On the SitePoint PHP blog editor Bruno Skvorc continues his look at the Diffbot service and shows how to use their API to create entities representing objects from the API data.

A while back, we looked at Diffbot, the machine learning AI for processing web pages, as a means to extract SitePoint author portfolios. [...] Since then, the design of the pages we processed has changed, and thus the API no longer reliably works. In this tutorial, apart from rebuilding the API so that it works again, we’ll use the official Diffbot client to build custom entities that correspond to the data we seek (author portfolios).

He starts by setting up the environment for development (a Homestead Improved instance) and pulling in a few libraries to bootstrap the script. He shows the setup and configuration of the Diffbot client, creating a new API application via their UI and using the browser tools to help the service locate the information it needs. He then shows how to extend the client and define an "entity factory" to generate the objects requested. In this case he creates an AuthorFolio class to contain the author's number of posts.

On the NetTuts.com site there's a new post (a part of a series) that introduces you to the global variables available in WordPress and provides a practical use for them.

In the first article in this series, we reviewed an introduction to WordPress global variables. Specifically, we said that they are variables that hold a variety information that can be accessed from anywhere in the WordPress page lifecycle. We learned how to access a global variable and display various details about the latest post using the $post global variable. In today’s article, we will dive further into global variables by learning how to access them to display the author information.

In this post they focus on extracting user (author) data from the system via the "authordata" global variable. He shows an example of a print_r output of the data it contains and use this to filter posts, only showing three per-author.

The PHP Town Hall podcast has posted their seventeenth episode today - Authors Galore, Conferences and Game Changers. In it they feature guest Cal Evans a well-known member of the PHP community and author of Signaling PHP.

Cal Evans talks with us about some of the great projects he is (and has) been involved with, including training days, writing books, speaking, organising conferences and a bunch more.

They also talk some about Phil's own book, the Sunshine PHP conference and much more. You can listen to this latest episode a few different ways - either the audio via the in-page player, by downloading the mp3 or you can watch the video of the live recording on their YouTube channel. If you like what you hear, be sure to subscribe to their feed for more PHP community goodness.

On 7PHP.com today they've posted the latest in their interview series with people from all across the PHP community. In this most recent post, they talk with Rob Allen, author of the "Zend Framework in Action" book and well known speaker and Zend Framework contributor.

In this edition I talked with Rob Allen who is the main author of the famous PHP book “Zend Framework in Action“. He is very passionate about the whole Zend stuffs: he’s a contributor to the Zend_Config component in Zend Framework 1, he’s a member of the Zend Framework Education Advisory Board, he keeps on with his contributions with the new Zend Framework 2 and he rambles a lot about QUALITY Zend Framework tutorials on his blog. Rob is fond of writing; his latest PHP-Advent article is “Better Than the Rest” and is also a regular conference speaker, speaking at the likes of ZendCon, PHP North West, PHP|Tek and a whole lots of places.

In the interview Rob answers questions about:

• How he got started with PHP
• His advice to beginning PHP developers and ones looking to improve themselves
• Who he works (IDE, debugging, testing)
• Some recommended resources to learning and keeping up to date
• and some of his thoughts about conferences

On PHPMaster.com today there's a new tutorial from Alejandro Gervasio about using virtual proxies in your application - a method in development that provides a layer of abstraction on top of domain objects and makes it more efficient to work with (and lazy load) them.

Often referenced by a few other fancy names, the substitute is generically called a virtual proxy, a sort of stand-in that exploits the neatness of Polymorphism and interacts with the actual domain objects. Proxies aren’t new to PHP. Doctrine and Zend Framework 2.x make use of them, although with different aims. On behalf of a didactic cause, however, it would be pretty instructive to implement some custom proxy classes and use them for lazy-loading a few basic aggregates from the database, this way illustrating how virtual proxies do their stuff under the hood.

He starts off by setting up a domain model for a "Post" and "Author" - a typical blog example.Based on the definition of these classes, he creates a mapper class to generate Author objects and an "AuthorProxy" class that uses a "loadAuthor" method to only load in the author's details when a property is requested. He gives a bit more code showing it in action and the difference between using the normal Author and AuthorProxy class.

PHPBuilder.com is starting off a new series today that, if you're new to the PHP language, aims to teach you everything you might need to know to get up to speed. Today they've posted the first article in the series, an introduction to the author (Peter Shaw) and a mention of what PHP can do for you.

In this 10 part series, I'm going to take you through the basics of PHP and hopefully give you a taste of what such a versatile language can do. I am not, however, going to preach that PHP is the greatest thing since sliced bread. I'll let you decide that for yourself!

He introduces himself first, talking about some of his past experience with PHP and other various languages. He then goes on to talk about where PHP came from, a high-level look at how it works in both the web and command-line environments.

If you're looking for a way to give back to the PHP community, there's plenty of ways - one of which could be writing for PHPFreaks.com.

We have decided to give people the chance to write tutorials and blog posts for PHP Freaks. [...] You'll be writing about things that are of general interest to PHP developers and you will be writing tutorials for people who are learning about PHP at any level (i.e. from beginner tutorials to advanced topics). We would rather have tutorials that teach programming/coding concepts or theory than specific things, such as a blog.

You'll need to request membership and join the "Authors" group to get started. Check out their list of other criteria you'll need to match too.

On the Inside Open Source blog today, Jason Gilmore mentions an upcoming event the Drupal-ers out there might want to check out:

Co-author of Pro Drupal Development Matt Westgate will be giving a live webinar on how to customize Drupal themes. The webinar is slated for September 9 at 7pm GMT, so mark your calendars!

You can find out more information about the webinar on the Groups.Drupal website.

On the Inside Open Source blog today, Jason Gilmore mentions an upcoming event the Drupal-ers out there might want to check out:

Co-author of Pro Drupal Development Matt Westgate will be giving a live webinar on how to customize Drupal themes. The webinar is slated for September 9 at 7pm GMT, so mark your calendars!

You can find out more information about the webinar on the Groups.Drupal website.

Those that didn't get a chance to check out this year's PHP UK Conference can get a little taste of what it was like from Rob Allen's perspective in his latest blog post today.

Included in the happenings he mentions were the talk that Cal Evans of the Zend Developer Zone gave on mashups, Kevin Henney's look at Object Orientation, and Rasmus Lerdorf's look at PHP5 performance/security. He also mentions meeting up with Dagfinn Reiersol (author of PHP in Action) to "talk shop" a bit about writing books.

You can check out all of the details about the conference that was over on their website including summaries of the talks that were given during this jam-packed one day event.