In a new post Bertrand Mansion shows how he combined the versatility of the PEAR QuickForm2 package and the Bootstrap project from Twitter to quickly make a form using the project's styling (CSS).

I don't know about you, but for me building HTML Forms and styling HTML Forms are maybe the most boring things in web development. It's repetitive and takes a lot of time to do things correctly. That's why tools like Twitter's Bootstrap and PEAR's HTML_QuickForm2 can help with this part of our job. Wouldn't it be nice to have QuickForm2 generate a markup compatible with Bootstrap CSS, so that you could get a nice looking form without to much efforts? Well, that's what I plan to do here.

He starts by creating a simple QuickForm2 form with no renderers attached (no pre-defined styles) and a custom render callback that wraps the items in "div" tags with the correct styles. There's also a custom renderer included for grouping items with additional styling attached.

In this recent post to his blog John Congdon looks at some of his local user groups - Orlando and Daytona Beach in Florida - and how they handle their meetings and groups differently.

I am a member of two PHP user groups. Each one runs a little bit differently. I am looking for feedback from other people in other PHP user groups to find ways we may be able to make these better. he East Central Florida PHP User Group (Daytona Beach area) is new/restarting. [...] They seem to be more geared towards teaching new PHP developers. [...] The Orlando PHP User Group is quite different. They lean towards more presentation style meetings. Someone proposes a topic, and then someone volunteers to be the presenter.

He asks for comments from the community as a whole, wondering what he can do and what other groups in similar situations have done to help grow and improve their group. Comments on the post include suggestions of a more traditional approach over the mentoring aspect, a possible mixing of the styles and using tools likee Google Moderator to pick out the topics people are most interested in.

Derek Allard has a quick post for the CodeIgniter users out there with some styling you can use on the default CI calendar.

A project I'm working on needs a monthly calendar. Naturally, I'm using CodeIgniter as the base of it. [...] My needs were something more akin to the interface iCal provides; broad, spacious, subtle. Obviously, the default is just an unstyled base that CI provides as a starting grounds. The Calendar library documentation provides some insight into how we can start changing this up.

He talks about the settings he needed to change including the "day_type" setting and template that specifies the CSS classes to use. Add in the CSS and you'll end up with something like this. You can download the example files too.

Richard Smaizys has a new post to his blog with a few simple tips you can follow to help improve your code's style and readability.

So you have to know and you can not forget that your program (not only websites) is like a living beast with whom many people might work in the future. Your code is like your art piece which sometimes need editing, renewal and etc. You can not just think that you will always be the person who manages everything and supports all the bugs. By understanding this you also agree that the code must be maintainable and readable not only for you after a year or two but to other people that may not be so skilled or advanced and otherwise.

He covers two things in this post (there's this other about brackets) - tabs versus spaces (or hard vs soft tabs) and a bit more on braces, specifically about the same line/next line debate.

Have some code style tips of your own or just want to discuss Richard's suggestions? Leave a comment on the post!

On DesignLuv.com today they've posted what they call a style guide for PHP developers - some types on writing well-styled, easy to read code.

If you're a new developer and are trying to hone in on your coding style, maybe try giving the following a go. These are simply some conventional formatting methods that are generally appreciated and supported by PHP developers and will improve the overall readability of your code.

They talk about a few different subjects - variable names, class and method naming, bracket spacing, default arguments, constants, loops and a lot more. It's good to see them including things like commenting and file name suggestions.

WebReference.com has the latest tutorial in their "Simplified XML" series posted today. This installment focuses on the formatting of the documents in the browser and how to read them back in.

We have already discussed the XML functions so let's use an example to demonstrate how they work. First, we get the XML file that we want to use. The idea is to create an XML parser. This will then enable us to read and write to an XML document.

Their examples show code that parses an XML document, outputs a simple list of the values inside and how to take an XSL style sheet and apply it to the data as applied through a xml-stylesheet tag.

On t Dagfinn Reiersol'sblog, there's a new post that's the second part of a series on "real programming" with the upcoming PHP 5.3 release.

In part one of this series, we looked at the ability to use lambda functions or closures to process arrays. In this part, we will see how closures can be used to build classes in a completely new way. After I did my own research, I discovered that someone had beat me to it.

He compares the two approaches - one defining closures in the constructor, the other as they're needed - and some code showing the creation and use of the lambda functions (using __call and call_user_func_array to catch those requests).

In this new article from Noupe.com they link to several resources that can help you make your site's forms a bit "more beautiful" by combining PHP and Ajax (and Javascript).

Forms needs a solid visual structure, a profound hierarchy of form elements (Fields and Labels), powerful techniques and Functionality (AJAX) to make the form look and work creatively. [...] Today we wanted to share with you some great steps to get the perfect form: we will go through designing and usability you need to keep in mind, styling your form, spicing it up with some nice javascript effects, validating user's input and finally getting it to work using PHP and Ajax.

Some of the links include:

• Web Form Design Patterns: Sign-Up Forms
• Justify elements using jQuery and CSS
• XHTML/CSS web forms: 5 simple techniques
• Using ProtoForm
• Autosuggest / Autocomplete with Ajax

Most of the article links also include links to demos of the tutorial/application in action.

DevShed finishes off another series with the last part of their look at making a blog app with the help of the CodeIgniter framework.

By using the framework, you'll be taking advantage of the MVC pattern to separate the application's logic from its visual presentation. This article will focus on the improving the appearance of the application's final details: the section concerned with receiving and displaying comments.

Starting with the full source from the previous parts of the series, they modify the view file for their blog's comments to ass come nice CSS and styling. The final page shows the entire code for the application (split out ino chuncks of code for each file).

Robert Basic has a new post showing how to style the default output of the Zend_Form component of the Zend Framework:

Here's an example for styling Zend_Form's default layout. The default layout is using definition lists. While there's an option for changing the default layout, the wrapper tags and stuff, I see no reason for it. Create the form, add some CSS and your good to go.

He includes some sample markup, the PHP (framework) code that produces it and the CSS that can be used to style it. This can then be used and expanded on however you'd want to customize the form to your site.