular frameworks - Zend Framework and CakePHP.

On the PHP in Action blog Dagfinn Reiersol shares a method to send messages across a POST request that's followed by a redirect (versus a simple GET where it can be in the URL).

When processing a GET request, you can display whatever messages you want. The most simplistic way is to echo them directly; or if just slightly more sophisticated, set it in the template that's about to become the web page. When processing a POST request that is to be followed by a redirect, you can't do that. The response (redirect) sent back to the browser does not have any text or HTML content.

He points out two different ways to handle the problem - either manually append the message to the URL you're redirecting to or (a bit better method) store it in a session variable and remove it once its done. Several frameworks call this a "flash message". He gives examples of how to set this in two popular frameworks - Zend Framework and CakePHP.

On the ThinkPHP blog today, Andreas Uhsemann has posted about a project that he and fellow Mayflower Barcampers came up with that they thought could be useful (and interesting) to work on - a PHP extension to interface with the Skype communication tool.

At the Mayflower Barcamp a few weeks ago we had a very interesting and promising project: Develop a PHP extension for communication with Skype. Actually this project was a merge between two projects: One was to "develop a PHP extension" - five out of six project members never had written any PHP extension or did any PHP core development before. The other project was the Skype extension, with the goal to have a new PHP function that could send a chat message to a given Skype profile.

As they worked on it, they realized that it was really D-Bus (the message bus system) they needed to interface with, not Skype directly. They include some of the code they used to make the connection - creating the message, setting a few parameters and "send and block" the message out to the D-Bus connection waiting. They've even put the code up on a public CVS repository (on thinkforge.org) if you'd like to download and play with it yourself.

On his blog today, Samisa Abeysinghe points out a library that can be used to trace the SOAP messages going back and forth between your client and server - the WSO2 Web services framework for PHP.

The Web services client class, WSClient has two methods for this, getLastRequest() and getLastResponse(). After calling the request() method of the client instance, you can call any of those methods to gain access to the messages.

Simple example code is included showing how to grab that information from the client object. If you're looking for a way to get the WSF/PHP functionality installed on your system, check out this step-by-step tutorial on using the PECL tool to create and install the packages to your PHP setup.

DevShed has posted the next part of their series looking at handling errors thrown by the __autoload functionality of PHP. This time they enhance their previous method and allow for custom error messaging.

In this last article of the series I'm going to introduce some additional modifications to the current signature of the "__autoload()" function to make it throw exceptions that display more useful error messages.

They start by setting up the application to have something to build from (a series of PHP scripts). They add on the exception handling to throw the custom error (the "class not found" they mentioned).

On the Northclick Blog Soenke Ruempler has shared the new name for their message queue software they're developing (see here) - dropr.

Why? When Boris was writing the client angel script he somehow named it "dropr". As we neither got better suggestions nor had any other idea we just decided for this name. Actually the name is a little bit fun because all those stupidR startupRs. But it's nice and somehow our framework drops message into queues.

Check out the project's homepage for more information including installation instructions, methods to download the latest version, some FAQs and a roadmap for where the project's going.