Giulio Pons has posted a great tutorial for anyone looking to hook their application into the Facebook Connect technology.

This tutorial will guide you to the process of integration of your web community with Facebook. This means that when a visitor comes to your site it can log in with normal credentials if it has, but if it has not it can click on the "facebook connect" button and try to log in with its facebook account, automatically.

You'll need to register the application with Facebook before getting started and get an API key you can use to work with their backend. With the help of the Facebook-provided libraries and a file for the cross-domain interaction (a xd_receiver file) you can use the code he's provided to allow the user to log in with their Facebook username/password and it be mapped to a user on your local application.

On the Web Development Blog there's a recent post about connecting your PHP application with the Flickr API to search for photos with the help of a simple class.

We will be using the php function "file_get_contents" to receive data from flickr. The data which we will receive will be a serialized PHP array which means all we need to do is unserialize the array and we will easily be able to use the data returned. As an alternative we can use a cURL function to get the data, for example if the function "file_get_contents" is not allowed on your web host.

They show how to get your API key from the Flickr website and the sample code that you'll need to make a GET request (with file_get_contents) and an example of a loop displaying the response.

On his blog today Matt Curry shows how to connect CakePHP plugins so that two could be used and treated as one by the end user.

In the asset plugin I needed to know if the localization plugin was also installed and if it was use it. Cake's App::import() function returns "boolean true if Class is already in memory or if file is found and loaded, false if not." Perfect.

His code shows how he combines a plugin for localizing javascript files and an asset plugin that combines and compacts javascript and css files.

In this new post to the Liip blog Tobias Ebnother looks at Jackalope that's looking to bring JCR functionality into the toolset offered to PHP developers.

We initiated a new open source project called Jackalope. Its purpose is to bring JCR via Jackrabbit to the PHP world. [...] JCR provides a great standardized storage for hierarchical content and supports some nice features like full text search, versioning, transactions, observation, and more. Our main goal is to create a PHP Connector for Jackrabbit without using any Java.

To accomplish this, they're doing things in two steps. First, they've created a setup with the Java bridge (from Zend Server) to make the connection back to the Jackrabbit server and making writing tests to that API. The second step is to swap out the Java bridge with the Jackalope connection piece. You can check out the current state of the project on its Github page or come and ask questions of the team on the Freenode IRC network (#jackalope).

On the phpro.org site today there's a new tutorial posted about the powerful combination of PHP and MySQL introducing a bit about both sides - connecting PHP to MySQL and working with SQL statements.

This tutorial is aimed at those new to PHP and MySQL. The object of this tutorials is to show by way of example how to use php to CREATE a database, how to CREATE a table, how to INSERT data into a database, and how to SELECT that data and display it on a web page. [...] his tutorial will grow in size and complexity as time permits. Lets begin with a brief description of what MySQL and PHP are.

The tutorial looks at connecting to MySQL, creating a test database, working with the data inside via insert/selects/updates and a few other miscellaneous tips.

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.