Kevin Waterson has posted a new tutorial (a very comprehensive one) seeking to make introductions between a developer new to PHP and the MySQL abilities the language has.

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.

The tutorial doesn't get into working with forms and the data submitted in them, but it does give a great overview of basic SQL commands, pushing data into tables and some other simple functions (loading a CSV file, preventing SQL injection and getting the last inserted ID).

The Bakery has five new items they've recently posted - a few new articles, helper information and tutorials. Here's the list:

• CSV Helper - I was recently outputting some comma-delimited data and thought I would benefit from a simple csv helper
• p28n, the top to bottom persistent internationalization tutorial - For some developers, allowing a website to support multiple languages is essential. Luckily cakePHP 1.2 has the foundations available to make this possible.
• Tracking navigation history of a user - Many times it can be very useful to track the navigation history of a user. [...] With this HistoryComponent, it's extremely easy to handle such actions.
• Habtm hacks to menage columns in both models - I had a habtm relationship between two models and when i did a "findall" in a model i couldn't filter the rows with a clause from the the other model.
• SecureGet Component - I am not pretending this can replace ACL or more complex implementation, it's just a small component, inspired a bit from the Security component.

If you're a CakePHP developer, you'd do well to check out The Bakery for these and more great Cake-related articles, tutorials and information.

In a quick new post from Brent Meshier today, he shows us how, with the help of a database CVS file, to block visitors to your site from certain locales.

A client asked me last night if it was possible to block certain countries from accessing his website. He's concerned about the "axis of evil" and their comrades downloading his software. The task is easily accomplished, although it's like using a sledge hammer to tap in a finishing nail. He didn't seem too concerned that we could accidentally block Uzbekistan in the process. Unfortunately his entire site uses plain .html files, no dynamic scripting. This led me to using a slightly creative solution with .htaccess.

Broken up into five simple steps, he makes a light function to drop into an output buffering function to tell it to either show the normal content or return a 401 Unauthorized header to the visitor.

In this new tutorial from InformBank posted today, they show how to use PHP (and a few handy tricks) to create Microsoft Office documents on the fly.

Sometimes you have to generate some MS Office document for the users of your website using dynamic data. For example, few days ago, I had to generate some Excel reports using data from some tables in MySQL. I knew about the COM but it has a lot of disadvantages, including Windows-only platform and not very high speed. CSV is much easier and faster but you can't format the cells to make them better-looking. The method I've never thought about before was using HTML.

So here came the inspiration and after some research and experiments I wrote this tutorial for all of you who are looking how to create Office documents on the fly using PHP. Of course, I included the COM methods and some methods to create other MS Office documents like DOC and PPT, to make this tutorial as full and as useful as possible.

The tutorial starts with the creation of documents (Word, Excel, Powerpoint) with the COM functionality (the standby method PHP has had for a while). Of course, it also requires the script to be running on Windows to work. So, what's the other option? As he goes on to explain, it's something as simple as HTML.

He includes two examples of alternate mathods, showing hhow to use HTML or a CSV file to create a custom Excel document. He also throws in some code to help you stream out the resulting document as a zip file to the browser.

The IBM developerWorks site has posted part one of a new series - using PHp o build a search engine optimization application.

PHP, a dynamic Web-based programming language, takes a variety of input formats and uses a built-in SOAP client to obtain information from the Web. PHP, combined with applications using search engine optimization (SEO), is a powerful tool for obtaining information from major search engines, allowing this information to guide a webmaster's online marketing and SEO strategies. Find out how to take advantage of these strategies by building the back end of an application to monitor and track your client's SEO efforts.

The application takes in CSV files that contain keyword and domain combinations. The positions on each of the search engines is generated from these. You'll need a bit of prior PHP knowledge to work through it and you'll need a place where a web server, PHP, a database, and Java are installed.