Hannes Magnusson has a new post today about an interesting feature of the PHP documentation some might not have known existed - manual pages (man) for PHP functions/methods for unix systems.

For a while I had vim configured to run reflection when I hit "K", but after the PHP documentation team released unix manual pages for PHP I now get the manual page in all its glory; function description, parameter descriptions, return values, examples, notes, see also and everything you are used to see from the online manual. Its awesome.

These manual pages aren't installed by default, so you'll have to grab the download from the PEAR channel for the PHP documentation (doc.php.net/pman). If you're wanting to use it in VIM, you'll also need to change the keywordprg setting to "pman".

Richard Thomas has posted another "short" in his series looking at the features of the Solar Framework. This time he focuses on enhancing the base framework functionality by extending the Solar_Controller_Page class.

Solar's manual has a getting started section that walks you through setting up a basic app, This app extends "Solar_Controller_Page" which handles a lot of the backend work for you. As you get into your project you will find that pretty much every controller you have needs access to some basic structures and information, how can you ensure these are always available?

His example extends the Solar_Controller_Page to provide two model objects automatically to the rest of his application (as protected objects in the base class).

On the Unravel the Music blog there's a recent post about using memcached to held reduce the load on your PHP applications by caching certain parts of your pages.

Many framework and standalone PHP developers are given options to do full-page caching but partial page caching is rarely an option. Many times a sidebar or a footer that is loaded with dynamic content can be cached for 5, 10, or even 30 minutes without needing to read from the database again. This can drastically reduce the load on the server as query results for certain portions of your page are stored temporarily. [...] Memcached can store queries that have been processed and the bits of HTML that go with their presentation. Read on for a detailed example.

Once the memcache functionality is installed, its a snap to get right into caching your content. The two examples - pushing data in and pulling it back out - show how to cache a bit of HTML content to be used later.

NETTUTS.com has posted this new tutorial you can use to monitor when and what pages people are trying to get to on your site that aren't found:

Although many web developers rely on server logs to keep an eye out for hits on error pages, I'm going to take a different approach by using a PHP generated email. In addition, we will spice up the design a bit, add basic navigation and link to the website sitemap.

He briefly explains what error (404/403) pages are and how they work before getting into the mailing portion - a script that, using the phpMailer tool, notifies you when people hit the 404/403 page and includes things like their IP, where they came from and what the requested page was.

DevShed continues their series covering the CodeIgniter framework in this second part, a look at paginating the results of a database query for blog entries.

In this initial stage, the controller in question had a rather limited functionality, since it was only capable of displaying a bunch of blog entries that were previously stored in a MySQL table. [...] Nevertheless, in this second article of the series, I'll be explaining how provide the controller class built in the preceding tutorial with the capability for paginating blog entries.

Basing the enhancements on the code from the previous article, they update their controller to use the pagination library that comes with the framework to split up the results. The page number is based off of the third parameter of the URL.

In this new blog entry Marc Gear suggests a few things that you can do to help learn a new framework quickly and easily:

There are dozens of PHP frameworks around now, some attracting more attention than others. I am no expert on these frameworks and have not used a single one extensively so I wouldn't dream of recommending one over the other, nor do I want to enter the debate about what is or is not a framework (I'll work on the assumption that anything calling itself a framework is a framework). Instead I'm going to concentrate on how you can get started with a new framework as quickly as possible.

He suggests four examples that can help you get more familiar with each framework and how they're structured - a "hello world" as a first step, creating a simple calculator, making a guestbook and making a simple script to parse and paginate a remote RSS feed.

On the Debuggable blog Tim Koschutzki shows a way to have more than one paginated item on your page at a time (in a CakePHP application).

Many of you might have run into the problem of having multiple boxes on the same page that need to be paginated. For example you might have a left column with a list of members of your site and a right column that shows for a example a list of forums. Yeah, that's not the best example, but you get the idea.

The typical CakePHP pagination functional assumes that there's only one block of information that needs to be paginated per page. With Tim's modification, the model name for where the data is being pulled from is appended to the end of the URL and parsed by the script to know which is which.

Updating from a previous post, Jonathan Snook has updates some of his comments about a simple way to make static pages in your CakePHP framework application:

So it seems that the old code I had didn't work in debug mode, although on the current CakePHP 1.2 RC2, I'm not even sure it works at all. However, I decided to take some time to revisit the code. Last time, I simply hacked up the missingAction and missingController calls and it felt kludgy. It looked kludgy.

Instead of abusing the error handler like before he decides to opt for this missingAction/missingController combo to handle the fall through. It doesn't seem to be working 100% correctly, though and he's put in a ticket to see if its a bug or by design.

On the KillerPHP blog today, Stefan Mischook comments on whether or not WordPress version 2.5.1 "sucks".

I just recently installed the this latest version of Wordpress (2.5.1) and quickly found it hanging (while trying to load a page) for as long as 40-50 seconds! I then proceeded to isolate the potential causes (database, custom fields, custom theme) and have since found out that something stinks in 2.5.1's core.

He details some of the steps he took to try to track down the bug - installing on another server, searching the web for others with the same issue. His suggestion?

Before you upgrade your old working installation of Wordpress, I would suggest that you test 2.5.1 in some other directory just to be sure it works with your server.

On his ThisLab blog, Fred Wu has posted some quick benchmarks comparing some of the popular frameworks out there - Ruby on Rails/Passenger versus CodeIgniter/Kohana.

Last few days I have been playing with Ruby and Rails, again. Today, when someone was asking on a forum about the efficiency of web frameworks, I thought I'd give the few frameworks I work with some more benchmark testing.

His benchmarking is based on basic "Hello World" page requests for each of the frameworks. His results were interesting with CodeIgniter coming out with the fewest number of requests responded to (per second) and Rails coming out on top by a margin of about eighty or ninety over CodeIgniter/Kohana.