Rob Allen has a quick note for fans (or those just discovering) his "Getting Started with Zend Framework" tutorial - he's posted an updated version for ZF2 beta 1.

Getting started with Zend Framework 2 (beta1), creates the same application as my ZF1 tutorial, so it should be very familiar, but this time, it's in the context of Zend Framework 2. As usual, it's a PDF too.

This latest version gives you a gentle introduction to the framework and steps you through the creation of a sample music inventory system. It includes code and explanations of how set up modules, controllers, models and views and how to tie them all together. If you're new to the framework and want to get off and running quickly, I'd highly recommend his tutorial.

On PHPMaster.com today there's a new tutorial about using the Zend_Pdf component of the Zend Framework to generate invoices from the billing data in your application.

The PDF format is currently the most used format to exchange documents. If you provide your website users with printable versions of invoices, event tickets and other similar documents, you'll most likely want to generate them as PDFs on the fly. In this article you will see how you can use Zend_Pdf to auto-generate PDF invoices.

The concept is pretty simple - take the rows of invoice data from your system and inject them into a new PDF document. They show you how to create an invoice layout that includes that data, a header with your company name, invoice-related information and the total/amount due at the bottom. The full code is included to help you create the Zend_Pdf object, apply the text to it (based on location in the document) and working with the default font. You can download the full source from github.

Sameer Borate has a quick post to his blog today with some code that lets you read the version of a PDF document programmatically without a dependency on a PDF extension or library being installed.

The following [example] is a very short code to read the version number of a PDF document using PHP. I needed this recently during a PDF processing app developed in PHP. As Adobe uses different compression methods in various versions, it becomes necessary to be able to identify the version of the PDF under work.

The code opens the file with a fopen and parses a certain line for the major and minor version. The PDF extension for PHP can do something similar with the pdf_get_value function passing in either "major" or "minor" as the second parameter.

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.

php|architect Magazine has officially announced the introduction of a new publishing format for their magazine. Readers are no longer tied to just PDF versions - they can now opt for ePUB editions of the magazine starting with this month's issue (and retroactively!).

Still, even though PDF was a less popular format in 2002 than it has become today, it was a much easier choice for us when the only way to read an electronic publication was to sit in front of a computer. The advent of portable e-book readers demanded that we consider other formats; as a result, about six months ago we started a skunkworks program, spearheaded by our very own Keith Casey, to create ePub and MOBI versions of our magazine.

Thanks to an ePUB document generator, the magazine can now be dynamically generated into three formats - the usual PDF file, an ePUB edition and a MOBI edition for the Kindle fans out there. All subscribers have been upgraded to this plan - the Premium subscription - and are able to start pulling down these editions today.

Sudheer Satyanarayana has provided a handy cheat sheet for those using the Zend_Date component of the Zend Framework listing the default values of the constants it provides.

Date and time handling in general is a problem in programming. For PHP programmers, there's a good library out there that performs all the difficult tasks and provides convenient APIs. Zend_Date has several constants defined. It is good to know what each one of them represents.

You can either come back to this post if you need a reference or you can download the PDF and have it right at your fingertips.

Brian Swan has a new post to his blog that looks at a method for pulling back the reports from a SQL Server instance in something a bit more readable/useful - an Excel document.

One of the most common questions [from his previous post] has been "How do I render a report as an Excel document?" I've been telling folks that this is easy with the SSRS SDK for PHP (and it is easy), but when I sat down to do it, I ran into a problem. So, in this post, I'll show you how to render a SSRS report as an Excel document and how to avoid the one problem that caused me headaches.

This post's a short one with a code snippet (and download) showing how to connect to the server and create a "RenderAsEXCEL" object and request the report information with that in the rendering function. Then it's just as simple as pushing that information out to a file as a ".xls". The included download will also let you pull down the report as HTML or as a PDF.

If you've been waiting for the print edition of Matthew Turland's "Web Scraping with PHP" book (from php|architect Press) your wait is over. According to a new post on his blog the print version is now available for order.

I know a number of my readers have been waiting for this announcement: my book, Web Scraping with PHP, is now available for sale in hard copy form! That's right, you can now finally order your very own print edition copy. [...] To those who felt forced into buying the PDF edition to get access to the content because a print edition was not available until now, you have my most sincere and profound apologies.

His web scraping book covers topics like understanding HTTP requests on a base level, working with several HTTP clients like cURL, pecl_http, Zend_Http_Client and how to analyze the remote page's information with things like SimpleXML, the DOM functions and the XMLReader extension. If the print version's not your thing, you can still get the PDF from the php|architect store too.

On the Perplexed Labs blog today Matt has this new post looking at a common issue developers face when they're trying to make their site easier for users to get their information off a site and onto their local machines - converting HTML over to PHP (using wkhtmltopdf).

Often this involves using somewhat cryptic output primitives and creating the PDF by hand. Wouldn't it be nice if there were a way to re-use all that beautiful HTML, CSS, and maybe even Javascript that you already wrote? Well, there is. It's called wkhtmltopdf. Normally a command line utility, with the release of 0.10.0_beta5 antialize included a simple C API to be able to build bindings in other popular languages.

How does this relate to PHP? Well, he's created an extension specifically to hook PHP into the tool and make calls like "wkhtmltopdf_convert" with the output type and page to convert as parameters and a PDF filename to push it out to.

On the Zend Developer Zone there's a new post by Vikram Vaswani about a method for creating PDF files directly from a Zend Framework application (hint: it uses Zend_Pdf).

PHP comes with a number of options to help developers dynamically generate PDF files from within their applications. The Haru and PDFlib extensions offer a complete API for dynamic PDF generation, and there also exist a number of open-source PHP components that can be used for the same purpose. This article will introduce you to one such component, the Zend_Pdf component that ships as part of the Zend Framework, and illustrate how it can be used to perform sophisticated PDF operations from within a PHP application.

The tutorial walks you through some of the introductory steps to using the component (outside of the framework) and create a sample PDF with some basic text. It gets more technical by adding in pictures, text wrapping, drawing lines and shapes, styling text and using things like the My_Pdf_Table feature to easily create tables. There's even a bit at the end about using the properties of the file to set things like title, subject and author.