On the Tiger Heron blog, there's a continuation of the series that Tony Freixas has been writing to following the beginning steps of working with PHP. First there was the download/install, then setting up a development environment. This time, he actually gets around to writing a bit of basic code.

Specifically, I will describe how I boot my PHP scripts and why I boot them the way I do. Part 1 shows how my requirements for code portability and maintainability influence the boot process. Part 2 will go into more detail about the specific steps executed by the boot code.

His basic task for the first example is to make a templating sort of system, calling a Navigation class to output links in list items. He outlines the goals of the project, what he's found for his current solution and some alternatives he's discovered along the way.

Tiffany Brown shares a quick function she whipped up to create dropdown menus from the contents of a newline separated text file (or files).

I developed this PHP function for a project I'm working on. I'm posting it here in case I need it again, or in case you find it handy.

The function turns each line into an option tag making defining custom menus based on the contents of dynamically-given text files easy.

This could also be easily adapted to create navigations menus at the top of your pages with a few modifications to the HTML tags being used and some CSS to change the look of the list.