Jani Hartikainen has posted a quick tip for Zend Framework users out there looking to force a download from their script.

"How do I make a file downloadable through my script?" This seems to be a relatively common question on #zftalk nowadays, so here's a quick wrapup!

He compares the two ways - the usual PHP-only way of using header() calls and echoing out the file versus the more Zend Framework way - using a Response object to pull in the content, set the headers and a helper to display/render the data output.

DevShed has finished off its CodeIgniter series today with this ninth part focusing on making a simple content management system with the framework.

Designed to allow programmers to create applications rapidly by utilizing the Model-View-Controller pattern, the Code Igniter framework lets you add many capabilities quickly and easily. This article will bring everything we've learned together for the creation of a content management system.

Their system combines the bits of knowledge from the previous parts (segments of specific functionality) and combining them into a MySQL-driven system to store some information about the user's favorite movies.

A new post on the Debuggable blog spotlights a content management system built on top of the framework - Wildflower.

There are hundreds of PHP Content Management Systems. Why would a decently earning freelancer, hacking Wordpress to fit any clients need decide to write one from scratch? The reason is CakePHP. [...] So what does a programmer do when he's not comfortable with the tool he uses? He programs a new one. It's slightly more than a year that I started a project called Wildflower. The tag line is A CakePHP CMS.

The article talks about what comes built into the CMS, includes some screenshots of it at work and talks some about the roadmap for the future of the project.

In a recent blog post Gaylord Aulke illustrated a method for dumping the (key) content from a memcached cache in a friendly, formatted way.

When i did some optimization of a cluster based webapp lately, I was wondering how Memcache was speading my cache entries over the cluster. So i did some research for monitoring tools. [...] Inspired by [memcache.php], i wrote a small script that fetches all data from a memcache cluster, gets all keys out of it and then sorts and displays them in a list. Yes it it ugly and yes: the memcacheD is not answering other requests while doing a cachedump.

He includes the 22 line script in the post to spit back the data in a simple array. From there it can be styled whoever you'd like.

DevShed continues its look at sending MIME emails with PHP in the fourth part of the series - a method for sending HTML in the message.

In this article, I'm going to show you how to provide the MIME mailer class with the ability to send email messages in HTML format. This will greatly extend its functionality, so don't miss this tutorial.

They start by reviewing the class they've created so far, including an example of its use. From there they modify it slightly to make it easy to embed the HTML content into the email by adding the addHTML and buildHTMLPart methods.

On the Paranoid Engineering blog, there's a recent post with a "CMS battle" of sorts between two of the more popular PHP-based content management systems out there - Drupal and Joomla.

It's hard to choose which one to use without trying them out. As usually, there are more options - home grown custom programming or even building your own CMS (which I was once stupid enough to do). Programming from scratch is always fun and beneficial for your skills, however, if you need things up and running in no time or you don't do (or don't want to do) any programming, using a CMS is the way to go.

His vote is for Drupal but he's included a long list of specs comparing the features of both so you can decide for yourself on which is the better fit.

On his blog today, Stefan Mischook shares his reasoning for making all of your pages PHP pages, regardless of static content or dynamic.

By making all your web pages PHP pages from the start, you are basically leaving open the possibility of using PHP in your web pages at any time.

By his reasoning, it provides an "out" for you later on should you decide that a page needs to have some dynamic content thrown in there somewhere (without having to change the filename - bad for SEO, supposedly).

The PHPEveryDay.com website has posted some more tutorials recently - here's the list:

• PHP Network: Pinging Remote Hosts
• Web Content: Crawl Image Source a Web Page
• Web Content: Getting All URL in a Web Page
• Web Content: Reading Other Web Page
• Web Content: Forcing Browser Downloads
• Web Content: Calculating Script Execution Times
• Web Content: Protecting E-mail Address
• Web Content: Changing URL Text become Active URL

Check out the rest of the site for even more great tutorials and articles.

On the Developer Tutorials blog today, there's a new post talking about the "three easy steps" to making an RSS feed for your blog:

Adding an RSS feed to your site is quick and painless, and can be done with pure PHP (and some kind of data source). After the jump, 3 simple steps to building an RSS feed in php.

The steps are pretty simple - figure out what content you want to serve, set up the basic RSS XML structure, and loop through your data to push it in to the template and echoed out. Some simple example code is included.

Lars Strojny has posted about a the new element that's been introduced in the PHP 5.3 branch - NOWDOC:

PHP 5.3 introduces a new syntax element, NOWDOC. If you know HEREDOC, NOWDOC is easy to understand: it is in fact HEREDOC taken literally. Whily variables are expanded in HEREDOC, in NOWDOC they are not.

NOWDOC is basically a HEREDOC except for one thing - no parsing is done inside of it, making it good for echoing out PHP code (that would otherwise need to be escaped all over).