Creating a Custom RSS Feed with PHP and MySQL
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RSS has become the standard technology for syndicating information to large audiences. Many people have something to say, but finding the right audience for your voice is what matters. In this article you'll learn how to syndicate your own custom RSS feeds using PHP and MySQL. By Kris Hadlock. 1025
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When finding he was in need of a parser and lexer, Wez Furlong decided to work up one that was PHP-based and a take off of the popular lemon parser and JLex lexer.   From time to time, I find that I need to put a parser together. Most of the time I find that I need to do this in C for performance, but other times I just want something convenient, like PHP, and have been out of luck.   His result is two new packages - lemon-php and JLexPHP (under a BSDish license) you can download and compile on your own system.   Also, if you'll remember a while back, Greg Beaver had wanted something similar (as mentioned in the comments) and created his own lexer/generator as well.
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Matthew Turland has mentioned his article in the latest issue of php|architect magazine (the December 2007 issue) covering web scraping.   Just a quick post to announce (albeit a little late) that the December 2007 issue of php|architect, which includes my article on web scraping. Please buy a copy, give it a read, and feel free to post comments on the forum thread for the article. I'd love to hear some reader feedback!   Other articles in the issue include "Writing an Object/Relational Mapper in PHP", "Understanding CLI" and the cover story "Going native with mysqlnd".
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I think I've mentioned this before but on Saturday Feb 12th I'll be talking  about the Jakarta FeedParser at CodeCon  in San Francisco.  I published an outline  of the talk on the FeedParser wiki.  I'm hoping to have a 0.5 release done before then and havepotentially another suprise in the works.
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In a new tutorial from DevShed today, they walk you through the creation of a simple (very simple) RSS reader in PHP.   In this article we are going to discuss how to create a PHP-based RSS reader. It would be helpful if you know something about XML, but not really necessary. RSS documents have three main tags: Title, Link and Description. And they all do exactly what their names suggest. I will go into detail about these tags in my second article dealing with âbuilding an RSS file.â For now, we will only focus on the âreadingâ part of the article.   They start with an overview, showing where you'll come from and where you're headed to. They include a section introducing the XML handing functions (SAX, not DOM) and use them in a chunk of code to read in the RSS file and handle the contents.
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Yet another new series is starting over at DevShed today with part one of a look at the creation of a blogging application in PHP 5.   Assuming that building a blogger with PHP is really an interesting topic for you, let's learn together how this useful application can be developed in a few easy steps.   These easy steps include:  defining the structure of the application creating the insertBlog method creating the updateBlog method creating the deleteBlog method  Each of the above functions provides just the basics of the functionality needed to make a more fully-developed blogging system, but there's more to come in future parts of the series. You can download a zip file of the current code here.
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Really Simple Syndication technology, which lets news junkies get instant info feeds from multiple sites, is grabbing investors' attention. The latest evidence: a multimillion-dollar funding round for RSS developer Technorati. By Daniel Terdiman.
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In his continuing effort to redesign his blog, Shiflett.org, he's been working on one of the things that really makes a blog useful - the commenting system. Specifically, he wants site visitors to be able to add their own code listings to the comments they post. He gives more detail in this new post.   I've been playing with this tonight. Feel free to follow along as I go. The first thing you want to do is create an ordered list from the code you want to format ($code in these examples).   He gives an example of a listing using his system and explains how it all works. It's a mixture of:  PHP for parsing the data inside the 'code' tags CSS to correctly style the information, whitespace and all Some ini settings to set parameters for... ...the use of highlight string on the PHP code contents  A little str_replace magic later and you have list items styled as code blocks on your page. Check out his demo for an example.
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A new tutorial on the ProDevTips.com website today shows how to parse tags (like in a feed) with the Zend_Feed component of the Zend Framework.   Consuming a feed with Zend Feed is quite simple if you don't want to do something fancy.    They include an example of how to pull in the feed, parse out information from the various tags, and push that information into a database they've created (they include the code for the script and to create the database as well).
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Lukas Smith has posted his review of a book from Packt Publishing - "PHP Web 2.0 Mashup Projects: Practical PHP Mashups with Google Maps, Flickr, Amazon, YouTube, MSN Search, Yahoo!"   Duane from Pakt asked me if I would be interested in reviewing a few books for them in my blog. I picked "Mashup Projects" from the list of just released books, since I am interesting in the topic and I am actually going to give a presentation at the internal "PHP Day" we are doing at Optaros in November.   He points out the good (good writing style, well-chosen examples) and the bad (a log list of errors and oversights in the code). He also talks about the contents of the book - the different examples and the final more major project. Overall though, he sees it as a good book, one that would be a good introduction to mashups for PHP developers (if you look past the formatting issues).
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From the Oracle Technology Network website, there's a new tutorial in the Oracle+PHP Cookbook series that focuses on using PHP and Oracle together with Ajax to create a simple HTML form example.   In this recipe, I discuss all the code necessary to use Ajax to go from a simple Web page to a JavaScript function to an XMLHttpRequest to a PHP script and, finally, to an Oracle database. Along with the code, I do talk about the individual pieces with respect to the whole picture: what each chunk does and why it's important. By reading this HowTo, you will acquire not only some sample code but also, hopefully, a broader understanding of the whole Ajax concept.   They step through the creation of the background database tables, including the insertion of some sample data. Next up is the creation of the query to run our check, then testing the script to ensure things are set up as they need to be, and finally, creating the front-end - writing the HTML and Javascript to make the form.    The end result is a simple form that, when the contents of the text field are changed, a message is sent back to the server to check and see if the email address entered already exists.
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The ProDevTips website has posted part seven of their series covering the construction of a community site (or CMS) with the combination of Smarty and the Zend Framework.   Since XOOPS didn't do it for me when it comes to this project I have started with the blog component. As it turns out, a blog is more complicated than you would think. Therefore this part will not cover the whole component, only as far as I've gotten at the moment. Covering the whole process in one piece would make it a very long piece indeed.   He provides the code examples and complete SQL structure to get the blog up and rolling as well as some handy tips and explanations along the way.
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Paul Jones will be one of the presenters at this year's php/db|works Conference happening up in Toronto this week and he's offering a teaser of his talk (here's the synopsis) for those interested - "Organizing Your PHP Projects".   Fans of Henry Hazlitt's "Economics in One Lesson" will recognize the kind of talk I have in store, although I don't have the time available to expound in detail the way Hazlitt does. The talk will consist of a one-sentence lesson for you to remember when deciding how to organize your PHP project, whether it's a library, an application, a CMS, or a framework. I'll then explain how to apply the One Lesson in your project, and the various follow-on effects the One Lesson will have on your project organization.   He also jokes that he'll be the only presenter to use references to livestock, Jimmy Hoffa, and Mir as a part of the talk. He's even included a slide of the presentation for even more info.
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In this new tutorial from WebReference, they show you how to develop a simple database-enabled Ajax application in PHP.   In this article you'll learn how to create database-enabled Ajax requests using PHP and MySQL. We begin by creating the front-end HTML and JavaScript files used to make requests to the server-side. The requested server-side is a PHP file which bridges the gap between Ajax and a PHP object that connects to a MySQL database and returns results as an XML response to the Ajax engine.   The application is a simple way to enter news postings into a database and pull them back out with this handy Javascript functionality. They also provide the complete source code for download to help you get started.
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The Developer Tutorials site has posted a new article covering the creation of a small application that can help you scrape content from a remote page and pull it into your script.   In this tutorial you will learn how to build a PHP script that scrapes links from any web page.   You'll learn to use cURL, the DOM functions, XPath and a bit of MySQL to get the job done. It's nice to see that they also include a section looking at one of the more touchy aspects of web page scraping - "is it legal?"
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Mike Potter points out that the code from the previous PHP/Flex e-seminar [zip] has been posted and is ready for download.   f you have any questions, or are new to Flex and PHP, you should download the Flex / PHP Test Drive from flex.org/php. That page also has a link to the PHP FlexCoders email list, where you can post questions about Flex and PHP. If you have any questions about the code in particular, you can post them to this blog entry, and I'll be happy to answer them.   Also included in his post are instructions on getting things compiled and working to be able to use the example code on your system.
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In a new tutorial from jJason Whittenburg today on the Zend Developer Zone, he demonstrates how to use the Zend Framework and a little JSON to get your application talking to Del.icio.us.    Del.icio.us is a social linking site to store web links. Some one afternoon while messing around Zend Framework I had the idea that it might be nice to add my Del.icio.us links to my homepage. This sounds easy enough as Del.icio.us makes available an RSS feed for this purpose. However, there is one problem; Zend_Feed does not seem to be able to parse this particular RSS feed.    The reason is that Del.icio.us makes use of some extended namespaces for its RSS feed. Normally this would not be a problem as we could simply write a new class to extend Zend_Feed to read this file. However, this is a quicker and simpler way. Enter JSON.    Since there's no direct JSON support in the Zend_Feed component, they have to load up the Zend_Json component to help out. He shows how to create both the controller and the view for the setup as well as a database to help cache the data from each request.