Raphael Stolt recently spent some time working up a tool to visualize Phing buildfiles and he's blogged about it in this new post.

Out of the box the Phing -l option can be used to get a first overview of all available targets in a given buildfile but it doesn't untangle the target dependencies and sometimes a picture is still worth a thousand words. Luckily the Ant community already provides several tools to accomplish the visualization of Ant buildfiles, reaching from solutions that apply a Xslt stylesheet upon a given buildfile.

Using the ant2dot tool along with the Graphiz graphic library, he transforms the XML from the build file into a simple graphic showing the flow of the build. An example image is included.

Christian Stocker points out an interesting contribution by the web developers over at the New York Times website - the xslcaching extension for PHP.

It caches the parsed XSLT stylesheets into your apache child memory (shared memory is on the todo list) and reuses it at the next request. [...] As - depending on the size of your stylesheets - the importing of XSLT stylesheets may take a considerable amount of time, this extension may really improve your website's performance.

Check out the project's page for full details on the installation, use and license for it (including some links for further reading).

On the PHP-Coding-Practices.com site today, there's a new tutorial posted showing how to create monocromatic (variations of the same color) CSS stylesheets quickly and easily via PHP.

The monochromatic color scheme uses variations in lightness and saturation of a single color. It looks clean and elegant. [...] The monochromatic color scheme is perfect for our task of generating CSS via PHP based on forming shades of a base color.

You'll need to grab their library to work with in the tutorial, the rest is included in the tutorial. They show how the CSS is defined, how to use the CSS in your page and some sample screenshots of the resulting layouts with the monocromatic coloring.