In a new blog post today Jonathan Snook shows how to create a contact form for your CakePHP application (version 1.2).

Most contact forms take a name and feedback from a user and mail it off to the administrator but don't store any information in the database. This tutorial will show how to use CakePHP's models, even when no table is being used.

He shows how to define the model class, set up the mapping of columns to named elements and the code to handle the submit. It just sends a basic email with the contents of the form with a few validation rules to ensure it's not abused. Simple stuff...

In an effort to help employers/recruiters/etc find the PHP people they're looking for, the PHPClasses.org website has launched their PHP Professionals Directory:

So, I thought to myself, instead of recommending people, I could provide a place where available PHP professionals looking for work could list. Then companies can look up the list of available professionals and contact them directly.

Developers are divided first by country, then by name and have all the contact information you'd need (address, zip, location, phone) to get in contact with the developer. You can also add your own profile to the directory to make it easier for others to find you.

On the Zend Developer Zone, there's a new tutorial talking about one developer's method for creating a link between Flex and Drupal to create a data entry form.

Why Flex? Because I'd like to be able to put the widget on any site and Ajax has security issues there. Web browsers, quite rightly, ensure that Ajax pages only request data from their server of origin. So it's much harder to host an Ajax widgets on external sites without kludges like IFrames or Script tag data transit. Flex allows data access from different servers. So it's far easier to write widgets that can be hosted externally.

You'll already need Drupal installed to start working with the tutorial - he chose Mac OS X as his platform of choice, but this setup will work with any installation that supports Flex. He uses the AMF protocol to interface with the PHP scripts on the backend (via AMFPHP) and a small update will need to be made to Drupal to get it to cooperate.

The rest of the tutorial shows how to create the Flex interface - making a simple information form that takes in a user's name, address and phone number and updates the Drupal contact information for them.

In his search for "contact grabber" classes, Jonathan Street came across one posted to the PHPClasses.org website recently, the Contact Grabber class, and decided to give it a shot and report back his findings.

I haven't tried it yet but apparently it can connect to hotmail, yahoo, gmail, orkut, rediff and myspace. It is an impressive collection of scripts. [...] Generally speaking I wouldn't have a problem with the script being included in another project. In fact I would encourage it. In this instance though there are a few problems.

He breaks it up into a few different kinds of issues: inaccuracies, updates, licensing problems, and that the author wouldn't make contact back to Jonathan about some of his problems.

Stefan Mischook points out in this new post on the KillerPHP blog about an article he has published in the latest edition of the Web Designer Magaizne covering the creation of a contact form in PHP (a beginner look at working with forms and sendmail).

You can find out more about the magazine and the other contents of the issue from their website.

Attention all PHP User Groups out there - listen up! There have been a few announcements about user group meetings on this site, and I'm coming to you to ask for more.

If you've ever wanted to expand the audience of your user group but haven't gotten much of anywhere, let us post the information about your latest meeting. Getting the name of your group and the fact that it exists can only help. PHP user groups can be a great place for developers of all skill levels and backgrounds to come together, socialize, and maybe even learn a thing or two.

If you'd like to submit your user group information for posting on the site, send me an email to enygma@phpdeveloper.org and mention that it's in reference to this post. The best is if you have a feed that can be subscribed to, but if you don't a process is being put in place to allow user group members to provide us with the needed info without having to email it each time.

So, drop us a line and let us know about you and your group!