On PHPBuilder.com today Octavia Anghel has written up a tutorial about working with zip archive files directly from PHP. The key is the Zip Archive extension that you can get from the PECL repository if you have a version older than PHP 5.2. Those on PHP 5.2 or higher already have it bundled in.

I explain how to manage Zip archive files in PHP using a number of demo PHP applications. You'll learn how to create Zip archives, add files and folders inside the archive from a string and from a given path, delete and rename files using their indexes and names and list the ZipArchive object details (number of files, filenames, comments, statusSys, etc.).

Complete code for the examples (along with a few screenshots) are included in the tutorial as well as a link to download the source to get you started even faster.