In the first part of a new series on NetTuts.com, they started on the creation of a full web application (a Twitter clone). The first article covered the CSS and using LESS to create an interface. In this second post they get into the PHP backend, opting to create it without a framework on the first shot.

In the initial entry in this series, we took care of the UI-aspect of our Twitter-clone, called Ribbit. Now, we'll begin coding the application in a number of languages. This lesson will leverage standard PHP (with homegrown MVC), but, in future articles, we'll review other implementations, such as with Rails or Laravel.

They provide all the code you'll need, the database table structure to power it (MySQL) and the examples of a model, router and basic MVC stack to handle the requests. They help you make a user creation and login system as well as a few other pages ("buddies", "make a post" and a few others). You can also download the source from their Github account if you want it all in one shot.

The Codeception blog (a BDD testing tool) has a new post on using their Locator class to create more complex tests based on XPath or CSS selectors.

In the latest Codeception 1.1.4 new Locator class was introduced. Basically it should simplify your life in writing complex XPath or CSS locators. Right now it has minimal, yet useful functionality.

The post shows how to combine more than one item for location with either a tag, CSS-based or XPath-based selector. It also shows how to use the "tabindex" method to simulate the movement through a page using the "Tab" key. Finally, there's a quick piece of code showing how to locate an item based on the "href" value. For more information on using Codeception, check out their documentation or the project's main site.

On the ScreenFony.com site there's a quick tutorial showing you how to get started with Symfony2+Twitter Bootstrap+Assetic+LESS in a basic application. Assetic is a library that helps with asset management and use and LESS is a CSS pre-processor that makes it simpler to work with your site's CSS.

Bootstrap is a well known and powerful front-end framework for fast prototyping, it uses LESS and it can be easily integrate in your Symfony applications with the help of assetic. In this post I'll show how to: Install bootstrap in you Symfony application, load it using assetic, and compile bootstrap LESS files with lessphp.

Using Composer, creating a new Symfony2 project is just a single command away. The just update the "composer.json" and run the install to get the other needed libraries (LESS and the Twitter Bootstrap). They help you set up some Assetic filters for LESS and provide a simple page to output the Bootstrap in your header.

In this recent post to his blog Linesh Jose shows you how to create a simple PHP-based compressor for your CSS (using some string replacement methods and a regex or two).

CSS or Cascading Style Sheets is a language used to describe the presentation of a document written in a markup language. If you're developing a very complex design for your site, CSS scripts become very long, and takes too much time to load. But a compressed CSS script can help your website load faster and easily maintain its functionality. Here, I've created a very simple CSS compressor using PHP to compress or reduce CSS script size.

You can read through the example code and see how it all works or you can download the code and see a live demo of it in action. His script does the compression on the fly, but it's not a far stretch to get it set up as a part of a build to output to a file on deployment.

In a recent post to his blog Lee Davis gives an example of using the Zend Framework's pagination functionality, complete with some CSS to style it a bit better than the defaults.

One of the reasons why zend framework has been so popular is due to all the hard work put in to make sure components are extremely configurable. Sure there are default behaviours, but nothing is assumed and anything that needs to be overwritten or reconfigured can be. A strong emphasis on configuration over convention means you'll never be lumbered with code that just can't be changed. Zend Paginator is one of the smaller components of Zend Framework that allows you to get a simple paginator up and running on your listings or search pages in a matter of minutes.

Included in the post is a cut-and-pasteable view that creates the Previous/Next links as well as including the first/last page numbers and a few around the current page.

On PHPMaster.com today there's a new tutorial showing how to use a little PHP magic to compress your CSS automatically.

There are many ways to compress CSS files or automatically generate browser-specific CSS3 prefixes, but usually extra tools are used which is very annoying. I'd like to show you how such tasks can be done using only PHP.

Complete code for this small script is included in the article. It uses some regular expressions to parse the CSS and does some replacement and removal of things from the CSS content to slim it down and format it all as one line. There are some images illustrating the process also included.

On the ServerGrove blog, there's a quick post with a handy tip for the Symfony2 + Assetic users out there - how to get it to recognize the "less" module.

Unfortunately the Symfony documentation does not provide any details on how to configure Assetic to use LESS. There is a blog post by Dustin Dobervich that gives some pointers, but after following the instructions, Assetic issued the following error: Cannot find module 'less'. We searched around without much success. After several tries, we nailed the configuration.

It's an easy two-step process: first you be sure you have "npm" (the package manager) installed on your system, then you modify your Symfony app.yml file to point to the Node modules path.

In this new tutorial Smashing Magazine shows you how to create a mini "Christmas List" application with PHP, HTML and CSS (and a little bit of database help) to display a list of what you or your family wants this holiday.

'Tis the season to be jolly, and how much jollier could we make it than with a helpful Christmas wish list crafted for your family to ensure that you get maximum presentage this holiday? In this article, we will focus on creating a very simple system that allows you to add gift ideas to a Web page, and for your family (or whoever) to view the list.

They walk you through the setup of the basic PHP file structure, the HTML template for the list output, CSS to make it look nice and the actual PHP backend - working with a MySQL database to pull out product information and use a simple login method.

A new post on CodeForest.net today gives you a technique for obfuscating email addresses with a combination of PHP, CSS and Javascript. It uses ROT13 for the obfuscation and some tricky CSS to keep it usable for the human visitors.

According to Wikipedia, more than 97% of all e-mails sent over the net are unwanted. That's around 200 billion spam messages per day. To keep this insane amount of spam out of your inbox, you should keep your e-mail safe when you display it on web. One of the ways to keep it safe is to obfuscate it. In this tutorial I'll show you how to create a script that will do just that.

The script converts the email address into a ROT13 obfuscated versions and reverse it. The spam bots harvesting addresses won't see it as a valid format but the user, thanks to some CSS rules, will see it and be able to copy it easily. Each part of the script is explained in the post and you can see a demo of it in action here.

Script-Tutorials.com has a new article posted today showing you how to combine PHP, some CSS, a dash of SQL and some HTML (oh, and jQuery) to create your own commenting system from scratch that could be used anywhere from a simple blog to a more complex social site.

Today I prepared new interesting article - I will tell how you can create own commenting system (AJAX) for your items (any units at your website) with PHP. For our demonstration - I prepared two SQL tables: first table will keep records of our items. It contain several fields: title, description, time of adding and comments count. Another table will keep records of comments. We will use jQuery too (for better interface behavior). One of features will spam protection (we can post no more than one comment every 10 minutes)!

The tutorial includes all of the code, markup and styling you'll need to make the system work. If you'd like to get right into the code you can download it as a package or you can try out their demo.