Dave Dash's Blog: Boosting terms in Zend Search Lucene
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On the SpinDrop blog today, Dave Dash continues his look at the Lucene search engine for the Zend Framework with this new post showing how to boost certain terms' relevance in the search results.   Lucene supports boosting or weighting terms. For example, if I search for members of a web site, and I type in Dash, I want people with the name Dash to take precedence over somebody who has a hobby of running the 50-yard Dash.   He shows how to, with the help of a few simple lines of PHP code added to your application, you can easily boost terms based on field by whatever multiplier you choose.
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Aaron Wormus is back today on the Zend Developer Zone with another in his "Hidden Gems" series. This time, he takes a look at the "Zend Plumbing", those bits of connective code that help you make your Zend Framework applications work.   The functionality that he covers in this article are some of the min parts that a lot of ZF coders use every day and might not know it:  the Zend class (providing a suite of helper methods) built in Wrapper functions:  loadFile loadClass loadInterface isReadable dump exception  the Zend registry  Each of these is briefly described with some sample code for the loadFile, loadClass, exceptions and the Registry to give you an idea of how to use it all. As always, you can check out the Zend Framework website for all the details on each of these functionality bits.
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Popular posts from PHPDeveloper.org for the past week:Zend Developer Zone: Book Review: Learning PHP Data ObjectsProDevTips: Writing a CMS/Community with Smarty and the Zend Framework: Part 7Ivo Jansch's Blog: Book announcement: Enterprise PHP DevelopmentEvan Sims' Blog: Announcing libGameFlySite News: Popular Posts for the Week of 12.28.2007Reinhold Weber's Blog: From PHP to Ruby - 30 similarities and differencesSanisoft Blog:  Theming your CakePHP apps (V1.2)John Lim's Blog: Why Should PHP ever be taught in school?Zend Developer Zone: Profiling PHP Applications With xdebugCommunity News: A Look Back at 2007
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Found in the search marketing forums:  > AdWords 101; Site Search; Jobs in SEO; and more.
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Chris Hartjes has posted the first part of a series on the "rebirth" of a component that was contributed to the Zend Framework - Zend_Service_Audioscrobbler (to interface with the Audioscrobbler service from Last.fm).   Many moons ago I set out (along with my friend Derek) to make a contribution to Zend Framework in the form of an add-on to let people easily access the Audioscrobbler web service. We worked really hard, implemented all the features of the web service at that time. Imagine our surprise when it got accepted as part of the 1.0 release of Zend Framework! Awesome! It even has it's own entry in the manual and everything.   He admits, though, that the code is not all that it could be and cites some examples as well as ways he would make it all work so much better.
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Cal Evans is attending this year's php/db|works conference up in Toronto and has reported back with his summary of the first day of the conference - "Tutorial Day".   Day One at php|works was dedicated to tutorials. Paul Reinheimer did a 6 hour crash course for those who wanted to take the Zend Certification Test here at the conference. I talked with a three attendees at the Crash Course to get their opinion on how it was going. Cairan Walsh, who is not currently Zend Certified found the course interested although he thought maybe it was a bit too basic.   Cal notes that just about everyone that attended the "Crash Course" was pleased with the contents/teacher/etc. He also mentions his visits to the "Advanced XML and Web Services" and "Extending PHP" tutorials.
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Popular posts from PHPDeveloper.org for the past week:PHPClasses.org: A PHP killer feature - Streams abstractionRob Thompson's Blog: Switch vs. IfPHPEverywhere: Octopussy numbers in PHPJob Posting: MODE Visual Seeks PHP Developer (Charlotte, NC)ProDevTips.com: Why PHP as a templating language sucksMatthew Turland's Blog: The Yin and Yang of TypingStubbles Blog: Stubbles 0.5.0 releasedChristopher Jones' Blog: Updated connection pooling in PHP's OCI8 extensionBen Ramsey's Blog: Congrats Costa Rica PHP!Carsten Lucke's Blog: Configuration issues with Xdebug on Debian Etch
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In a a new post to his blog today, Padraic Brady mentions a component of the Zend Framework that's fallen into the wayside in favor of a Zend-sponsored OpenID component, Zend_Service_Openid. Despite this setback, he still plans on helping with its resurrection, maybe just in a different form.   After posting some questions to the mailing list before adding any additional formal proposals, I have learned another OpenID library for the Zend Framework is also in progress within Zend.   The upshot of this, given it's a Zend sponsored library, is that I feel like there's little choice but to abandon my own version of a proposal for the framework. So it's status is "withdrawn" at this moment as is Zend_Service_Yadis, being a linked proposal. The library itself is not being abandoned, far from it as it has always been my intention to release it under a New BSD License and that plan is not wavering.    He talks about some of the thoughts going through his head of the choice that Zend made and how his library approached the OpenID authentication issues.
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On the Zend Developer Zone there's a new post from Bill Karwin highlighting the Zend_GData component of the Zend Framework and how it can help grab information from the Google Data APIs.   The recent Zend Framework 1.0.3 release includes new support for some great services, including Picasa Web Albums, YouTube, and Google Documents List.   He talks about the interfaces for each of these (including what you can grab) and includes some pointers to example code that can be used with either the full framework or just the GData bundle. There's also a video demo of the component being used to fetch data from the Data API.
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In an effort to somewhat unify the authors of the wide range of PHP database abstraction layers out there in the community, Lukas Smith has proposed a "doctrine miling list" for the discussion of things "like best practices, new discoveries, challenges, etc".    Now I am hoping that all of you are reading this. I know quite a few of you pretty well already (John, Hans, Manuel etc.). [...] So please everybody come out of the woodwork, send me a mail or post a comment.   While I think its fine for end users to also join the list, the goal is not to create a list for end users to ask questions, but more for people who actively develop database abstraction layers. End users should better go to the respective mailing lists.    Ian P. Christian has already stepped up to the plate and is offering a mailing list that you, the database abstraction developer can subscribe to - mailto:phpdbabstraction+subscribe@lists.pengus.net. Be sure to check out the comments for more great discussion.
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A different sort of abstraction layer project has been started up and has already seen a few releases - Forage. As mentioned on Rob Young's blog:    Recently I've been working on a search abstraction library for PHP called Forage. The idea is to bring to search what we've had for relational databases for quite a while, abstraction.    On Friday I put up a preview release with three backends; Solr, Xapian and Zend Search Lucene. At the moment it has the bare minimum of features but there will be more soon. In this post I'm going to talk a little about the motivation for the project and then walk through a short example.    He talks about the need for search abstraction (integration and resilience to change) before getting into an example of some code that grabs the data from an RSS feed, passes it in to the Xapian search engine and stores it before looking it over for thier search terms ("yahoo microsoft").   You can download the library if you'd like to try it out for yourself.
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Chris Hartjes has posted an update on the Zend_Service_Audioscrobbler package for the Zend Framework, including writing the unit tests to ensure it's complete functionality.   In my spare time I've been banging away at writing the required unit tests for the Zend_Service_Audioscrobbler component that Derek and I had started. I finished all the unit tests for the user based functions, which is a nice milestone. Then I decided to go back and actually read the comments made from the proposal. Oops. I discovered there were a bunch of changes that the folks at Zend said needed to be made in order to accept them. I agree with most of them.   He also lists some of these comments/changes/suggestions for the package that were given to help it fit in better with the rest of the framework.
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One of the major issues plaguing search engines right now is the growing list of web documents available online. While no exact numbers are available, there are billions of search results to sort through. But, they can&#8217;t all be relevant both on material content and time &#8212; can they?  Of course they&#8217;re not, and Google [...]
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Well, the official announcement has been made and the Zend Developer Zone has the scoop on the latest release of the Zend Framework - Preview Release 0.6.0.    This represents a watershed for Zend Framework: we have passed the halfway point. We decided to advance the version number more than the customary "one-tenth" increment.   We are at a phase in which we are focused on finishing the components of the product. As we are approaching a state of feature-completeness, a Beta Release, and then the General Release of version 1.0, we have created a more precise roadmap for the scope and schedule of upcoming preview releases of Zend Framework.    Updates in this edition include:  Lucene-compatible search engine query language Improved Session-handling design Improved XmlRpc client and server Emerging components for I18N, Getopt, Mail folders, and others. Solutions for 126 bugs and feature enhancements, recorded in our issue tracker.    You can read up about all this and more on the Zend Framework Wiki home page.
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Scott Mattocks, like so many others, has just reciently recieved notification that he's been accepted as a speaker for the Zend/PHP Conference & Expo this fall. He talks more about his speech in his latest post.   My session, "Consusming Web Services with PHP-GTK 2&#8243; will be a look at how to turn a web services API into a desktop application. I only have fifty minutes so it won't be very heavy on implementation details. Instead it will look more at representing different data structures, collecting different types of data and how creating a desktop application can make life easier for the company and the end user.   Scott joins other speakers for this great event, including speakers like Ilia Alshanetsky, Wez Furlong, and Zeev Suraski. Be sure to check back on the Zend site soon to see when Scott and others' talks will be held.
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Users can search by file format, size, and duration.
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As a part of the release of the new book from Manning Publishing, Zend Framework in Action, Rob Allen has created a new site to act as a companion and to host new Zend Framework-related articles - ZendFrameworkBook.com.   The intention is to highlight interesting things that I see on the Zend Framework mailing lists and also to talk about book stuff periodically as well.   A good bit of the content will be summarized from the Framework's mailing lists but will also include other articles/tutorials/updates on proposals/etc that are happening in that community.