On DZone.com today there's a new post from Chris Shiflett sharing some timeless advice from an older copy of a PHP Quick Reference (published in 2009) about performance and security.

While cleaning out my desk, I found an old copy of a PHP Quick Reference I helped make a few years ago. On the front page are a few performance and security tips that I thought I'd share. (Performance tips are from George Schlossnagle.)

Performance tips include profile early/profile often, cache when possible and don't over-optimize. The security hints include some of the usual suspects - trust nothing, filter input/escape output and use prepared statements.

On DZone.com today there's a new interview by Lyndsey Clevesy with Jason Gilmore looking at the Zend Framework and some of the general things to expect in coming versions.

This week's DZone Refcard is about Getting Started with the Zend Framework. The card introduces you to the basics of the Zend Framework and sets you on the path to creating your first project. I met the author, Jason Gilmore, to find out more about the topic.

They talk about some of what the framework currently has to offer developers, what kind of involvement he's had with it, who it supports as far as advanced PHP features and what's to come in version 2.0. The Zend Framework RefCard mentioned can be viewed or downloaded here - a six-page quick reference for some of the more common Zend Framework tasks.

Chris Shiflett, after finding an old reference guide, has decided to share a few helpful hints from the guide to help you in your development.

While cleaning out my desk, I found an old copy of a PHP Quick Reference I helped make a few years ago. On the front page are a few performance and security tips that I thought I'd share. (Performance tips are from George Schlossnagle.)

The tips include topics like caching, using external data sources, filtering input using prepared statements and using pre-existing solutions before just rolling your own.

Among other things mentioned in his his latest post Bill Staples talks about a new tool that makes the installation of lots of popular web apps (PHP and not) simpler - the Microsoft Web Application Installer.

The Microsoft Web Application Installer (Web AI) is a companion to Web PI, and provides a super easy way to download, install and configure many popular community and open source applications on IIS7. Available applications include DotNetNuke, Drupal, Gallery, Graffiti, osCommerce, PHPBB, and Wordpress, with more on the way.

You can find out more about this web installer and the Microsoft Platform tools from this page on Microsoft's site or in this Web AI forum (where you can also provide your own feedback).

The folks over at DZone have added to their RefCardz selection with a PHP version quick reference card.

PHP is the world's most popular server-side Web scripting language. This reference card was created to help you quickly navigate some of PHP's most commonplace features, including objectoriented programming, array and string manipulation, regular expressions, and MySQL integration.

The card (created by Jason Gilmore) is available for free download (PDF) from the DZone website.

The Zend Developer Zone has pointed out a new course that's offered by Zend to help experienced programmers further their PHP education - Zend Quick Start: PHP for Experienced Programmers.

This course covers many of the same topics as both the PHP I: Foundations and PHP II: Higher Structures classes but at an accelerated rate with special emphasis on the differences between PHP and other commonly used languages.

The next session of the course starts on April 29th and will last through May 16th. There will be nine sessions during that time for two hours at a time. You can get full details, including how to reserve your spot, on the course's page on the Zend website.

From Codewalkers.com today, there's two new tutorial-related bits of information we wanted to pass along - one's an update to a current tutorial, "Multiple Pages of Data from a Text File", and a brand new tutorial - "Quick and Dirty Ajax".

The update to the pagination tutorial includes a bit broader scope of functionality - mainly allowing for pagination from database results and how to be sure you're not dropping any additional query string variables included in the script (always a good thing).

The Ajax tutorial goes through just the basics - how to create and make the connection to a background PHP script. They also give a more "real world" example than just a "hello world", a script that can handle two types of requests, one of which is a call to a database to return results back to the script.

Over on Evolt.org today, there's a new tutorial combining two great tastes that taste great together - Ajax and PHP - to create an online calendar system quick and easy.

There are many web calendars in the market but some of them are quite complicated. If we are not able to understand the code, it becomes harder for us to customize the calendar to fit into our existing application. As such, we need to create a calendar that can plug itself into any system seamlessly without problems.

They show the creation of a calendar that can be used by including one line into the app and integrates easily into whatever style the website might be using. They give the code for building the calendar and to add dates to it on the server-side with PHP. The Ajax comes in when they make a call to the script in the background, requesting the next/previous month's output and pushing it into a local div.

Jonathan Snook has a quick tip for PHPers out there using MySQL and looking for an easy way to concatinate a lot of data in your queries.

This is just a quick tip. If you have a bunch of data that you need to concatenate, take a look at MySQL's GROUP_CONCAT function.

For example, way back when, I wrote about (and subsequently weighting those tags) to an application. It was a very simple approach with each record having a tags field. It was just a simple text field and I stored all the tags with spaces. However, to pull out a list of all tags being used in the system, I returned the tags field from all records, looped through each record, exploding the tags onto an array.

Using the group_concat() function already in MySQL, he was able to reduce looping through his data, splitting on the spaces down to a single line call in SQL telling it to concatinate spaces. He includes the code (just a few lines) to get the job done.

WordPress, one of the most popular pieces of PHP-based weblog software out there, has never been famous for it's templating system - specifically, making them. Thankfully, there's a new utility that's looking to make that a thing of the past - Canvas.

The tool integrates its results with your existing WordPress installation to make for quick and easy layout editing without you having to know a single bit of PHP, HTML, or CSS. The interface allows you to drag and drop elements into place and includes a plugin system to make for easy enhancements down the line.