On PHPBuilder.com today there's a new post from Vojislav Janjic with three methods (sans-framework) that you can use to create a multilingual website - some a bit easier to maintain than others.

Fast internet growth has brought many opportunities in the global market. Businesses can reach their customers across many countries, and information sharing is not limited to a local area or country anymore. This is why there is an increasing tendency for multilingual websites. By having a website in multiple languages, you can target local markets more easily. Also, it is more convenient to use a website in your native language.

His three methods are all relatively simple, but they all have their good and bad points - making separate HTML/views for each language, creating XML files with different versions of the content or storing the translations in a MySQL database. He gives quick code snippets showing how to implement each of them, some basing the language on a cookie value, others on a GET variable passed to the page.

From Tutorialzine.com today, they've posted the first part of a series looking at the construction of a full mobile website using PHP, MySQL and jQuery mobile.

In this two-part tutorial, we will be building a simple website with PHP and MySQL, using the Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern. Finally, with the help of the jQuery Mobile framework, we will turn it into a touch-friendly mobile website, that works on any device and screen size. In this first part, we concentrate on the backend, discussing the database and MVC organization. Next time, we will be writing the views and integrating jQuery Mobile.

Their simple application lets you browse products in a storefront with products and their categories. They don't use any particular framework and instead opt for a "include all" approach in their example. This makes it simpler to bootstrap, but shouldn't be used in a production-ready version of the application. There's simple frameworks (like CodeIgniter out there that can help take it to the next level without much more complexity). You can see a demo of it in action or just download the source to get started hacking.

If you haven't seen it yet, there's a post over on StackOverflow that's been growing over the past few days about form-based authentication in websites. The author wants to make a definitive resource for people to use when making good, secure user authentication systems.

Please help us create the definitive resource for this topic. We believe that stackoverflow should not just be a resource for very specific technical questions, but also for general guidelines on how to solve variations on common problems. "Form Based Authentication For Websites" should be a fine topic for such an experiment.

They want to include topics like logins, storing passwords, "forgot password" security, OpenID, browser autocompletion, password strength, email validation and more. They already laid out eight different sections with summaries including:

• How To Remain Logged In - The Infamous "Remember Me" Checkbox
• Using Secret Questions
• Checking Password Strength
• Much More - Or: Preventing Rapid-Fire Login Attempts
• Two-Factor Authentication and Authentication Providers

There's some good feedback from other users with other suggestions and links to external resources that could shed some more light on the topic.

Sasa Stamenkovic has a quick post to his blog talking about a switch he made away from the Zend Framework over to Silex for a simple portfolio site.

Last week I needed a small website. I wanted it to be quick and dirty. Well, blazing fast and not so dirty. I heard best about Silex, so I gave it a shot. It was more then good experience. It worked like a charm, it was fun to use and site was completed in one day.

He includes two code snippets - one is the basic "hello world" example that most Silex tutorials reference and the other is more specific to his site. It defines the routes and the (Twig) templates they relate to. A few submodules helped him get this and other functionality working (like the Forms component and Swiftmailer for a contact form). You can find the full source for the site over on github.

In a new post Justin Carmony looks at what it means to me a "middle-scale website" and has some recommendations for anyone working with their applications and considering things like scalability, overcompensation and finding real results through profiling.

Hopefully at some point, your website is going to get a lot of traffic. Yay, you've reached your goal of getting good traffic, but it is soon followed by issues with performance and load. I like to call these the growing pains of a website. So as a web developer, I suddenly have the epiphany of "Hey, I need to scale my website!" What follows next is the biggest mistake a web developer can make: They start looking at articles on how Google scales, or maybe how Facebook manages all of their traffic. This is a mistake! To be brutally honest, you are not Google. You are not Facebook. You are not Twitter. You are a website that receives less than 0.000001% of the traffic that some of the major websites receive.

He includes a "reality check" of the setup behind a popular social site, StackExchange, with comments from their own post about their infrastructure. He talks about things included in a move to "middle-scale" like adding caching, performance tweaking, moving to a multiple server model and using replication.

As Derick Rethans notes in his latest post, the Xdebug project is now on github and can be found under his account.

I've just opened my Xdebug repository on github. Importing my old SVN repository was a bit of a task. With the help of Ole Marius Smestad I managed to cook up a bash script to import and fix-up the repository. In the meanwhile I've learned more about git than I ever wanted to know, but still not enough.

Besides the source for Xdebug itself, you'll also notice repositories for the Xdebug website, the GtkDBGp client and the DBGp protocol definition.

On the "PHP and Me" blog there's a new entry from Pinpin Bysma showing how to use the PHP-based deployment tool Phing to update your production website via an FTP connection, automated by a Phing build.

If you're working on a PHP project, like with any other project, probably comes a time when you need to "build a new release," e.g. update the production web site with the latest version of the code. And doing the whole thing manually isn't the most efficient way to get things done, especially if you're lazy, or have to do that every once in a while, over a long period of time. [...] Obviously if updating the site itself could be done without FTP but through a simple svn switch, things would be easier. Still, Phing would allow to make things easier just as nicely. It could for example still be used to create the new tag, trigger the switch, etc

He introduces the process by showing a basic Phing build file that uses the PEAR VersionControl_SVN component to get the latest from the repository and push it to another directory. There was one thing that he wanted to do that the default SVN task couldn't - export the difference between two tags. To make this happen, he had to extend Phing and make a new task - SvnExportDiff. He includes the code for this new task and an updated build file to show it all in use - complete with the FtpDeploy to push the code live.

In a new post Sameer Borate shows you how to take screenshots of websites with PHP (and a little help from the wkhtmltoimage tool).

aking screenshos of websites is not a frequent requirement for developers but can come handy on many occasions. Although there are some nice solutions on the web, a particular one I found very good is wkhtmltoimage. wkhtmltoimage is a simple shell utility which can be used to convert html to images using the webkit rendering engine, and qt.

He includes some brief instructions of how to get the tool installed and how to run it (via the command line first) to grab a screenshot of the bbc.com site. To use it in PHP, he suggests either using it in a shell_exec type of function or by using the snappy wrapper that handles some of the interfacing with wkhtmltoimage for you.

In another in his framework series, Jason Gilmore has a new post on PHPBuilder.com about another popular framework - the Yii framework. He introduces you to the framework and shows the creation of a sample, basic site.

Frameworks have been the topic du jour here at PHPBuilder.com, with numerous recent articles covering DooPHP and Fat-free. In this latest stop on the framework tour, we'll check out Yii, a relatively new framework (less than three years old) that boasts an impressive array of features and an equally impressive array of users, among them the enormously popular Stay.com.

He walks you through the install (downloading the latest version) and shows how to use the command-line tool to automatically generate the basic website structure. He continues on showing how to update the main page and template, how to get it connected to a MySQL database and how to use the Gii tool to create basic admin forms for working with the tables.

On the Script-Tutorials.com site there's a new article showing you how to use XPath to parse web pages, complete with screenshots of the page and the code to make it happen.

Today I will tell you how you can make parsers of remote HTML pages (in PHP). In this article I will show you how to perform xpath queries to Web pages. XPath - a query language to elements of xml or xhtml document. To obtain the necessary data, we just need to create the necessary query. For the work, we also need: browser Mozilla Firefox, firebug and firepath plugins. For our experiment, I suggest this webpage Google Sci/Tech News. Of course you can choose any other web page too.

They provide two demos and a downloadable package with everything you need. The script pulls in the page as a DOM document (which works as long as it's correctly formatted XML) and spits back out the matches from a few different XPath expressions. There's all sorts of sites out there that can help you with examples of other XPath expressions and syntax.