Christian Stocker has pointed out that Liip is hiring, including a position for a PHP/XSLT developer:

With our new office, we have more space, with more space, we can hire more people. Therefore and without further ado, I'll recommend you liip.ch/jobs, if you're looking for an interesting and fulfilling new job in an innovative and fascinating environment.

Details on the PHP position can be found here and info on the others are here: Java/Flash developer, Linux sysadmin and Clerk.

A note was passed along to me about a new project that's been created to help make the generation of ODF-XSLT documents simpler - the ODF-XSLT Project from Lone Wolves.

Lone Wolves is happy to announce the ODF-XSLT project [1]. The ODF-XSLT Document Generator is a library written in PHP 5 that brings the full power of XSLT to your OpenDocument files. It enables you to use ODF files as if they were plain XSLT templates. It also includes a few extra parsing options that allow you to edit the XSLT parts of these ODF from within your favourite office suite.

The tool was developed by Tribal Internet Marketing and is being released under a GNU Public license, version 3. You can get more information about the project from its homepage including things like downloads, the manual and their subversion repository address.

Gergely Hodicska has posted part four of his "what's new in PHP 5.3" series - a sort of "wrapup" for some of the smaller features that have been added. Among them are:

• __callStatic
• OpenID support
• user.ini user defined ini functionality
• dynamic static calls
• XSLT profiling

...and many more. Check out the post for more to add to the list and for some brief examples of the ones already mentioned.

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).

Christian Stocker briefly mentions a new addition he's made to the post-PHP5.3 branching of the main trunk of the PHP development - XSLT profiling.

After PHP 5.3 was branched (for making place for - among other new stuff - namespaces), it was finally time to put my XSLT profiling addition into the official PHP sources.

The addition allows you to check in on your XSLT translations and see which spots in it are taking the most time to parse. This can be a very valuable tool when trying to see into the "black box" that PHP has around XSLT transformations. PHP 5.2ers can get the same functionality with this patch too.

In a new post to his blog today, Raphael Stolt shows how to take the output from the Zend_Log component of the Zend Framework and, with a bit of custom coding, make it output an RSS feed.

Whilst touring the web I found an interesting project for turning Apache Web Server log files into RSS feeds. This approach can be adjusted to monitor the maintenance needs of a web application deployed on an assumed productive system. Therefor a XML capable Zend_Log instance will be set up and the resulting log file will be transformed into a RSS feed via a custom Action Helper wrapping a XSLT transfomation.

He sets up the XML logger first, using the Zend_Log, Zend_Log_Writer_Stream and Zend_Log_Formatter_Xml to create the XML output from the logging. Then, with the help of the custom helper - Recordshelf_Controller_Action_Helper_Xslt - he reformats the XML output into an RSS feed ready for public consumption. (There's even a screenshot of what it might look like in a feed reader).

In this new post on Raphael Stolt's blog, he shows a way that you can take XML that holds SQL information (in his example INSERTs and DELETEs) and transforms them into SQL statements via XSL stylesheets.

A canny data import technique that emerged from praxis, while working on the import of data-centered XML resources, is utilitizing the abilities of Xslt. The generation of the required SQL statements actually only needs a simple Xsl stylesheet which might import for an PHP XSLTProcessor object or pass to the xsltproc command line tool. Both further described approaches are based upon the libxslt library and are assuming the use of XSLT 1.0.

He starts with an example bit of XML that has the XSL stylesheet at the top that will be used to transform the data and the information to perform inserts on several "partner" values in the XML below. Following this, he creates a PHP class to load the file and apply the stylesheet.

He also mentions a few different approaches to the same problem - XSLTProcessor class approach returning a single SQL string , xsltproc approach and the XSLTProcessor class approach using the ability to use PHP functions as XSLT functions.

Christian Stocker points out a handy patch for the PHP XSLT functionality today - one that allows you to test to see where in the transformation the most time is spent.

Look no further than this patch to the PHP XSL extension. It uses the built in profiler of libxslt to get the information which template was called how many times and how much time was spent in them. It may help in improving the speed of your XSLT transformations, like a PHP debugger can help in profiling your PHP scripts.

Besides the link, he also includes a simple sample script that uses the setProfiling function to write out to a text file the stats of the transformation. He also includes a (very beta) patch to the libxslt functionality itself to make it easier to not only time the overall execution of the xslt, but also allows for timing of other individual templates that might be included.

On the AnyExample.com website, there's a new tutorial showing how to create an XML-based website that uses XSLT for its templates.

XML and XSLT technologies provides standard ways of separation of presentation and data. This article contains an example of simple php "xslt engine" for XML driven web-sites which implements caching techniques and Apache-based XML file processing.

They start by setting up the web server to parse all XML file requests through a handler script using Apache's directives. Following thi ssetup, there's three code blocks, one for each of the "moving parts" of the sample application - the XML content, the XSLT template to style it, and the PHP to bring them both together.

On his "Yet andother PHP blog" today, William Candillon shares a script he's written up to create a visualization of the parse tree of a bit of PHP source code.

I wrote this xslt stylesheet to visualize the parse tree of a PHP source code. The stylesheet can actually convert any XML tree to graph in the dot format interpreted by Graphviz.

His code is a simple seven line script that outputs a nice, clean tree structure image of how the process flows. He includes links to all of the source and files he used to create the tree image.