Paul Jones' Weblog: Form Processing Questions
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On Paul Jones' weblog today, there's a posting covering one of the banes of PHP life - form processing/handling.
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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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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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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.
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PÃ¡draic Brady has a quick update today pertaining to the PHPSecInfo project - a new manual (currently in development).   I'll keep adding to it over the days, weeks and months ahead. The current form is going to be mainly a draft. When it's done, I'll go through it and do some serious editing. Next priority is getting in the material on actually using and implementing PHPSpec...   You can find the manual at http://dev.phpspec.org/manual/ with quite a bit of content already filled out. Topics currently covered include installation guides, your "first steps", testing the code and some examples of it in use.
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On his blog today, Vinu Thomas has an example of what he calls a "quicker and cleaner form" using the Zend_Form component of the Zend Framework.   Usually handing forms involves coding the form in HTML and performing client and server side validation, which usually makes the code for complex forms quite unwieldy. Zend_Form which is available in Zend Framework version 1.5 aims at simplifying this process.   With this new version comes the ability to add in methods for validation right into the form definition. His example shows a traditional login form that checks things like if it's required, checking the length and adding filters to modify the input.
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On his blog today, Ilia Alshanetsky has posted an update on one of the last issues before PHP 5.2 is released - the Filter extension - and some of the problems that have surrounded it.    If you have been monitoring PHP's internal mailing list you probably know that over the last few weeks we've been locked in a stalemate in regard to the API revision of the filter extension brought to light by Dan from our documentation team. This is also the reason why despite this being early October PHP 5.2 is still not out.    Fortunately, after mediation with Derick and Pierre the two protagonists of the filter conundrum a compromised was finally reached.    He mentions the commit that was made to include it into the current build, and no complaints have been lodged against it. He also comments that, with this isse out of the way, developers can look for PHP 5.2RC5 out as soon as this Thursday (10.05.06). Ilia also gives a brief tour of the filter extension's functions.
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As Paul Jones mentions, there's a sort of force in the PHP community that seems to be pushing back at the Smarty templating system and calling it unnecessary.    He points out Hasin Hayder's post on the subject. Hasin (ironically author of a Smarty book) has recently come to the conclusion that there "is no need to use an external template engine like smarty".   Some nice guys over there developed smarty and it saved life of a lot of developers (i mean developers). But that time is over. Seriously why the hell I need to learn a new templating language when a "echo" does the thing much better.   Judging by the responses to both Hasin's post and Paul's post it seems like quite a bit of the PHP community agrees (including Michael Kimsal, Harry Fuecks and Brian Lozier).
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A quick post from janschneider.de talks about questions regarding the PHP5 compatibility of Horde, IMP, or other applications on the Horde mailing list
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Electronic forms capabilities added to application server.
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Derick Rethans has pointed out a "gotcha" that was passed along to him (somewhat incorrectly) about the "name" attribute being deprecated in XHTML 1.0.   Just now somebody on IRC was claiming that the "name" attribute in HTML - the one that is used to give form input fields a name to be used in $_GET and _$POST in PHP is in fact deprecated. [...] But if you read correctly, it's only for the elements: a, applet, form, frame, iframe, img, and map.   For the official information, check out the section of the new spec dealing with this transition.
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Popular posts from PHPDeveloper.org for the past week:The Bakery: Six New Articles/Tutorials PostedEvert Pot's Blog: PHP: Arrays vs. ObjectsDevArticles: Learning AJAXInternet Super Hero: PHP: mysqli_fetch_all()David Coallier's Blog: PHP Namespaces (Part 1: Basic usage & gotchas)I/O Reader: 15 Cool Things & 12 Things to Dislike About PHPProPHP Podcast: Newscast - August 16, 2007PHPBuilder.com: Dynamic XML with PHPSite News: Popular Posts for the Week of 08.17.2007PRADO Watch Blog: PRADO Watch: Interview With Timani Tunduwani - Why I Moved From CakePHP to PRADO
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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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On his blog, Stuart Herbert has a quick tip showing how to mimic a feature of Ruby on Rails:   I'm still working on the next article in my series looking at PHP on servers, so in the mean time, check out this simple way to emulate Ruby's nice way of handling separate getter, setter and state query methods in PHP.   He admits his example isn't as elegant as the Ruby method, but it does get the job done. Code for the method is included in his post ready for cut and pasting.
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The Zend Developer Zone has released part two of a series (here's part one posted back in November) looking at making forms for your website with the help of the PEAR HTML_QuickForm class.   I'll be discussing some of the package's non-standard form elements, teaching you how to combine elements into groups, showing you how to apply templates to control a form's appearance, and guiding you through the process of writing and registering your own custom validation rules.   There's plenty of sample code and screenshots to go around in this second part including examples of form auto-completion, multi-select elements and and example of its integration with Smarty.
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This week we look at valid names, declaring, initializing and displaying variables and mixed data types. We conclude this section with an introduction to form variables. By Ellie Quigley. 0122
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The results of the latest International PHP Poll are in for the question "Which is the best way to do PHP web testing?" Options included "Use SimpleTest Web tester", "Use element IDs or names to test links, forms and fields", and "Log HTTP requests in the application".   Coming out on top with 22.6 percent of the votes was the first item, though - "Use SimpleTest Web tester". Second was a close race with "All" and "None" only about 1 percent different ("None" being the higher).   Be sure to get your vote in for this week's poll question - "What Is the Top Mistake That PHP Coders Commit?" Options for this poll include "Not escaping entities and SQL input", "Syntax errors", and "Not using a Framework".