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Some of you may wonder what PHP is, and what can it do for you. To explain simply, PHP stands for Hypertext Preprocessor. It is a server-side programming language that can be used to create applications from the most simple HTML website to extremely complex multi-platform implementations. Popular applications coded using PHP include Friendster and MyBlogLog. PHP is also the primary languages for many open-source applications such as PHPbb, PHP-Nuke and WordPress.

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Zend Developer Zone: PHP Abstract Podcast Episode 40: Data Importing
The Zend Developer Zone has posted their latest episode of the PHP Abstract podcast series. This time, Cal's brought in Lorna Mitchell from Ibuildings to talk about importing data.

Today our special guest is Lorna Mitchell. Lorna is a Developer at Ibuildings in the UK, and is based in Leeds in the North of England. She is a Zend Certified Engineer and the senior member for phpwomen.org in Europe. Today, Lorna will be talking to us about Data Importing.

There's three ways to get this new episode - you can either download the mp3 of the show, listen using the in-page player or subscribe to the show's feed and get this and other great episodes automatically.
Jordi Boggiano's Blog: Who let the Dwoo out ?
Jordi Boggiano has blogged about a new PHP5 templating engine called Dwoo that's just been released for download.

Early this year I wanted to rebuild my template engine to have something stronger to work with, so I started thinking about it and then asked myself why I didn't use one of the available engines out there. The fact is that - and I guess I will lose many of my few readers here - I am not fond of using php itself as a template engine (with Savant or similar).

Features of the templating engine include a striking similarity to Smarty's methods, the fact that its code is scope aware, it has template inheritance and comes with a plugin system that can be extended as you see fit.

You can get complete information about the engine from the Dwoo homepage.
C7Y: REST and Resource Handling with CakePHP
On the C7Y website, a new tutorial has been posted from Nate Abele (following his previous CakePHP-related article) covering the use of the framework to create a REST web service and manage resources inside of it.

We're going to take these concepts [from the previous article] further and add a new one: REST. In the course of this series so far, we've only been discussing how to use the Router to examine and act on different parts of a URL.

He gives a list of possible headers that could come from a client (like Accept-Charset or Content-Type) and how these can be directly pulled in to the CakePHP routing system. A few extra bits of code later and your app can be mapping requests directly to the controllers for the actions the user's requesting. All that's left is to serialize the results back into XML to echo out.
Chris Hartjes' Blog: New CakePHP 1.2 Release Coming
Chris Hartjes has blogged about the new CakePHP release that's on the horizon - version 1.2:

I'm certainly not the only person who has been blogging about this, but I thought I'd mention that a feature freeze is coming up for the next CakePHP 1.2 release, codenamed 'DV'. My very modest contribution this time around is a patch to fix a problem with running 'cake bake' on Windows, where it was mangling the app path that a user would enter. Ticket 4495 if anyone is interested.

He makes a few recommendations about how to get involved in the project, but also mentions some of the "trouble in paradise" that's been happening on the mailing list (not friendly for beginners?) and about the direction of the project.
ThinkPHP Blog: Accessing Nike+ data with PHP
On the ThinkPHP blog today, Stephanie Ehrling has posted about a method for PHP to take in the output of the Nike+ equipment and put it into a usable form.

There is no official API that allows you to use the raw data. Nevertheless the data are sent to the Flash via XML so there is a chance to use them. For PHP Rasmus Lerdorf himself has implemented a class to access these data. The class allows to authenticate a user and fetch the running data of a user in a XML-Format

She gives an example of it in action - simple creation of an object then a call with the username and password. Behind the scenes, the data is pulled in and dropped into a SimpleXML object that includes total distance, total calories burned and data on the most recent run.
Ibuildings Blog: Intimate PHP Seminar (Enterprise PHP)
Paul Wander has posted to the Ibuildings blog today about a new seminar (non-web) one of their CTO, Ivo Jansch, will be giving on the 10th of June at the King's College London:

Are you a sophisticated PHP developer, or a newbie? Either way, you need to make the best of your resources, be they people delivering projects, or hardware serving your customers. Take this opportunity to learn from the industry experts the importance of PHP best practices.

Ivo will be talking PHP in the Enterprise - how good developers are hard to find, keeping code up and running well and how important scalability is to you and your business.

If you would like to attend, you can find contact information at the bottom of this page.
Alex Netkachov's Blog: Zend, Prado, ASP.NET. Which framework is the best?
In his latest blog entry, Alex Netkachov asks a question that has been wondered hundreds of times over - "which framework is best?" (though, to be fair, his is limited to three choices - Zend, Prado and ASP.NET).

I've been asked on the forum about my preferences in frameworks and I wrote a few thoughts about it.

These comments include the fact that eighty percent of his code is not in frameworks, that the Zend Framework is the more flexible of the group and that the right tools, methods and language structure is the real key to making for successful software development.
Zend Developer Zone: Uploading YouTube Videos with Zend Framework
In a recently posted tutorial on the Zend Developer Zone website, Cal Evans has pointed out a video showing PHP pushing videos out to YouTube.

Attention all you Zend Framework junkies, Jochen Hartmann has uploaded a new video to YouTube that demonstrates the basics of how to use Zend Framework with the YouTube Data API. This step-by-step demonstration walks you though everything you need to know to upload files to Youtube via Zend Framework.

The video (from the official Google developers) shows the creation of a simple application that uses the Google Data component of the Zend Framework to upload the selected video from their local machine.

You can find out more about the Google API for YouTube on this page on the Google Code website.
Site News: Blast from the Past - One Year Ago in PHP
Here's what was popular in the PHP community one year ago today:
The Bakery: New Tutorials, News and Helpers Posted
Several new tutorials, components, news and helpers have been posted to The Bakery, the CakePHP community site lately. Here's a sampling:
Check out The Bakery for more great CakePHP-related goodness.

Recommended PHP Scripts

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