On PHPMaster.com today there's a new tutorial that talks about PCI compliance with PHP applications and some of the technology you can use to help conform to its requirements.

In reality, PCI is a set of security guidelines drawn up by a consortium of credit card companies and industry security experts to govern how applications should behave when handling credit or debit card information. The card companies impose these standards on the banks who then impose them on those of us who operate e-commerce sites and the like. In this article we will dispel a couple of persistent myths about PCI, take a 20,000-foot look at what PCI encompasses, and then zero in on those requirements that are most closely associated with coding in general and PHP specifically.

He starts with some common myths about PCI (Payment Card Industry) compliance, including that it only applies to "the big guys" taking payments on the web. He then goes through some of the major points of the PCI requirements and talks about a few of them that specifically relate to the backend code side of things.

On PHPMaster.com today there's a new tutorial introducing you to the array handling features in PHP - sorting, slicing and more.

In my previous article on PHP arrays I suggested a number of things that are tables and therefore can also be expressed as arrays. In this article I’ll use a pack of playing cards to explore some of the built-in array functions most often needed by PHP programmers. To highlight some of the array-handling functions PHP offers, I’ll be using some components of Buraco - a game very popular in my part of the world and quite similar to Rummy.

In the example he represents a deck of cards with an array of values like "A", "03" and "13". This array is then looped to make the full set of 52 cards and shuffled to deal a "hand". Array functions put to use include array_rand, in_array and sort.

Unit testing fans will be happy to know that a Refcard from DZone has been published (authored by Giorgio Sironi) so you can keep PHPUnit at your fingertips.

Do you occasionally forget the syntax for creating Mocks and Stubs in PHPUnit? Or wonder how a command line option work? Or if there is an assertion that may be perfect for the test you're writing? Then this Refcard can help you. The Refcard is a PDF cheatsheet of 6 pages, which interleaves code samples with explaining test and sample outputs. Getting to know PHPUnit to use it at its full potential will be a little easier now.

You can check out the contents of the refcard on the DZone site or download a PDF to make it all your own.

On his blog, Rob Richards reintroduces a library he's written (xmlseclibs) to work with information cards with a missing piece from the example code he provided before.

There is, however, a missing piece to the managed code example I had posted, which I am finally getting around to talking about. It is the Infocard Managed library file (icard_managed_lib.php). This library provides the functionality needed to create a managed card that a user can download and install.

He also includes the different classes that the library uses to create the information cards including ICard, ICardClaimType, ICardUserCredential and ICardSAML.

On his blog, Rob Richards reintroduces a library he's written (xmlseclibs) to work with information cards with a missing piece from the example code he provided before.

There is, however, a missing piece to the managed code example I had posted, which I am finally getting around to talking about. It is the Infocard Managed library file (icard_managed_lib.php). This library provides the functionality needed to create a managed card that a user can download and install.

He also includes the different classes that the library uses to create the information cards including ICard, ICardClaimType, ICardUserCredential and ICardSAML.

Keeping track of people's faces at conferences can be a daunting task, but on PHP developer has his own method. Cal Evans (of the Zend Developer Zone) has created his own Flash cards of the "who's who" in the PHP community. Wez Furlong has this post documenting the fact.

Cal Evans of Zend's DevZone accidentally revealed his php community who's who flash cards (so that he can put faces to names at the conference)--and it looks just like a trading card game.

Luckily for you, Terry Chay was on hand to document them. You can see more of these on Terry's flickr stream.

Wez comments that there also seemed to be problem with the run (more than one Zak?).

Keeping track of people's faces at conferences can be a daunting task, but on PHP developer has his own method. Cal Evans (of the Zend Developer Zone) has created his own Flash cards of the "who's who" in the PHP community. Wez Furlong has this post documenting the fact.

Cal Evans of Zend's DevZone accidentally revealed his php community who's who flash cards (so that he can put faces to names at the conference)--and it looks just like a trading card game.

Luckily for you, Terry Chay was on hand to document them. You can see more of these on Terry's flickr stream.

Wez comments that there also seemed to be problem with the run (more than one Zak?).

Aaron Wormus notes in this new blog entry about a client-side card game he's been introduced to that comines great graphics, a smart AI and a powerful combination - PHP5 and the Winbinder library.

The game, 32cards is a digital card trading game with tons of data about each country for each card. On each turn, the topmost card is uncovered and five stats are compared. The player with the highest stats wins and points are awarded. You can gabs this great example of how flexible PHP really is (and try out a pretty cool game) by heading over to their site and grabbing the download.

Aaron Wormus notes in this new blog entry about a client-side card game he's been introduced to that comines great graphics, a smart AI and a powerful combination - PHP5 and the Winbinder library.

The game, 32cards is a digital card trading game with tons of data about each country for each card. On each turn, the topmost card is uncovered and five stats are compared. The player with the highest stats wins and points are awarded. You can gabs this great example of how flexible PHP really is (and try out a pretty cool game) by heading over to their site and grabbing the download.