The ePub format is a publishing standard built on top of XHTML, CSS, XML and more. And since PHP is well suited for working with HTML and friends, why not use it to build ebooks? In this article we'll see what goes into building a tool for creating ePub packages starting from a set of content files. Maybe it's your next best selling cyber-sci-fi novel or documentation for your latest code project… because we all write good documentation for our projects, don't we?

He starts off with an introduction to the ePub format, showing the directory structure the package has to follow and some example contents. He helps you set up a test book with two chapters, cover images, styling and a cover/title page. Included in the tutorial is all of the code you'll need to make your own "ePub builder" tool and a suggestion of a tool to check the end result.

On the back of a CIConf in London last month, I would like to delve a little into a common theme amongst CodeIgniter developers. Speeding up development through simple automation. To do that we're going to take a look at the CodeIgniter Sparks project and how it can drastically speed up your development. To demonstrate, I will walk through building a little portfolio that leeches off the GitHub API.

They show you how to install it from the Getsparks website, finding Sparks to add to your application, the code to load in the component and configuring it on load. They include an example of loading in a REST client Spark and how to use it to make a request to Github and pull down a Markdown file.

I needed to create a number of static help pages in three languages in a Symfony 1.4 application. Using the XLIFF translation files seemed absurd, since I knew that I will include a lot of HTML. [...] And so, I decided to create partials using the following structure: _docs/{lang}/{title}.php. This method would organize my pages nicely and will only load what is needed. Then, I remembered that we were planning to hire a technical writer for the rest of the manual. I wanted to make his life as easy as possible and the source files easy to read for everyone.

She found the solution in Markdown and has included a step-by-step guide to getting it integrated with Symfony using this parser. It's loaded as a helper and used to parse the partial view's content. You can find a quick guide to Markdown on the Daring Fireball website.

The new release is out; you can download it from the usual location. As always, you should read the full change notes.

This release of Solar includes new Prototype and Scriptaculous ("Protaculous" ;-) Ajax support in the form of view helpers, ext/json compliant JSON support, and a new plugin-aware Markdown engine.

He details out the changes, talking about a few things that are broken (backwards compatibility), the "Protaculous" support, JSON support, and the implementation of Markdown support.

And PHP Markdown Extra adds a few niceties, like Markdown inside HTML block tags, simple tables, and definition lists. It just drops straight into WordPress and away you go.

For more information on Markdow (or it's use in PHP), you can check out the Markdown manual first and the PHP one to follow up...]]> Fri, 13 Jan 2006 07:30:50 -0600