Vikram Vaswani has a new tutorial posted to the Zend Developer Zone today about integrating PHP with an OpenID system via a few helpful packages.

OpenID, a free, open-source framework for "single sign-on" across different Web sites and applications. The even better news? There already exist a bunch of PHP widgets that allow developers to easily integrate OpenID into a PHP application, and this article is going to show you how to use them. So what are you waiting for? Flip the page, and let's get going!

For those not familiar with the authentication method, he defines OpenID and shows how it can help with the "too many passwords, too many accounts" problem many users face. He uses the PHP OpenID Library and the Authentication::OpenID_Consumer PEAR package (as well as several other PEAR packages to help with the connections and message formatting). He builds two simple forms to use the service - one to authenticate a user and another to create a new account.

On his blog today, Stefan Mischook has posted a new video tutorial showing how to hook together one of the more popular web development combinations on the internet - PHP and MySQL.

I've gotten around to releasing a new set of beginners video tutorials on PHP. This time around, I have a four part video on how to get PHP to talk to MySQL.

All four parts are there, bundled into a Flash presentation. Note: these are not installation tutorials - they only show how to get PHP talking to the MySQL backend, not how to set them up together.

On the SaniSoft blog, Tarique Sani talks briefly about some of the prefix "automagic" that's already built in to the CakePHP framework's routing.

There are times when you need more than just admin routing, how about something like http://blah.com/user/profiles/edit and http://blah.com/user/profiles/changepassword ? If this could be routed to an action like user_add and user_changepassword wouldn't it be great!! (eg: think ownership ACL checks)

Good thing the CakePHP developers already planned for something like this - they included the connect() method for Router objects that maps the URL request to a method with that same prefix in the controller.

From The Bakery today, there's a new tutorial that steps you through the process of getting the Eclipse software set up and working happily with a CakePHP installation.

So you're on a noob on the quest for painless PHP development? You've started using Cake and now you're considering the Eclipse Integrated Development Environment. These are two great first steps. All you need now is a little help getting to know Eclipse and configuring it for maximum effect with CakePHP. This tutorial gathers lots of information already out there, adds a bit of my own, and puts in all in one place.

They work through the installation, how to define a workspace for your project and getting the "bake" command to work directly from the local software.

John Walsh got to thinking about performance when it comes to the MySQL functions versus MySQLi in PHP - this quick post is the result:

I've decided that a little investigation in weather it can connect,query and close faster than the MYSQL function I prefer the MYSQLi version as the _connect function is a lot more organised with the DB select in it.

The code used for the benchmarks is simple - just a connect, query and close (no fetch). The results of running each 1500 times shows that, by a pretty narrow margin, the MySQL extension comes in around 92 milliseconds faster than MySQLi.

DevShed is getting back down to some of the basics with this new tutorial - the first part of a three-part series looking at connecting PHP with a MySQL database backend. The article is part of an excerpt from the O'Reily book "Learning PHP and MySQL" (by Michele Davis and Jon Phillips).

In this first part of a three-part series. you will begin learning how to use PHP to display and modify data from a MySQL database.

They step through the process of connecting to the database server, picking the database you want to work with, creating a SELECT statement for the data in the tables, running it and getting back the information. For this first part of the series, though, they only go as far as making the connection including the solution to one of the most common errors people experience - the "call to undefined function" problem.

Working with multiple databases in your scripts can be a pain at times as Ligaya Turmelle found out in getting a PDO connection working to a SQL Server in one of her scripts.

My DSN just was not right and wouldn't play - my host string was off and any permutation I used wasn't working. Looked at the PDO docs, the DSN docs in the manual, connectionstrings.com and no love.

Her final fix involved setting up an "instance" of her SQL server to point to the host. Her code is included.

It's always good to finish a rather large project, and Robert Peake shares his joy in this new post on his blog nothing that not only is the project off and running, but it was all created based on a best practices/standards-based approach with respect to PHP development.

I spent over 18 months architecting the system, from dedicated hardware to software including eCommerce, CRM, subscription management, recurring billing, and content management systems. I had great help from a small, dedicated, and very talented in-house team of artists and programmers. Absolutely everything is implemented on a LAMP stack.

He notes several of the things they used along the way, including:

• Design patterns
• Ajax
• Optimization
• Coding standards
• Extreme programming tactics

I consider it a kind of real-world treatise on how to effectively implement enterprise best practices with LAMP technologies. No books, no debating, no theory -- we did it.

PHPit.net offers up yet another fine tutorial for your learning pleasure - this time with a focus on email, reading it that is in Read your e-mail with PHP (catchy, eh?).

E-mail is something we use every day, and almost everyone has their own e-mail address. To read our e-mail most of us tend to use something like Microsoft Outlook or Mozilla Thunderbird, but it's also possible to use PHP to read your e-mail. In this tutorial you will learn how.

I will take you through all the steps necessary to read your e-mail with PHP, and show you how to display all the newest e-mails in your inbox.

They use the POP3 class from PHPClasses.org to do most of the work, from connecting to thse server, logging in, grabing stats (like the number of emails), and grabbing and parsing out each email's data.

There comes a time in a developers life (well, okay, some of them) when they'll need to get one machine to talk to another in a quick and easy way. There's lots of options for this, but in this new tutorial, they'll focus on one - a combination of OpenJMS, XFire, and PHP.

recently got involved in a project where reliable communication between etherogenous platforms was required. Having already worked with JMS, I had to find a way to expose its services to the frontend(a PHP base web application). Some time before I had come across XFire, and had been looking for a chance to work on it.

This was that chance. I know SOAP can sometimes be cumbersome, but XFire really makes its use easy, and PHP well supports it( we'll use the nusoap library). In this article I'll make an introduction on how to easily merge together OpenJMS,XFire and PHP to get a generic, immediately usable messaging system. If someone will be interested in it, further articles will follow on this topic.

He introduces the technology, explaining what they are and the role they'll play. From there, it's straight into the code - first looking at the "functionalities wrapper" on the OpenJMS site, then how to expose this OpenJMS services with XFire (implementing a SOAP interface). Finally, the last piece of the puzzle - the PHP - comes into play with a simple set of calls surrounding the NuSOAP library to grab the data.