Padraic Brady is on part five of his series looking at making a blogging tool with the Zend Framework today. This time he focuses on the database side of things, working with models and making an admin module.

First of all I decided to add an Entries Model and Authors Model to the mix, primarily to get ready for when we can add new entries to our blog. This leads to where we can create new Entries; we add an Administration Module to the application with it's own distinct Layout.

He starts by making the database schema, an entries and authors table, before starting in on the models. They're made based off of the Zend_Db component's structure and they let the application interact with the data in the tables easily. His code for the modules is included as well as the controller and view for the admin module.

A little while back Matthew Turland posted an interesting item to has blog talking about what he calls the "odd triangle" of PHP, MySQL and Oracle.

In [an article from Maggie Nelson in a blog entry], she remarks on the article being MySQL-oriented and how limited MySQL explain plan support is compared to Oracle. I've had some thoughts in my head for a while that are related to these points, so I finally decided to, knock on wood, put pen to paper.

Matthew talks about things he agrees with (Oracle over MySQL when it comes to hierarchal data and set operators) and some of the things that can make Oracle, with all its power, fall by the wayside. This includes its licensing, the administration costs and some of the recent developments between Sun and MySQL.

ProDevTips.com has posted part nine of their long-running series about using the Zend Framework (and Smarty) to create a CMS/Community website.

This piece covers creating a proper folder structure so that we can have a skin system. I've also created a folder for the admin section which is fully contained with it's own controllers folder and so on. Another unrelated change that has happened since the last part is sub menu logic which we will also take a look at.

They make updates to the bootstrap file to introduce another controller directory and, inside of that, create the Administrator controller and integrate it with a Smarty template to show different menu items if an admin user is logged in.

As posted on Nick Halstead's blog:

DevShed wraps up their look at databases in PHP (a excerpted from "Programming PHP, Second Edition") with this new tutorial showing how to insert and work with PDO prepared statements.

Concluding our discussion of databases and PHP, we'll finish building the [administration portion of the website] example that we started last week.

They start with the code for the administration page for adding a new record to the table - in this case, a business. They give the code to handle the submit and how to display a list of the current businesses. They wrap it up with a look at working with PHP Data Objects (PDO) and using them to create prepared statements.

Robert Treat has an announcement posted to his blog about the release of the latest version of the phpPgAdmin package - version 4.1.1.

The phpPgAdmin Team is proud to announce a new minor release of phpPgAdmin. Version 4.1.1 fixes several bugs reported to use from our users since the 4.1 release. Everyone is encouraged to upgrade.

Feature of phpPgAdmin include:

• the ability to administer multiple servers
• Support for PostgreSQL 7.0.x, 7.1.x, 7.2.x, 7.3.x, 7.4.x, 8.0.x, 8.1.x, and 8.2.x
• Easy data manipulation (browse, execute, select/insert/update/delete)
• Dump table data in a variety of formats: SQL, COPY, XML, XHTML, CSV, Tabbed, pg_dump
• Excellent language support - available in 27 languages

David Coallier points out a new feature of the main PEAR website (http://pear.php.net) - integration of the jQuery framework to help with the administration of a recent addition to the site, user comments.

http://pear.php.net is now using jQuery for some sections of the administration area in order to view user notes/comments and that I will be starting implementing more sections over the site within the next few weeks (Of course this will all be done once we have split the code completely into templates, views, controllers, MDB2 move, etc)

He also makes some comments about the number of Javascript frameworks out there and a mention of the roadmap for the rest of the features they plan to add to the PEAR site.

David Coallier has an update today on the effort to get PEAR developers all over the world mapped out to a Google map to show their locations - one that's finally been launched.

Over the past weeks we have had many people asking around if it would be possible to have a place to see the pear developers around the world. Well now Christian Weiske and I (With the help of Arnaud Limbourg) have put up a nice little map system on pear.php.net. You can see it at http://pear.php.net/map/

David also links to images of some of the administration panels for the application (one, two, three) and the connection information for a web service (REST) that allows access to all of the data.

DevShed continues their look at creating a simple treaded discussion foum with part two in the series, a focus on creating the administrator panel to help you manage users and the topics/comments they make.

This article, the second of two parts, will show you how to set up an administration area for a threaded discussion forum, and some of the functions you might want an administrator to manage.

Included is the functionality to get a listing of all of the topics, delete topics quickly, start a new topics, and manage a "blacklist" of bad words to keep out of the discussions. Of course, the code is all there and they explain each piece of it. They keep it simple though - the code is pretty procedural with only functions dividing up the functionality into the pieces.

With a bit more formal announcement, Pádraic Brady has posted these details about the resource he's working up, the Patterns for PHP site.

Patterns For PHP is a new project to write and catalogue Design Pattern descriptions and tutorials for PHP programmers. The website is intended as an (advertisement free) online resource for Design Patterns with a focus on PHP implementations.

It is our intention to allow the public edit and contribute freely to its content under the GNU Free Documentation License. Contributions may include Design Pattern descriptions and tutorials, articles demonstrating their use in varying scenarios, contributions on Design Pattern and OOP principles (since these are always applicable), and whatever else a contributor believes would improve the resource.

He also talks about the admin team (himself and 'Ambush Commander') and regular contributors have already started to come in. They've already (in the two weeks they've been live) moved over to a MediaWiki environment and added information for the Singleton, Registry, Factory, Abstract Factory, Strategy, and Composite patterns.

They also want to remind everyone out there, no matter the skill level, that they can contribute their knowledge to the wiki and help the community built another great patterns resource.