Jared White's Blog: Willowgarden Highlight: Easy Processing of Form Input
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Jared White has posted another Willowgarden highlight to his blog today, this time with a focus on the processing of form input.   In the bad old days of processing forms and saving each field to a column in a database row, you'd have to do a lot of manual gruntwork: accessing each field from the $_POST superglobal, checking the values, constructing the SQL query, connecting to the database and executing the query, and so forth. Wouldn't it be great if you could just import the form right into an object, and let it do the validation and the database saving based on just a few simple rules? Let's take a quick look at how that might work.   He shows how to make an instance of the WFFormCreator class in a simple script and add actions to it to handle the successful submission and the errors that might come up.
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In Using HTML_Quickform for Form Processing, the author introduces you to a very powerful (and widely used) PEAR package to help you keep a consistent look across all of the forms of your site (not to mention the functionality).
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Mike Potter (from Adobe) has issued an invitation for all PHP and Ruby developers attending the MAX Conference to track each other down, as well as him.   I think this would be a perfect time for these groups of people to get together, showcase what you're working on, and talk about the problems that you're facing.  We're working out the details of MAXUP, but if you're going to MAX, plan on arriving on the Sunday so that on Monday we can get together and showcase and talk about the work that's going on with Flex and languages other than Java and ColdFusion.   He suggests using the entry's comments to help coordinate the meetings. The Early Bird pricing is still in effect for the conference, so there's no time like the present to reserve your spot.
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Ligaya Turmelle has relayed some great news in her latest blog entry, something that the web's been needing for a long time - a new group from the W3C created specifically for enhancing the HTML standard.   Now I have to admit to being curious about what is going on - after all anything new dealing with the web affects me as PHP coder. Since the W3C is supposedly interested in input from the Web community and content developers, I decided to see who from PHP would be there. Granted it is very early for the formation of the group so it didn't really surprise me to see no one from PHP that I know or heard about in there, but I wonder if anyone from the PHP Group will become a "invited expert" somewhere down the road.   The group is looking for members to help define this next generation of markup on the web. Check out their page for some of the qualifications needed to participate and for some of the upcoming events.W3C Launches New HTML Working Group
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Popular posts from PHPDeveloper.org for the past week:RefreshinglyBlue Blog: PHP vs Ruby - Practical Language DifferencesAndreas Gohr's Blog: Determine StumbleUpon RankingsPHP.net: PHP 5.2.4 ReleasedThe Bakery: Five New Posts - Custom Views, CSS, ViewInFile, ActsAs and Email ValidationPHPBuilder.com: File uploads made easyStefan Mischook's Blog: Turning on display_errors in WAMP - Video Tutorialphp|architect: Pro::PHP Podcast - Newscast for August 2007MT-Soft Blog: Creating a secure PHP production environment from Source CodeCommunity News: Andi Gutmans to Present at AjaxWorld 2007HowTo Forge: How To Set Up A Facebook RSS Feed Reader
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This week you're going to learn how to create a Color Picker similar to the one used in Photoshop, but entirely in JavaScript! By Mark Kahn. 0901
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New on Dynamically Typed today, Harry makes this call for help for phpDocumentor.
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In the first maintenance release of our Popup Calendar, we added better navigation bar styling and the ability to clear read-only input fields. In this latest release, we include new functionality that enables you to separate form elements to display any combination of a user-selected date, month and year. By Peter Belesis. 1021
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Dave Dash has posted a quick script to help with an integration of openID into your application - well, really just to read the response back easily.   I'm working on implementing openID for reviewsby.us and for use in symfony apps. One thing I was having trouble with was parsing key value pairs, which is one of the requirements to reading responses. It's a fairly easy task, but [PHP][] offers so many ways to do this.   He notes the spec for how the results are returned and shares his code (based around a regular expression) that goes through the response and separates things out into key/value pairs automatically.
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On the Zend Developer Zone, they point out a handy little image manipulation class they've come across - GenXDesign's PHP Thumbnail Class - as well as some details about it.    I've seen a lot of implementations of thumb nail functionality in PHP, I've even written a couple of my own. I like this class thought. In looking over the code the first thing you notice is that it's clean code. I don't mean they use the latest whiz-bang method to cshave a few keystrokes.    This code is simple, nicely formatted and easy to read through. My only real problem with the code itself is that it is not terribly well documented. That can be forgiven since easy to read.    Cal talks about some of the other features of the class, including that it works with gif/jpeg/png images, makes it easy to set the quality of the jpgs, and makes it easy to display the dynamic images directly to the browser. Check out the demo for more.
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In a new post to his blog today, Matthew O'Phinney dives in to some of the more advanced features that the Zend_Form component of the Zend Framework has to offer.   I've been working on  for the past few weeks, and it's nearing release readiness. There are a number of features that Cal didn't cover in his DevZone coverage (in part because some of them weren't yet complete) that I'd like to showcase.   These additional features include internationalization, element grouping and array support. He looks at each of these, including some sample code where needed, and shows you how they can be useful to you and your ZF application.
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New version allows users to categorize entries and make layout changes more easily.
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Related to an issue from a previous post, Greg Beaver has posted a solution to his Relax NG schema problem in PHP.   Shortly after my last blog post, I got a very helpful email from Rob Richards, who offered to help me with my trials and tribulations. He took a quick look at the schema for package.xml, and a sample package.xml and was able to find two small tweaks to make parsing actually work (gasp). This changes everything. I am abandoning the creation of a relax NG schema in favor of the battle-tested xsd. The error messages for xsd validation are far clearer than the rng ones.   The code included shows how much simpler the error messages are with the XSD validation option versus the RNG ones.
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On the Zend Developer Zone today, Cal Evans has posted his look at the Phrasebook series from Sams Publishing covering Javascript, MySQL, Apache, and, of course, PHP.   I get a lot of books to review. Currently the stack is about waist high and UPS hasn't been here this morning. So in an effort to trim down that stack of books, I'm going to talk about books 4 in one review.   He looks briefly at the contents for each of the books, pointing out specific areas they seemed particularly helpful in. He doesn't recommend them to someone trying to learn the language right off the mark. These are, as their title implies, just clips and handy snippets of information to help you get to where you're going. You have to know how to get on the road first, though...
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In a new post to his blog today, Danne Lundqvist shares his method for creating a blog aggregator (in the style of the planet-planet sites) to re-aggregate all of the feeds back ou tinto one.   Lately I have begun to get more and more annoyed with my feed reader. I use a simple feed reader which lack most features except for subscribing to and reading feeds. The one thing that annoys me the most is that it can't aggregate several feeds into one feed. Yesterday I finally decided to scratch that itch.   His method uses the Zend Framework to accomplish the goal - and "the whole website logic (both model and controller) is about 200 lines of code". There's no exception or error handling in it, but it works and the Zend_Feed module works well to grab just about any kind of feed.
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In this new blog post, Jared White spotlights a feature of the Willowgarden application platform - the template modes.   Unlike many Web frameworks, Willowgarden doesn't provide a different template for every action. All actions are provided via a single template file for the entire page. This works because of the concept of template modes.   He includes a quick example of these templates, creating two files to show the difference - one with the normal templating methodology and the other showing the difference Willowgarden's templates make (more concise and more flexible).
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The O'Reilly PHP Devcenter has a new article posted seeking to help you out with your form handling with a listing of several tips to get started.