On the Etsy "Code as Craft" blog there's a recent post about their move to using the GeoNames service internally rather than the external, third-party API previously in use.

People are passionate about where they live. At Etsy we need to keep track of lots of different locations, such as buyers' billing and shipping addresses and sellers' shop locations. As Etsy continues to expand internationally we wanted to provide better localization and translations for our location place names. We determined that the best way to effect this change was to move from using a closed location API provider to internal services backed by the open GeoNames data set.

The post details some of the steps in the process including the mapping of the current data to the new structure (the script is available on github). They talk about how they mapped their old data over (trial and error sometimes) and the creation of a database of "GeoNameIDs" for each customer in their records. They've also implemented a Lucene/Solr search for improved searching and auto-suggestion based on the user's location.

If you're a PHP developer and have been looking for a good way to manage 3rd party dependencies in your applications, look no further than Composer. If you're already using it, you know how useful it can be, but you might not know about some of the extra features that come with it. In this new tutorial on PHPMaster.com, they describe the automation that is also possible as a part of Composer's management process.

Following Alexander Cogneau's introduction to dependency management with Composer, you now know that Composer is a resolver for managing external project dependencies and versioning constraints. But is that all it does? In this article I'll show you how Composer can also be used as a basic build automation tool.

Thanks to some handy configuration settings available in the "composer.json" file, you can execute scripts for events like "pre-install", "post-update" and "pre-uninstall". They include an example "Installer" class with methods for a few of the actions, showing some of the special methods you can use to get metadata about the current operation and environment.

Derick Rethans has a new post today looking at a method for setting up multiple PHP versions on the same machine and switch between them with a little help from some simple bash scripts.

For many of my projects (both hobby and commercial) I need to support many different PHP configurations. Not only just different PHP versions, but also debug builds, ZTS builds and 32-bit builds. In order to be able to test and build extensions against all those different PHP configurations I have adopted a simple method that I'm sharing with you here.

Using this script he can tell his system to pull the latest version of any release from SVN and try to compile it. The trick is putting each of them into a different directory under /usr/local. He uses another small shell function (with a function called "pe()") that sets up the pathing to the right release, complete with its own locations for PEAR/PECL and a php.ini.

ProDevTips.com has a new tutorial posted today sharing a database replication script they've put together to keep two databases in sync.

After reading up on MySQL replication for a bit I realized that it would go quicker to simply write something in PHP that would sync a subset of tables in one database to exact copies of the same tables in another. Note that the code/SQL [in the example] only works if you replicate from one database to another on the same machine since the main thing here are SQL queries that contain operations/look ups on two databases in the same query.

He includes the code to do the fetch on certain tables (based on a unique key), pushes them into an array and exports them back out into another table. There's also a modification included that makes it work on tables without an auto-increment column.

NetTuts.com has come up with a Phing (the automated build tool written in PHP) build script that designers can drop in as a part of their deployment process to compress, concatenate and Prefixize all of their stylesheets and scripts.

We've created a build script for Phing that will give designers the ability to automatically compress, concatenate, and Prefixize all of their stylesheets and scripts - simply by typing five characters. I'll show you how to use it in this quick tip video.

The post includes a screencast showing you how to get it all set up and working with the rest of your Phing install. They don't help you set up Phing - you'll need that already set up and running to use the task. You can grab teh script directly from github.

In this new tutorial on DevShed, they walk you through the creation of a secure login script that uses sha256 encryption, a captcha to prevent automated signups, XSS attack protection and several other features.

Recent advancements in PHP offer the developer a variety of tools to improve the security of login systems. [...] This programming tutorial will teach you how to create a simple, yet secure login script utilizing PHP using MySQL and bracing for XSS attack prevention.

Other features include no persistent logins, preventing direct file access, an idle timeout on the user session, protection against session fixation and anti-brute force measures. Full (procedural) code is provided as well as screenshots from phpMyAdmin showing the database table structure. You can grab the code for the project here.

On PHPBuilder.com today there's a new article from Marc Plotz looking at how you can use PHP and cURL with Facebook to update your status.

You probably know that cURL is a wonderful tool for extracting data from a Web page -- that's a given if you are a developer worth your salt. However, in this article, I want to show you how to use cURL to do things for you. We will start by exploring cURL in detail and then move on to use a very cool script to update our Facebook status.

He introduces cURL for those that aren't familiar with it already (including how to tell if it's installed) and some basic code to show a GET request on a remote file. Things get a little more complicated from there - you'll need to set up some cookies for Facebook, use some regular expression matching to find the form to submit to and send the POST data correctly for the update.

Jim Plush has a new post to his blog today that points out a bit of code you can use to auto-create issues in Jira from your PHP application.

We use Jira at Gravity for tracking issues and bugs. Since I'm not always on VPN or have access to our network managing my todos has been cumbersome. I've tried every Todo app out there and always fail to use them for more than 2 days. I finally saw a great article on just using a simple Todo.txt file in your Dropbox folder and working from that. It's been a dream and working out great.

His tool lets him use the Todo list example to push its contents out to the PHP script that connects to the Jira instance and make a new issue. The code is included in the post, ready for cut-and-pasting.

New on the Zend Developer Zone is an article looking t migrating your application from PHP 5.2 up to 5.3 (relatively) painlessly.

Quick research shows that most prominent applications had to be patched or changed, even though minimally, to work cleanly with 5.3. To help people to convert their web applications to 5.3, I present here a migration script that would allow you to inspect your applications for potential migration problems. Do not expect supernatural wonders from it, but it may save you some valuable time.

The migration script looks for a few things (like bad use of magic methods and the use of deprecated functions) but doesn't catch bad use of reference or, of course, fix the issues for you - you'll still need to make the recommended updates yourself. An example of its use and output is also included.

Andrew Johnstone, inspired by a previous post on file locking to avoid cron job overlaps, as posted his own method and give a few more examples of how it can be done.

In order for a lock to work correctly it must handle, Atomicity / Race Conditions, and Signaling. I use the following bash script to create locks for crontabs and ensure single execution of scripts.

His bash script looks at the processes currently running and checks to be sure there's not already one there. If not, it takes the script given and executes an instance. If the process has finished running but the lock file is still there, it removes it and moves on to the execute. He includes a few examples of how to use it and the code for a PHP class that makes it easy to check if something's running, locked or what the current signal/status of the process is.