Inside Open Source: Matt Westgate on Drupal Theming
116295
On the Inside Open Source blog today, Jason Gilmore mentions an upcoming event the Drupal-ers out there might want to check out:   Co-author of Pro Drupal Development Matt Westgate will be giving a live webinar on how to customize Drupal themes. The webinar is slated for September 9 at 7pm GMT, so mark your calendars!   You can find out more information about the webinar on the Groups.Drupal website.
451061
The latest episode of the Zend Developer Zone's podcast, PHP Abstract, has been posted. This time it's hosted by Chris Hartjes on the subject of "Opinionated Software".   Today's special guest is Chris Hartjes. Chris has been building PHP applications since 1998. Currently employed as a Senior Developer for the Cake Development Corporation, Chris has been labeled as an "agent provocateur" within the PHP community. He contributes to open source projects, gives lectures on programming-related topics and tries to share what he's learned via his blog.   Opinionated software entails things like frameworks (his specific example is with the CakePHP framework's ActiveRecord functionality) that has a sort of agreement with the developer that things are going to be where it expects them (allowing for less time configuring and more time developing).   To hear more about this sort of software, grab the latest show's mp3 or subscribe to the feed in your aggregator of choice.
662669
In this new post to his blog today, Tim shares some of the tools that he uses to develop his PHP applications (including supporting the CodeIgniter project).   IÃ¢ÂÂve been asked on several occasions to spill the beans on my development environment. Sadly, itÃ¢ÂÂs probably not the easiest setup - but it works for my stubborn mind.   Applications included in his list are things like PHP Eclipse, CuteFTP, XAMPP and Subversion. He also mentions a Firefox extension, Devboi, that offers quick access to several different reference manuals on the web.
275619
Travis Swicegood is teasing us with some output from a script in his latest blog post:   So my free time of late (what there is of it) has been spent on a project that's getting really close to v0.1 release. In other words, its first functional release. If you've ever run a test using the PEAR installer or know what a .phpt file looks like, you might be able to guess what I've been up.   Keep an eye on his blog for more information on his "secret project".
627987
In a much anticipated article, Peter Belesis returns with this piece on a DHTML Lab Popup Calendar. Among it's many features: No knowledge of JavaScript is necessary; only a beginner's aquaintance with HTML and CSS syntax is all that's needed. 0809
729970
Cascading Style Sheets are an important element of current web design. Today, Lee Underwood examines Westciv's Style Master, an application dedicated to the creation and tweaking of Style Sheets. 0705
177344
P&aacute;draic Brady is back today with the latest installment (part 5!) of his look at complex views in the Zend Framework. This time, her focuses on something called the Two-Step Pattern - a pattern similar to the Layouts pattern.   Part 5 of our series takes a small time-out from approaching a Composite View solution to reusable Views to take a peek at a simpler approach useful for simpler types of web applications. As we've discussed previously Composite Views allow the nesting of reusable View elements, effectively building a View based on a hierarchy of Views. But often there are simpler solutions to simpler problems. One such solution is the Two-Step View pattern, sometimes called Layouts if implemented in a specific way (as we do below!).   He gives the example of a simple website that needs a header and footer on every page. Rather than having to duplicate the header/footer calls across all of the pages, the Layout (Step-Two) pattern defines a single template that contains the header and footer but also uses a "main" area where the content is dynamically inserted.   He includes a full code example to help illustrate the point - a class, Zps_View, that is fed the path to the layouts and the layout files to use before rendering.
473809
On his blog today, Stoyan points out a topic he's started over on the OpenSourceCommunity.org site - What do you think makes a good CMS?.   This year's Packt Publishing awards for the best Open Source CMS are on their way, starting middle of July. I've been selected as a judge in the PHP CMS category. [...] How can one judge something as diverse and liquid as a CMS? Content management comes in all different shapes, some systems focus on solving some problems and they do a better job than another CMS that mainly tackles different types of problems.   He shares the experiences he's had with CMS and companies that have rolled their own in the past as well as a small list of things that he's thinking about making "the standard" for the CMSes to be judged by. Also included is a lengthy list of requirements that he sees that need to be included for any decent CMS to move to the next level.
457664
In this post on the Zend Developer Zone, Cal Evans takes a look at an article published in a recent php|architect issue from Chris Hartjes about how several recent advancements in the PHP community have helped developers think more in "the Rails way" of development.   Chris does a good job of laying out his points. As with any article of this nature, you are going to agree with some of them and you'll disagree with some of them. However, to get to that point you'll have to consider all of them. That's really the point of the article; making developer sit back and think for a minute. It's well worth the read.   Cal also mentions some of the topics presented in the article including more conceptual ideas like "Convention Over Configuration" and "Rapid Should Mean Rapid".
486082
Padraic Brady has posted some of his comments on the newly included Zend_Layout and Zend_View_Enhanced components for the Zend_Framework:    These two (now much more polished!) components were both designed to solve the concerns a lot of developers were having in achieving truly complex, structured and modular Views using Zend_View.    Indeed there are months of blog postings, debates, experimental and not-so-experimental code, proposals, IRC sessions and countless emails pouring over how to accomplish the goals of these components. The end result is something I feel will serve Zend Framework users faithfully for months and years to come.    He thanks the developers (Matthew and Ralph) and notes that the inclusion of these two components is one of the largest advancements of the display layer for the Framework in a while.
572982
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.
769375
This week you'll learn about solid software design practices, many of them borrowed from working with Windows applications. The result is the development of a Web based drawing package. By Guyon Roche. 0802
77294
Cal Evans has posted his final wrapup from this year's php|works conference up in Toronto on the Zend Developer Zone today.   This last look at the conference includes mentions of:  Joe Stagner's keynote talk,  Cal presenting his talk - "Debugging PHP without cursing...mostly" Wez Furlong's PDO talk Derick Rethans' and his "Ranting Hour" The panel discussion on the Zend PHP 5 Certification PHPers winning at trivia Accordian cover solos John Coggeshall's "Apps Made Easy on Zend Framework" talk    Check out the full post for the rest of the story (especially the accordion music selections!)
53814
Cal Evans has posted his notes from the (just passed) Web Builder 2.0 Conference that happened over in Las Vegas. PHP had its presence there through Cal's "PHP Powers Mashups" talk and others like Chris Shiflett.   There was plenty to see and do at the conference besides PHP and Cal highlights just a few:  AJAX Optimization talks  An overview of some Flickr Stats Google's mashup offerings An introduction to  and some talk of benchmarking Ajax  Check out the full post though - it's jam-packed with links and some great event information.
299911
From Paul Jones' weblog today, there's a posting that more and more developers should live by - Document Your Project Already!
13585
The Zend Developer Zone has posted their latest episode of the PHP Abstract podcast hosted by Cal Evans himself covering ways you can attract quality talent to your organization.   Along the way I've picked up a few truths, mainly stolen from people like Joel Spolsky. Some of these ideas can be found in an article I wrote a while ago titled "Nerd Herding", a link to which can be found in the show notes. Recently, I've had many people ask me variations of the same question, "How do I find talented programmers?" So today, I'm going to share with you some of the things I've learned.   The latest show is available for direct download or, as always, you can subscribe to their feed to get this and lots of other great shows.
540230
Matthew Turland has been working on a new project as a part of the Zend Framework - a wrapper around the Remember the Milk website API.   RTM is basically a TODO list on serious steroids. It's the Swiss Army Knife of task management. It allows you to manage multiple lists of tasks. You can add them easily from a variety of mediums, tag them, prioritize them, set deadlines for them, have them repeat, get reminders for them, tie them to physical real world location, and share them.   He's even already issued a proposal for the functionality to the project to hep further along its inclusion. His goal is to get it included in the core for the framework within the next two releases.