On the InsicDesigns blog there's a new tutorial on using the MiMViC framework

MiMViC is a modular and lightweight PHP 5.3+ Web application framework designed to help build dynamic and robust Web sites. It's theory is based on minimal and framework emphasizes on only core glue for your complex PHP web sites. Today I will show you how to create a shout-box using the MiMViC framework. It won't take you more than 15 mins to get the job done and have friendly URLs as well.

Sample code for the "shoutbox" is included. Their example shows an Apache setup and a MySQL backend (complete with namespace-enabled code). A simple form to take in a "shout" works directly with the framework to save the information quickly and easily.

On the Joomla community site there's a recent post made of a video from the Joomla Day conference in Australia about creating a Joomla template from scratch. The presenter is Norm Douglas.

Norm Douglas recently presented about how to create a Joomla template from scratch at the Joomla Day in Melbourne, Australia, on 13 February 2010. This is a very informative 77 minute presentation and also covers using the Firebug Firefox addon, code editors and much more.

He covers some simple tools you get you started, the basics of HTML to create a sample layout and looks at CSS definitions that can make the layout look a bit better. Firebug (the plugin for Firefox) helps make locating the different parts of the page easier with a highlighting feature.

Marc Plotz has written up a new tutorial for PHPBuilder.com introducing a simple way to get started combining PHP and Ajax with a "Google Suggest" type of example.

When you use Ajax with PHP, PHP does the calculations that it needs to do on the server and sends the result back to the page. You then use JavaScript to display these results in a predefined place. The demo application you will learn how to build in this article is a very simple Suggestion box, just like the one that Google made famous and thus ushered in the Ajax era.

The example (you can download it here) creates a basic form text field and the Javascript you'll need to make the callback to the waiting PHP script. It doesn't use any external libraries (like jQuery or Prototype) so be ready for bare-bones Javascript.

In a new post today Raphael Stolt shows you how to use MongoHq, a cloud-based hosting service, to host a Zend Framework application that uses the MongoDb as a backend. The tutorial focuses on the bootstrapping process to make the framework play nicely with its hosting environment.

Since [MongoHq] went live a few weeks ago I signed up for the small plan and started to successfully re-thinker with it in an exploratory Zend Framework based application. [...] Therefore the following post will show how to bootstrap such an instance into a Zend Framework based application and how to use it from there in some simple scenarios like storing data coming from a Zend_Form into a designated collection and vice versa fetching it from there.

He shows how to create a new resource to make the MongoDb connection available through the entire application, to be used as needed. The resource creates the MongoDb connection based on the options from the config file and catches any exceptions that might happen along the way. As mentioned, he also includes a Zend_Form example that stores some proposal information in a collection in the database.

In the latest post to his blog Brian Swan hows how to interface PHP with "Dallas", a newly introduced technology from Microsoft that lets developers and users of the Azure platform share data with REST-based APIs.

Given that MIX10 is happening this week and that Microsoft Codename "Dallas" (CTP2) was just released, I thought it would be appropriate to look at how to consume "Dallas" data with PHP. [...] In this post I'll build a simple web page that displays some of the free "Dallas" data. And, I must say, I was really surprised at how simple and easy this entire process was.

The system shares out data sets (a list is here) including things like feeds from the Associated Press, InfoUSA, NASA, NAVTEQ and quite a few others. Brian includes screenshots on how to sign up for a data feed, some PHP that can be used to connect to it (just a REST request) and a simple web page that can output the results.

On PHPBuilder.com today there's a new tutorial walking you through the creation of a simple WordPress plugin that shows the latest YouTube video from your blog's channel.

Think of plugins as components where you put your functionality and widgets as components of your user interface. Building your own WordPress plugins and widgets will make your blog truly original, and all you need is basic PHP and HTML knowledge - and your imagination.

They help you get started with defining a few constants, registering the actions with WordPress, building the widget (with complete cut-and-paste-able code) and including it in your WordPress blog. You can download the complete source if you want to get started quickly.

A recent tutorial (screencast) has been posted to the ZendCasts.com site looking at creating custom Zend_Form elements when you need something more than just the usual, simple elements.

This video should help you build your own composite Zend_Form element. We'll be building a phone element. The phone element will have 3 textboxes, one for geographic location, area code and local code. In the following videos will add a custom cell phone validator and some ajax validation.

You can grab a copy of the source if you'd like to follow along or you can just look around the repository to find the source for this and other great lessons from the site.

Ian Christian has an informative new post for the Symfony developers out there. He's figured out a way to handle uploaded files with Symfony's admin generator relatively easily, changing the filename option.

When a file is uploaded using sfForm in the admin generator, by default the filename that's used is a random string, which can look bad in URLs. If you want to change this, it's not immediately obvious how - but it is incredibly simple.

The Symfony project does have some documentation on the topic, but it's not the easiest to read. It basically boils down to is defining a function in your extended class based on the name of the file where you can change the name however you'd like. Code snippets are included to make the point a bit more clear.

In a new post to his blog today Eli White takes a look at an interesting use of lambda functions he's figured out for a his development at work.

I found a very specific use out of the blue of Lambda functions that I have now used and I see as a great use-case. Which is specifically passing functions/logic from your Controller to your View. In the case of Goodsie, I'm using PHP for my templating language and as usual I'm trying to remove as much logic from my View as possible, while still allowing the view to be malleable.

His method centered around a pagination subview that he wanted to make flexible enough to work with both the standard page view and with an ajax request. Lambda functions came to the rescue by dynamically creating a function based on the request need.

On the Perplexed Labs blog there's a recent post looking at how to fork processes in PHP with the help of the pcntl_fork function and the process management extension.

Let's say you want to take advantage of more than one core for a given process. Perhaps it performs many intensive computations and on a single core would take an hour to run. Since a PHP process is single threaded you won't optimally take advantage of the available multi-core resources you may have. Fortunately, via the Process Control (PCNTL) extension, PHP provides a way to fork new child processes.

He gives a quick snippet of code showing how to spawn off a few new processes, get their process IDs and watches a max number of children until one dies (then starts another).