As mentioned in this new post from the Zend Developer Zone, Nexen.net (creator of the monthly PHP statistics) has kicked off something they call the Month of PHP Functions.

The month of PHP function aims at introducing PHP developers to a new PHP function every day : one that gets too little usage and spotlight, though is highly useful. [...] During this month, we'll present one or several function every day : they all deserve more attention. You don't have to search for it : most of the time, it will be available in your PHP installation, especially if you're using PHP 5.

So far, six functions have already been posted:

• export PHP variables
• listing folders
• validating dates
• localization
• HTTP headers
• SQL stats

In the ever-continuing work that he's been doing with SimpleXML lately, Ben Ramsey shares a new bit of code

It's not really a "problem," but FeedBurner's FeedCount image is a rigid 88 pixels wide, and I wanted to include it on my homepage under the "syndicate" heading, an area that I've defined in my template as having only 80 pixels in width. The 88 pixels were throwing things off, so I used the width attribute of the HTML img tag to solve the problem. Unfortunately, it just squeezes the image, making the text in it appear fuzzy.

He explains what the script does via the SimpleXML call and gives the code to accomplish it. It's a short bit of code, but quite powerful when combined with the API from Feedburner - grabbing the data from a local image and integrating the text response from the API. It's great that they have that too - definitely a wise move to allow users even more flexibility in integration for their site.