In this recent tutorial from the NETTUTS website, they show how to "build a better blogroll" by combining the client-side power of jQuery with the simplicity of the SimplePie aggregation tool.

A traditional blogroll is a simple list of other sites, often in the sidebar, that are related, owned by, or otherwise friendly to the home site. Blogrolls are a great idea and on-point with the spirit of blogging, but how is a casual reader to know if any of these sites are truly of interest? Let's improve upon the concept of a blogroll by not just listing sites, but dynamically pulling recent headlines from them, and using some fun jQuery animation.

Their code (demo here) uses a CSS-based layout and simple pagination to switch between multiple groupings of RSS feed content.

Jonathan Snook hands off a handy tip for the CakePHP developers out there concerning the debugging information that can be displayed at the bottom of your application's pages.

I just wanted to document this somewhere but whenever I work on a CakePHP project, there's always the debug info that sits at the bottom of the page. It's big and bulky and once I'm off the default CakePHP styles, it's usually pretty ugly. I've done various stylings but I finally took a moment to implement a really simple idea: Fixed position the table and then use hover styles to toggle the visibility.

He includes the simple four style entries that can be used to tame this debugging information down into something a bit more useful (and less intrusive).

On DevShed today, there's a new tutorial on showing how to create a simple application to use one of the simpler protocols - FTP.

PHP has many functions that help us to implement Internet and/or networking protocols. In this article, we will look at how to implement some of those protocols using PHP.

They introduce the FTP functions for PHP (a basic list, PHP manual style) and include the code - the CSS to make it easier to use and the PHP code to make the FTP connection and grab the remote file listing. A screenshot is included to give you an idea of the end result.

Padraic Brady has posted part four today detailing his development process for a piece of blogging software with the Zend Framework. This part focuses on the design stage of the application.

In this article we're going to take a stab at setting up a default blog style, using some filler content, and finally capturing the design with a Zend_View template to be consumed by Zend_Layout as a common HTML Layout for the entire future blog.

He uses the Blueprint CSS framework for his projects, a simple system that helps you lay out pages it a bit more sensible fashion without having to worry about the underlying CSS so much. He shows how to integrate the library into his project and gives some sample HTML to style with it. Then, with a little help from the Zend_Layout component, he splits it up into a layout that can be used over the entire website (code included).

Vinu Thomas has proposed a replacement for the usual var_dump or print_r sort of debugging developers tend to do - Krumo.

To put it simply, Krumo is a replacement for print_r() and var_dump(). By definition Krumo is a debugging tool (now for PHP5 only), which displays structured information about any PHP variable [...] it does the same job, but it presents the information beautified using CSS and DHTML.

It also supports output of other data in a "pretty format" like backtraces, included files and a listing of all constants. You can check out a demo of it in action here.

Tiffany Brown shares a quick function she whipped up to create dropdown menus from the contents of a newline separated text file (or files).

I developed this PHP function for a project I'm working on. I'm posting it here in case I need it again, or in case you find it handy.

The function turns each line into an option tag making defining custom menus based on the contents of dynamically-given text files easy.

This could also be easily adapted to create navigations menus at the top of your pages with a few modifications to the HTML tags being used and some CSS to change the look of the list.

Helgi has posted about the updates that have recently been made to the PEAR website (pear.php.net) to help correct some issues and bring in some new features.

I just did a new release of pear.php.net which has a bunch of new features and bug fixes, most of which you can see here.

Some of the updates include:

• One column design instead of the 2 column design
• Usage of the YUI CSS reset + fonts
• The package list on http://pear.php.net/packages.php doesn't highlight deprecated packages anymore
• Now developers can see bug reports by unconfirmed accounts
• The RSS feeds now contain new line breaks!
• Patch uploading during ticket creation now works

He also specifically mentions some of the feedback he's gotten on certain things (like the new layout, the CSS of the site and the DES passwords) and explains some of the rationale behind their update/use.

In this tutorial on the LotsOfCode website, the author looks to help you create a feature common to several (including this one) websites out there - a tag cloud.

In this tutorial i am going to show you how to create a basic word / tag cloud using php. I am going to create a class based cloud, this is because it will be more convenient for people to adapt it on there own websites, if you don't know much about class based programming then click here to take a look at the class tutorial.

They pull the information from their "words array" (where words can be dynamically added to it) and use a percentage rating to base the CSS size for the data's span tag. The entire class listing is provided in one big chunk to make copy and paste easy.

The Bakery has posted five new articles/tutorials for topics like customizing the view and sending emails a little differently:

• $anything_for_layout: Making HTML from the View available to the layout - Did you ever have a side navigation that you wanted to change based upon changes in the view? Using this helper, you can write HTML and other output for display in the layout
• css list-menu helper - A helper (method) to create a css formatable list-menu.
• ViewInFile component - Sometimes in needed to output a view in a file. Most of the time for debugging, but also for some web service (xml) where you might need to send (by mail as a copy) an xml file reflecting the answer of the webservice.
• ActAs Image column behavior - This behavior add new column to your model and allow to store images in file system. It can resize images, create several versions, and thubnails. After find model you got link to file for each record in model.
• Email Validation - email validation replacement for /cake/libs/validation.php

Check out The Bakery for even more great CakePHP-related content.

PHPBuilder.com has a review posted today of a piece of PHP development software - RapidPHP 2007:

Of the many editors available for creating (X)HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and PHP pages, several combine a few different yet compatible languages. Some include support and a few manage to make it work seamlessly. RapidPHP 2007 belongs in the latter category.

They walk through the list of features (including a PHP syntax checker) and include a screenshot of the PHP function hints in action. The reviewer also talks about the support for other languages it has - the (X)HTML editor and CSS style sheet editor.