On the SitePoint PHP blog there's a recent post from Craig Buckler showing how to split up your WordPress content into two or more columns quickly and easily.

WordPress is a great CMS, but implementing some features within your theme can require a little lateral thinking. The content for your page or post is usually output by the theme code using a single function call. But what if you need to split the content into two or more blocks? That might be necessary if your theme requires multiple columns or sections on the page.

There's a built in call WordPress includes, "get_the_content", that returns the content rather than just echoing it out. With this handy function giving you just the content, you're free to split up the content however you want - on certain tags or as they suggest, using the "more..." tag and a few modifications to a few other scripts to split it out into DIV blocks.

Matthew Turland, in trying to solve a problem from work, needed a way to split out some code into two files to simplify and make it easier to use them individually.

The issue I ran into was due to all the generated PHP classes being housed in a single file. I had to process two WSDL files that had several identical user-defined types in common. As a result, I couldn't simply include the two PHP files generated from them because PHP doesn't allow you to define two classes with the same name.

He used the tokenizer extension to create a simple command-line script that did the splitting for him. This script could potentially be used for splitting out other kinds of files too - "unpacking" them from their combined state. You can download the latest version from Matthew's github account.

Francois Zaninotto has a recent post looking at something every developer should consider when creating their applications - especially the libraries that might be used by other developers: code usability.

Usability guidelines can sometimes be of use in awkward places. I try to apply them to source code. [...] Of course, coding guidelines are there to make the code easy to read by everyone. But code usability goes somehow beyond. Let's see some of the differences.

He compares good versus bad code in a few different areas:

• Bad Code Comments
• Split Up Code
• Cleanliness
• New Conventions
• Listen To User Feedback

Each item is described, some including code examples to help make them more clear. Be sure to check out the comments for more good suggestions.

Alex Netkachov has updated a post he made a while back (in 2006 in fact) about making Windows batch files (.BAT) that would do the same thing as some of the functions in PHP. He's added two more to it today - one for string replace and another for splitting a string.

The replace is as simple three line call, much the same as PHP's and the split call, while a bit more complex, is still pretty straight forward (it just needs a few extra variables).

Other methods in the post include a "switch" method, defining a procedure and updating variable by its name.

In a new post to his blog today, Ken Guest talks about the split that's been made in a PEAR package for calculating the dates of holidays (Date_Holidays) for localization reasons.

We decided that this one package should be split into subpackages: one subpackage per region/country. Some advantages of this approach are that each driver / filter / subpackage gets it's own stability and version number - we wouldn't have to keep increasing the version number of Date_Holidays each time a new driver is added or when an existing driver gets a significant number of fixes.

To replace your current version of the package (with all of the regions built in) with a new version that still contains all versions, uninstall the Date_Holidays and grab the "Date_Holidays#all" package. Otherwise, you can check out the PEAR page for the main package and see the subpackage list if you only need one for your area.

Dave Dash has posted a quick script to help with an integration of openID into your application - well, really just to read the response back easily.

I'm working on implementing openID for reviewsby.us and for use in symfony apps. One thing I was having trouble with was parsing key value pairs, which is one of the requirements to reading responses. It's a fairly easy task, but [PHP][] offers so many ways to do this.

He notes the spec for how the results are returned and shares his code (based around a regular expression) that goes through the response and separates things out into key/value pairs automatically.

On the ThinkPHP blog today, there's a quick hint about dealing with larger files both with and whithout PHP.

As one man was quoted "640K of memory should be enough for anybody" no one will need to access more than 2 GB data. What happens if you - just for scientific reasons of course - try to access larger files using your 32bit hardware and your favorite programming language PHP?

They give the example of opening a large 2 gig file with PHP and the resulting error that would pop up. They try a few differnt ways before getting down to more of a non-PHP PHP solution (yes, you read that right). They decided, instead, to create a script to work with the file chunked, using an exec() call to the unix split command to break it up.

On Byster.net today, there's this new post detailing some benchmarks they've done with some of the functionality in PHP5.

Included in the list of tests were:

• Reading an integer array
• Parsing variable names
• Splitting out text
• working with a random number generator.

For each of the tests, they have a few different methods of doing the same thing and the results (in milliseconds) plotted out in bar graphs. Some of the results are surprising, but most are expected (if you work with optimizing PHP much at all). It's a good amount of coverage of functionality, though - most aspects of everyday programming are here.

Zend has issued a press release today announcing their split from the PHP group in order to pursue their own branch of the popular web development language.

Andi Gutmans, Co-founder and Vice President of Zend, is quoted as saying: It's about time we finally made the move. All of those people whining constantly about 'PHP is broken here - make it better' and 'Why can't you fix my favorite function so it works better?' Frankly, we at Zend are tired of it, and we're not gonna take it anymore.

Neither Zeev Suraski or Marc Andreessen could be reached for comment on this branch, but sources say that the entire company is behind this move. Branching off to create their own "Zend PHP" allows them to integrate their recently released (preview version) of Framework more closely and give it the power it needs to surpass the original PHP distribution.