A little while back, Alan Knowles wondered something that I'm sure has crosses the mind of every PHP developer out there, especially when they came across a particularly bad chunk of code - some people should need to apply for a license before releasing their PHP code out into the wild.

Unlike most of the reviews you get, I was specifically looking at code quality [of the CMSs]. not fuzzy does it look nice!

He looks at a whole list of them including: Tanslucis, Siteman, Pivot, jaf-cms, Guppy, Doop and CutePHP. Unfortunately, most of the news is bad - between badly structured code and mixes of HTML and PHP, there was almost nothing good in any of them.

Stefan Mischook has posted the second part of the video tutorial introduction to making a Zend Framework application:

This Zend Framework video is from our resident Zend-nerd: Jon Lebensold. Again, let us know what you think and should you have any suggestions or request, please feel free to comment.

Part one was posted back on Tuesday for those that need to catch up.

Stefan Mischook has just posted a new video in his set of PHP-related presentations - part one of a look at setting up the MVC structure in a Zend Framework application.

This video is a little more basic than the previous Zend videos.

The video runs about twelve minutes long and covers the use of the Framework to post information back to a page and insert some of the information back into the database.

The PHPBuilder.com site has a quick reminder about a handy little bit of functionality PHP has to make evaluations quicker - the ternary operator.

This allows you to check for the existence of a variable (or check that the variable has a valid value) and assign a value accordingly. This is very useful when you are dealing with $_GET, $_POST, $_SESSION etc. variables, because you don't know whether the incoming variable will exist, and if it doesn't you might want to assign a default value.

An example is included and explained - evaluating an index in the _GET superglobal to see if it exists. It returns either the value itself or a false.

Cal Evans has posted a tutorial on the Zend Developer Zone (posted today) about using the PEAR Structures_DataGrid package to create quick and easy data tables.

In this article, I'll be introducing you to the Structures_DataGrid package, showing you how it can be used to display structured data in tabular form. I'll be showing you how to hook it up to various data sources (including a CSV file, an RSS feed and an Excel spreadsheet), and how to format the resulting output so it's as pretty (or as ugly) as you want it to be.

They talk about what you'll need to get started (the different packages for different kinds of data) and some sample code to help you down the path to more attractive tables. There's even a bit touching on some of the more advanced features like exporting to Excel, pagination and data sorting.