On the Ibuildings blog, Soila Patajoki has posted about two upcoming events in the UK and Irish PHP communities.

Following the success of our two PHP seminars in London, we have decided to make it a tour and to visit other parts of the UK and Ireland as well. Next up are Leeds and Dublin - come and meet us in your city! Find out more about our events below.

The first is a talk on source control happening September 9th (as presented by Lorna Mitchell) and the second being a talk from Ivo Jansch in Dublin - "Enterprise PHP and Zend".

Check out the blog post for more information including how to register (do it before the Early Bird special ends and get a copy of CTO Ivo Jansch's book Guide to Enterprise PHP Development).

Mark Kimsal has posted part one of a new series he's working up on creating a virtual host control panel by pairing with PHP a few other technologies.

I still come across a person now and then who does not appreciate the power that any server control panel gives you. [...] They reduce the margin of error that a human can bring to the table when editing files and performing commands "by hand". If host control panels are so good, why would you want to write your own control panel when there are so many out there already? Well, the answer is, there aren't any open source ones.

He talks about starting out right by defining the build and the technology to use and only then gets started coding. His application uses the Cognify framework, SQLite, Nanoweb and, of course, PHP. At the end of this part of the series, you'll have the framework set up and a sample module in place to mess with.

Over on the PHP Zone (from the DZone community site) there's a in-depth tutorial looking at the creation and management of an access control system (users, passwords and what they can do) in your PHP application. It's an excerpt from the Packt book PHP5 CMS Framework Development.

Many websites will want to control who has access to what. Once embarked on this route, it turns out there are many situations where access control is appropriate, and they can easily become very complex. So in this chapter we look at the most highly regarded model role-based access control and find ways to implement it. The aim is to achieve a flexible and efficient implementation that can be exploited by increasingly sophisticated software. To show what is going on, the example of a file repository extension is used.

They talk about some of the general considerations about access control (limiting the number of rules, common difficulties) and plenty of code/database schema to get you started.

Recently, the Springloops version control system made its debut on the web and was greeted with both skepticism and interest. One developer, Hasin Hayder decided to look at it from a different angle and worked to see how easy it would be to reproduce a similar service.

Springloops is a nice code management service recently came into focus. It helps you to manage the code base of your application, monitor the commit and deploy the final version easily to another server. So if you are wondering how to build such a system and how it actually works, this article is for you.

He breaks it down into the six main topics (as he sees it) that are the core parts of the system - things like payment gateways, setting up subversion and making it user friendly. He goes through each topic, explaining its place in the application and providing some links to resources to help you set it up (or at least learn more about it).

David has posted an article to the Expirmentalworks.net blog about a task that he and Johannes Schluter have finished up - importing the PHP CVS tree over into Git.

A few month ago Johannes Schluter and I started discussing about GIT and other decentralized version control systems. During our exploration of GIT we thought about importing the PHP CVS tree into git. A few weeks later and a lot of wasted cpu time, we finally managed to provide an inofficial GIT mirror of the PHP CVS repository. It's provided by Johannes Schluter and mirrored by me.

The post documents the path they followed - using git-cvsimport, parsecvs and a path they needed to make - to finally get the import working without any flaws. You can check out their unofficial repository here (it's updates twice a day from the live CVS).

DevShed continues their series looking at some of the fundamentals of working with PHP in this new tutorial posted today. It looks at one of the flow control statements the language has to offer and a very useful data structure - the switch statement and arrays.

In our last exciting adventure (back in early November), we braved crocodiles, ravenous editors, most of the PHP statements, and beginning loops. In this edition we'll cover the final statement, the Switch, and discuss arrays. So sit back, order your R2D2 robot to bring you a cold, frosty Jolt Cola, and let's get cracking.

They start with a simple example of a switch statement (to echo out strings) and follow it with a detailed description of the different sorts of arrays - numeric indexed, associative and multidimensional versions.

Gergely Hodicska has posted about some hacking he's down with the Zend_Acl package in the Zend Framework to make support for custom roles and resources.

I found that the base Zend_Acl package has some limitation/problem if you want to use it in a bigger real life project. Zend_Acl supports only logical roles, resources so I decided to extend it to allow using custom roles and resources which can represent existing entities (for example users/groups and topics in a database)

He talks some about the package and its current functionality, including the limitations he ran up against. He came up with a structure for what he wanted (seen here) and set out to extend the class, making an interface and implementing it with his own loading method.

His source code can be downloaded here.

The Zend Developer Zone has posted episode 15 of their popular "PHP Abstract" podcast series today. The special host for this edition is Nick Halstead (of the The Programming and Management Blog) covering the use of the Zend Access Control List functionality of the Zend Framework.

Today's special guest is Nick Halstead. Nick has been a developer for over 15 years. Working for 10 years in the games industry working up from programmer to studio manager. Then moved into web technologies working in a number of startups. [...] Today Nick is going to talk to us about the Zend Access Control List.

The show notes also contain a link to a tutorial entry over on his blog detailing (including code) how to use the ACL functionality.

On the Version Control Blog today there's a new guide that helps to make upgrading your Drupal installation a simple and happy experience with the help of git (the version control system).

Drupal development team has released Drupal 5.2 on July 26, 2007. It fixes two security vulnerabilities, so it is highly recommended that you upgrade as soon as possible. Many Drupal installations often contain extra Drupal modules, and almost always the also contain local customizations.

Question arises: how to upgrade your Drupal installations timely, safely, with confidence that none of your local customizations are lost; without need to remember each line that was edited and re-applying those edits to new version and without need to drastically change your workflow (very little discipline is needed actually).

This detailed guide walks you through the import of the source code, import of the Drupal modules and making the upgrades to the installation (drupal, drupal-and-modules and drupal-production) as well as how to resolve conflicts that might come up.

On PHPGeek.com, there's a new post talking about the use of the AuthComponent for CakePHP for access control in your application. It's not a tutorial, but it does follow how the developer came upon the component and why they're using it.

Nearly everything that is built needs at least some level of authentication and authorization before users can be let loose to use it. Unfortunately, not only is there a lot of confusion out there on how to use it, but lots of poorly done, reinvented wheels out there because of it.

He points out the solution he came across via another article from the "Another Cake Baker" blog (lemoncake) show how to use the component for ACL in CakePHP 1.2.