Evan Coury has a new post looking at setting up environment specific configurations in a Zend Framework 2 application letting you switch between configs based on an environment variable.

So you're all excited to try out ZF2. You clone the skeleton, install some modules, maybe even follow Rob Allen's excellent ZF2 tutorial, and finally, start building your application. Now, if you're a former ZF1 user or refugee from another framework, you might be troubled at this point by the fact that, at first glance, ZF2 doesn't appear to take into consideration environment-specific configuration values (e.g., development, testing, staging, production). Luckily, this is not the case!

He includes a bit of sample code showing how you can use a simple getenv call to pull in the value from an "APPLICATION_ENV" environment variable and put it into an autoload path.

Richard Thomas has a new "Solar Short" posted to his blog to make life easier using the Solar Framework. This quick spotlight is about controlling the layout of the standard form renderer.

Solar's form system is pretty powerful and you realize the full beauty when auto generating forms directly from models but by default it uses a DL/DD/DT list for formatting your labels/inputs. If your not a fan of that formatting you can do something about it.

You can define the decorator tags in your framework's installation to replace the tags used for the list, element, label and the value output of the form. One of the comments on the post also suggests using the "decorateAsDiv" method the Solar_Form object provides to force the output into a div.

Ben Scholzen has written up a post about how regular PHP arrays can be used as a native configuration option for your applications.

I was asked many times how I organize my config files, and my response was always the same, until some time ago when I switched began refactoring the codebase of my blog. [...] Looking at [the advantages of PHP config files], you may ask now why not everbody is using them. Well the problem mostly is that you cannot create extend-sections (when working with Zend_Config for example).

He compares an example of a method that, using a base config file with some "smarts", you can have it automatically pull in certain files and overwrite settings from the array inside. A sample "other config" file is also included, showing the definition of some PHP settings, resources and database information.

New from the Make Me Pulse blog is this quick tutorial about bending the URL rewriting that the Zend Framework does to match whatever your needs might be.

Today for a good website's referencement in Google, it's necessary to have an URL rewriting. [...] If your application is based on ZF, we have a htaccess base file which will redirect all php files to the boostrap (what is the bootstrap ?), and ZF classes will manage all redirection rules. How to implement the URL rewriting with ZF classes ?

He sets up a config file (an ini file) with the routing instructions the framework will need to adhere to and shows how to get the application to include it and match against it for routing rules. His example sets a default route and several regular expression-based routes to remap requests right where they need to go.

Abhinav Singh has posted a guide to PHP extensions - what they are and how to write a simple "hello world" one.

Assuming you have read the previous post, lets discuss on how to build our first PHP extension: every PHP extension is built out of minimum of 2 files, a configuration file (config.m4) which tells us what files to build and what external libraries are needed and source File(s) which will contain the actual functionality.

He builds up an example skeleton for an extension (the config.m4) and explains how the file will be phpized and configured. Next up is the php_sample.h header file where the needed modules are loaded and the sample.c file to define them. Last, but not least, comes the extension code itself that calls the printf function to output the "hello world" message.

The Developer Tutorials blog has a new post mentioning the use of YAML structure for creating configuration files in your application.

YAML, or YAML Ain't Markup Language, is a "human friendly data serialization standard". It's essentially a very basic format for storing data, and uses far less syntax than standard PHP. [...] It's almost like English; it's as basic as you want. Of course, that's not to say it doesn't support complex structures - this example demonstrates the power of the format.

He also points out the spyc extension that makes working with the files in PHP a breeze.

The International PHP Magazine has links to announcements of three new releases of PHP-related applications - the PHP Advanced Graph and Chart Collection, Blitz Templates and the Generic PHP Plugins & Config System:

• PHP Advanced Graph and Chart Collection 5.1 provides a very easy way to embed dynamically-generated graphs and charts into PHP applications and HTML Web pages
• Blitz templates 0.4.19 Blitz templates is a fast template engine written in C and compiled as a PHP module. It started as a php_templates replacement, but developed into much more.
• Generic PHP plugins and config system 0.75 Plugin meta descriptions can reside as human-friendly comment blocks in .php scripts. Generic PHP Config reads them and facilitates plugin and configuration setting management.

Joshua Eichorn has a new update on his Webthumb application he's mentioned before, noting some of the issues/updates that he's worked through so far.

Webthumb got off the ground yesterday without too many problems. It ran into problems right out of the gate since a large number of sites don't seem to want to finish loading correctly. I also updated the server config, Webthumb now supports flash (version 7), and has a lot more fonts installed so sites that need non-latin characters should be working correctly.

He's also laid out some "feature goals" that he'd like ot add in eventually, including better URLs, a searching method for thumbnails, and user accounts.

From this quick post (on Jeremiah's blog) we learn how to create a simple proxy for your web surfing needs with the help of Ubuntu Linux, Apache2, and PHP4.

Using Ubuntu Linux, Apache2, & PHP4 we can set up our own PHP Proxy page to use at work or school for those web sites you probably shouldn't have access to.

The linux installation isnt covered, but the painless installs of the rest of the apps is summed up in a few simple lines. Following that, he shows you what needs to be edited in the Apache config and where to get the PHP proxy application from.