A few weeks ago, a client asked me to add a feed of interesting news stories to his Web application. Naturally, my thoughts turned immediately to Digg, which invariably has something interesting to read and which also offers a Web service API [...] A little Googling, and I found the PEAR Services_Digg2 class, which exposes a neat little PHP interface to the Digg API. As you might imagine, with all these tools to hand, it didn't take long to quickly integrate a feed of Digg stories into the application.

He walks you through the installation of the package (a one command step) and a secondary package you'll need due to Digg's authentication, HTTP_OAuth. He includes a request and response example (returned in JSON) as well as several code examples for sample requests, searching, working with comments on posts, post comments, "digg" stories and follow other users.

abcphp.com is a social news website made for people to discover and share PHP related content from anywhere on the Internet, by submitting links and stories, and voting and commenting on submitted links and stories.

The site lets you vote (with a registered account) on the PHP-related articles they've posted ala Digg.com and breaks them up into categories like "New Releases", "PHP Dev Tools", "Database" and "Security". You can even create groups of people that share the same interests. Check it out and maybe submit a story while you're there.

I thought I'd start with a quick thank you to all those groups and entities involved indirectly with PHP. The PHP project relies on donations to provide our service infrastructure, this is in the form of hardware and hosting from both individual companies and hosting companies to provide collocation.

Besides the hardware support there's also companies willing to allow their employees time to work on the project (such as Pierre from Microsoft). Other companies that have made large contributions include IBM's large amount of testing, Sun's work to improve PHP on Solaris and, of course, Zend's support of the project and the time its employees spend developing the language.

The Zend Framework puts heavy emphasis on Web services. This is a good thing, considering the amount of Web services out there that can help lower costs and increase the value of your site. [...] In this example, I'll develop a Web services client to Digg, a real-world Web services provider.

He steps through the process - finding the provider information, locating their endpoints, setting up query string interfaces, making code to handle the responses and, finally, making the actual client as a Zend_Rest_Client interface.

February is usually when the many fun and interesting activities that surround our spring conference php|tek start taking place - and this year is no exception. In fact, this year that are more people working - hellbent might be a better word, given their enthusiasm - on making |tek a memorable occasion for PHP developers from all over the world to meet up, learn and network.

The three events/happenings he mentions are the keynote being given by Andrei Zmievski (Open Source Fellow at Digg), the webcast/unconference being organized by Keith Casey and the Hackathon being put together by Matthew Turland (both of Blue Parabola).

You can get more information on what sort of talks will be happening and how you can reserve your spot on the main conference website.

The first project the I've been working on since joining Digg has seen the light of day. It's a new PHP extension for interfacing with memcache servers and it is based on the libmemcached library, which is becoming the standard client library for this task. [...] There is another memcache PECL extension, but this one offloads the intricacies of communicating with memcache onto libmemcached and instead concentrates on exposing a sensible API and some cool features like asynchronous requests and read-through caching callbacks.

You can find out more about the extension on its PECL project page and more about the memcached library from the project's website.

If you're a wordpress power user, you'll inevitably have some questions about how you can improve your blog or add new features. Here are five tips that will make life easier for people wanting to maximize their use of Wordpress.

The list is:

• Quickly Find Page/Post ID
• Custom Front Page
• Password Protect Wordpress
• Protect from the 'Digg Efect' with HTML
• Stop Hackers

Each of them with their own explanations (and links to other resources detailing how they're done).

One key thing he's repeating is using a service layer to access data asynchronously. His advice right now is to group data requests at the top of a user request, do them asynchronously, and then use the data in the rendering when it comes back.

They've published a PEAR package as an example of this asynchronous method that interfaces with Digg's API (http://services.digg.com). You can read more about the subject of his talk on the MySQL Conference website.

So, you want to start your own Digg or Reddit? Look no further. With PHP and MySQL, you can create your own Digg site in just five minutes. All you need is a PHP web server and MySQL database server; follow these instructions and you'll be up and running in time.

They use the Pligg software to do all of the hard work and describe its installation, configuration and use - simple and easy. You can find out more about Pligg on its website.

Digg is a user content driven site, users submit links to article and sites that interest them and other uses either give it the thumbs up or the thumbs down. The most popular sites get onto the front page and can have literally thousands of hits this is reffered to as the Digg effect. We are going to go step by step how you can develop such a site using Drupal CMS which is available from drupal.org if your unfamiliar with Drupal we have an overview here.

The real key to it all comes in with the plugins you install into your Drupal setup:

• Vote Up/Down module
• Links module
• Voting API
• Actions
• Voting Actions
• CRE recommendation

This article is just the first part in the series - check out part two and part three for the rest of the installation.