Freek Van der Herten has a post for the Laravel users out there showing how to use custom HTML components in your Blade views making use of this package.

Today we launched our newest package called BladeX. In short this package provides you with an easy html like way to render custom html components in your Blade views. In this blogpost I'd like to introduce the package to you.

He starts by describing an example application where reusable components could be helpful (things like alert messages, form components and layout parts). He then shows how to create a component for an alert message that can be used via the @component functionality in Blade as a sort of "include and use" call. He shows how to pass in variables, use slots, and prefix components. He wraps up the post going "under the hood" and showing how it works via a service provider and how they made the package (and why).

The TutsPlus.com site has posted a tutorial showing you how to use the DiDOM library to parse HTML in PHP. The DiDOM is a "simple and fast parser" packed with a lot of functionality for parsing, searching and modifying HTML.

Every now and then, developers need to scrape webpages to get some information from a website. For example, let's say you are working on a personal project where you have to get geographical information about the capitals of different countries from Wikipedia. Entering this manually would take a lot of time. However, you can do it very quickly by scraping the Wikipedia page with the help of PHP. You will also be able to automatically parse the HTML to get specific information instead of going through the whole markup manually.

In this tutorial, we will learn about a fast, easy-to-use HTML parser called DiDOM. We will begin with the installation process and then learn how to extract information from different elements on a webpage using different kinds of selectors like tags, classes, etc.

The tutorial starts by helping you get the package installed (via Composer) and provides a simple example of using it to parse either a string of HTML, a local document or a remote site. It then walks you through using the search functionality built into the library, using either CSS selector type strings. They also include examples of traversing the DOM, updating element attributes, and adding/removing/replacing elements.

Scraping content from other sites (while slightly controversial) can be a helpful way to pull information into your application without the overhead of manual interaction. In this new post to his site Sameer Borate shows how to use a DOM parser to extract data from a remote site.

In this post I have explained some elements to scrap data from external websites. Simple HTML DOM parser is a PHP 5+ class which is useful to manipulate HTML elements. This class can work with both valid HTML and HTML pages that do not pass W3C validation. You can find elements by ids, classes, tags and many more. You can also add, delete or alter DOM elements. The only one thing you should care about is memory leaks – but you can avoid memory leaks as explained later.

He starts by walking through some of the basics of creating a new instance of the class and loading the content (either as a string or as a file) to be parsed. He then give several examples of how to query the contents of the document and locate multiple or single elements (including the use of CSS-type selectors for fuzzy attribute matching). He finishes out the post showing how to access element attributes and append content back to the original HTML.

The Zend Framework blog has posted another tutorial focusing on the use of one of the components that makes up the framework. In this latest tutorial Matthew Weier O'Phinney focuses on the zend-dom component and how to use it for scraping content from remote sources.

Even in this day-and-age of readily available APIs and RSS/Atom feeds, many sites offer none of them. How do you get at the data in those cases? Through the ancient internet art of screen scraping.

The problem then becomes: how do you get at the data you need in a pile of HTML soup? You could use regular expressions or any of the various string functions in PHP. All of these are easily subject to error, though, and often require some convoluted code to get at the data of interest.

[...] zend-dom provides CSS selector capabilities for PHP, via the ZendDomQuery class. [...] While it does not implement the full spectrum of CSS selectors, it does provide enough to generally allow you to get at the information you need within a page.

He gives an example of it in use, showing how to grab a navigation list from the Zend Framework documentation site (a list of items in a <ul> tag). He also suggests some other uses of the tool including use in testing of your application, checking content in the page without having to hard-code specific strings.

The SitePoint PHP blog has another tutorial posted from author Christopher Pitt looking at writing async libraries with PHP. In this particular article he focuses on just one of many tasks an asynchronous library could perform: converting HTML to PDF documents.

I can barely remember a conference where the topic of asynchronous PHP wasn’t discussed. I am pleased that it’s so frequently spoken about these days. There’s a secret these speakers aren’t telling, though: "Making asynchronous servers, resolving domain names, interacting with file systems: these are the easy things. Making your own asynchronous libraries is hard. And it’s where you spend most of your time!"

The reason those easy things are easy is because they were the proof of concept – to make async PHP competitive with NodeJS. [...] Today, we’re going to look at a few ways to make your application code work well in an asynchronous architecture. Fret not – your code can still work in a synchronous architecture, so you don’t have to give anything up to learn this new skill. Apart from a bit of time…

He starts with some theory about things in the async world including callbacks, promises and what they might look like in PHP-land. He then starts in on the creation of the PDF files, creating a "Driver" class to handle some of the logic and using the Dompdf library to do the heavy lifting (the conversion from HTML to PDF). He walks through the code required for this class then moves on to the code, using the Amp project, to handle the async operations. He then creates a simple set of web accessible endpoints that call the Driver class with some basic attributes and performing the conversion. He ends the post talking about porting the parallel driver to other systems (such as ReactPHP) and a few simple steps if you need to move back to the synchronous world.

In this new post to his site Freek Van der Herten shares a new package he's worked up to help generate and maintain the status of menus in a Laravel application. While this example is Laravel-centric, there's also a framework-agnostic package that can be used in any application structure too.

Virtually every website displays some sort of menu. Generating html menus might seem simple, but it can become complex very quickly. Not only do you have to render some basic html, but you also have to manage which item is active. If a menu has a submenu you’ll also want the parents of an active item to be active. Sometimes you want to insert some html between menu items.

There are some packages out there that can help generating menus, but most of them have a messy API or have become victims of feature creep. Thanks why we decided to create our own modern menu package that has a beautiful API to work with.

He spends the rest of the post introducing the package, starting with the generation of a basic menu (and something a bit more complex). He also shows the use of the isActive method call to mark something as "active" but the package will handle that automatically for you if you'd like to keep it simple. He ends the post with a listing of the components that make this menu handling work (three of them) and some of the "modern PHP" functionality that they use.

Rob Allen has a quick post to his site talking about some of the improved error handling that's been updated in the latest version of the Slim microframework to help make reporting issues easier in multiple contexts.

From RC1 of Slim 3, we have improved our error handling. We've always had error handling for HTML so that when an exception occurs, you get a nice error page [...] However, if you're writing an API that sends and expects JSON, then it still sends back HTML. [...] At least we set the right Content-Type and status code! However, this isn't really good enough. We should send back JSON if the client has asked for JSON. Until RC1, the only way to do this was to register your own error handler.

With Slim 3 the framework handles things more correctly based on the value of the "Accept" header sent along with the request. This value is checked and, if it references JSON or XML, the error message is translated either giving the default output or reporting back for the "notFound" and "notAllowed" error types.

On the Developer Drive site today there's a quick post introducing you to Couscous, a PHP-based documentation generation tool. Couscous translates your Markdown files into HTML output that's professional and clean looking.

If there’s one thing I hate more than tracking down bugs, it’s documenting code. It takes forever, it’s almost a project in itself, and I never seem to factor it into my project lifecycle. Setting out to solve that problem for me, and anyone else whose life is too short, is Couscous. Couscous takes markdown files and converts them into professional standard HTML docs that colleagues, or fellow developers, can easily follow. You can preview the resulting site on your local machine, correct any issues, and then deploy straight to GitHub where it will be hosted for you.

They walk you through the (brief) process of getting the tool installed via Composer and using it to show you a preview of your documentation. The "deploy" command then allows you to easily deploy the results out to a GitHub Pages location on the gh-pages branch. You can find out more about Couscous on the project website.

Hari KT has a new post to his site today showing how you can integrate the Aura PHP components into a Slim framework application for input handling, like from a form. Aura PHP is a set of decoupled components for things like CLI handling, dependency injection and SQL requests (among others).

Rob Allen wrote about Integrating ZF2 forms into Slim. I did write how you can use Aura.Input and Aura.Html to create standalone form for PHP. This time I felt I should write about integrating aura input inside Slim.

He includes the Composer configuration to install the HTML and Input components as well as an up-to-date version of the Slim framework. Code showing how to create the form class (a "Contact form") is included, showing both the creation of the elements and the filtering/validation checks put on each. He shows how the Slim routes would handle the request as well as how the view processes the request and displays the form via a helper. You can get the full working code in this repository over on GitHub.

The php[architect] site has a new tutorial posted giving you a step by step guide to sending HTML email with the combination of Drupal 7, Webform and Mandrill (the mail service by Mailchimp).

By default, Drupal is configured to send out plain text emails. For many developers, plain text email is sufficient and preferable to HTML email. HTML email is still, in this day and age, not guaranteed to render the same across email clients, more likely to be labeled as spam, and requires a significant amount of testing to make sure it works. Still, a minimally styled HTML message can be easier for recipients to read and help reinforce your brand/design (if you don’t depend on images to do so). In this article, we’ll look at the modules to install and configure to enable HTML emails and, specifically, how to change the default Webform email template to send submissions as HTML.

The tutorial comes in four different sections, each with plenty of description and some code to make it happen:

• Set up your site to send email
• Allow outgoing email to use HTML
• Formatting Outgoing Email
• Send Webform Submission as HTML Emails