Like most content management systems, PyroCMS uses front-end themes. Though PyroCMS themes are built a bit differently than what you might be used to from other systems, they're still quite easy to create. They're so easy, in fact, that very little PHP experience is required to assemble them!

He walks through things like the folder structure of the templates directory and how to get started on a custom "Foo" theme of your own. He covers how to lay out the HTML markup for the theme and how you can use partials for the sections of the site. He briefly touches on using multiple layout files and how to use different layouts shown only to mobile devices.

In addition to handling the tedium of generating page and document tables of contents, or maintaining internal links and references, the documentation is now easier to write, as you can simply focus on the content instead of markup and presentation. Don't forget syntax highlighting of PHP, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript in code samples. Based on ReStructured Text, it's also more human readable in a text editor than HTML is, which is likely where you spend most of your time. As an added benefit, Sphinx can output HTML, PDF, and even EPUB formats all from the same source files.

There's also been a style redesign in the latest release (here on github) on the development branch of the framework. They warn of a few "bumps" that you might come across in using it, but they're working hard to take care of those quickly. If you'd like to see the new version, check out the nightly build results.

It is a fantastically productive framework, one which I happen to use almost every single day. There was however one feature which absolutely drove me crazy. The Zend_Form component's uses the dd, dl, and dt elements as the default form markup decorators, meaning that even a simple contact form consisting of name, email, and message fields and a submit button [is marked up with dl, dt and dds]. [...] It goes without saying that the overwhelming majority of developers do not use these elements to mark up their forms, with the sheer number of questions posted to StackOverflow and elsewhere about getting rid of these decorators backing this assertion.

He gives his simple solution to the issue, something better than removing all of the decorators and using setDecorator to replace them - a simple partial view that echos out the fields directly. The trick is to use the setDecorators call with a "ViewScript" option pointing to your partial and setElementDecorators() call to use a "ViewHelper".

Tidy is a very cool PHP extension. You can let it tell you what kind of mistakes you might have in your HTML markup and even correct it for you - if you want. In my projects I use it to give me a hint if my generated markup is invalid. This way I can easily correct it during development without being dependent on external validators. In this post I will show you how easy it is and how few lines of code you need to make your application show any potential errors you might have in your HTML markup.

He shows how, with the help of output buffering, to grab the HTML output of your script and push it through the Tidy functionality (via a call to tidy_parse_string) and outputting the results. It even has a built in error catcher for when it finds invalid formatting in the generated markup. You can find out more about the features of this extension in the PHP manual.

It has been a while since I've used a template engine during development, the last one I used was Smarty. Now there are a plethora of template systems, but most are a rehash of Smarty. Readers may beg to differ, but Smarty gets the work done, which is all that matters. The one that I found really interesting is Haml.

He includes some markup examples of how it's structured - the main structure of the site, tables, divs, etc - and what it comes out like on the other side of the parser. The phphaml and phamlp libraries let you run the template through with variable values set and display it. There are some downsides he mentions, though, like the rules on indentation and that the markup has to be all in one file (or combined before sending to be rendered).

This [word game] project was going to be slightly larger, and writing everything myself from scratch would have taken far too long. So I decided to use a PHP framework. PHP frameworks are a collection of code, meant to make your life easier and to aid you in the rapid development of dynamic websites. My choice fell on the Prado framework (see www.pradosoft.com).

He walks you through a first example script with both sides - controller to create/gather the content and the custom tag markup for it to inject the content into. He also includes a look at some of the Ajax support included with the framework. His example is the user clicking on a "Add to Cart" button to call the backend "onToCartClicked" method.

YAML, or YAML Ain't Markup Language, is a "human friendly data serialization standard". It's essentially a very basic format for storing data, and uses far less syntax than standard PHP. [...] It's almost like English; it's as basic as you want. Of course, that's not to say it doesn't support complex structures - this example demonstrates the power of the format.

He also points out the spyc extension that makes working with the files in PHP a breeze.

Everyone is talking about Facebook and their new Application Platform and I have to admit I think it's pretty cool too. So I decided to create an application that uses the Facebook Platform. I'm writing the application in PHP and I thought it might be useful for others to know how to write their own Facebook applications with PHP.

They show you where you'll need to go to set up an ID with Facebook to develop with, the developer application you'll need to add, where to grab the Facebook developer API and, finally, creating a simple application.

Their example is just of the "Hello World" sort, but it gives you a good foundation to start from. They also include pointers to the Facebook Markup Language and a reference for the Facebook REST-based API interface.

If you've ever encountered the same need, or if you're just curious about the YAML format and how it can be used with PHP, then today is your lucky day. Over the next few pages, I'm going to give you a crash course in YAML and in PHP's ext/syck extension, showing you how it can be used to efficiently translate data structures from PHP to YAML, and vice-versa. Come on in, and let's get started!

The tutorial starts with an example of a YAML file before getting into the application portion. He shows how to grab the Syck extension, install it, create a simple YAML file and create a configuration file (and parser) for a simple form application.

For a current project of mine I had to find a way to decode html into textile markup. Why? Because we are using tinyMCE to process our textareas as wyciwyg editors, which generate HTML. However, we want all output controlled via textile to allow only the textile tags. Yes, we could do it with strip_tags(), but textile is much more elegant. Plus, it was a requirement by the client. Come on and find out how to detextile html.

Code is included to work on the transformation: detextile, processTag, detextile_process_glyphs and detextile_process_lists. An example is included as well, showing how to input a block of HTML content to be "textile-ized". The full code is available for cutting and pasting at the bottom of the post.