A while back the PHPClasses.org website announced that it would be changing its look a bit and allowing visitors to set up and configure their own look and feel as they chose. The editor to make these changes has finally been released and is ready for use.

The site is launching an editor that allows designs to propose new site design themes. This is the initial beta version of the site design editor, but it already allows any designer to try different presentation designs.

You can access the editor from here and it'll require a login to get in (to create your own custom layout). The system uses simple tag-based templating to wrap the content of the site in your look/feel of choice. You can even try it out on different sized resolutions to give you an idea of the template's flexibility.

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.

Along with mentioning their 9th anniversary, the PHPClasses.org website has announced a contest for all of those out there who want to help improve the look for the site.

One frequently received suggestion is to redesign the site. As I explained before, changing the site design is not a big issue. The greatest challenge is to change the current design to another that pleases more users than the number of users the change may displease.

So, to keep things interesting, he's had a contest out of it with the winner, besides having their design applied to the site, will get their every own elePHPant and a prize of at least $1000 USD. The winning design will be the main one for the site, but it is possible that paying subscribers could have the ability to define their own.

More to come on the contest in the following weeks...

Padraic Brady has posted the second addendum to his series on creating a blogging application with the Zend Framework. It covers a revised blog design and the creation of a date format view helper.

In the second of my Addendum posts which revise previous entries either for missing functionality, progressive changes and enhancements, or reader comments, I revise the design and styling of the blog application. There's not a lot to discuss in this entry since the majority of changes are to the HTML and CSS of the blog.

He includes the phtml template files for the updates to the blog's layout along with the code for the new view helper (and tips on making them global and optimizing them).

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).

Matthew Turland set out a while back to develop a bot in PHP. The result of it is Phergie an "an IRC bot written in PHP 5 with an OO API" that can be extended with components for a wide variety of features. Another pleasant offshoot from his project is this first part of two articles on the C7Y community site detailing its creation.

The PHP Community channel on the Freenode IRC network, #phpc, had a longstanding bot called "Ai". Like many bots at the time of her creation, she was based on PHP 4. [...] With the coming end-of-life of PHP 4 and at the encouragement of channel users, I decided to start a project to develop a new bot based on PHP 5 that would fully utilize its new object model and offer users a chance to contribute to the bot they used in their channel.

Matthew talks about the initial stages of development (planning, research) and some of the development process of the bootstrap file, configuration file, and driver as well as the event handling.

The IBM developerWorks site has a new article posted that talks about design patterns, five of them in particular, that can help to "accelerate your PHP development" and make your code more maintainable down the line.

As an application developer, you can have a lifelong career without ever knowing what any of the patterns are called or how or when they're used. However, I've found that a good working knowledge of these patterns, as well as those introduced in the developerWorks article "Five common PHP design patterns" (see Resources), allows you to do two things: Enable high-bandwidth conversations and reduce painful lessons.

The patterns they talk about in this "five more" article of the series are:

• Adapter Pattern
• Iterator Pattern
• Decorator Pattern
• Delegate Pattern
• State Pattern

Diagrams are provided for each of them, showing how they flow along with brief code examples (structures really) to show how that transitions over to actual use.

Maggie Nelson has pointed out an article in the most recently published edition of php|architect magazine (the February 2008 issue) that's an introduction to database design for programmers (by Mac Newbold).

It's a pretty good article about database design and I think all PHP developers who are just starting to integrate databases in their applications should read it. However, there are a few things I'd like to add and point out.

The "blurb" for the article mentions MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, Microsoft SQL, SQLite and database schemas. You can find out more about this issue, including how to get your own copy, from the php|architect website.

Terry Chay, a popular speaker at many of the PHP conferences and photog to the geek chic crowd in San Francisco, will be speaking at the upcoming PHP Meetup for the SF PHP group. He'll be giving a talk titled "OOps! The PHP Fear and Loathing Guide to OO Design".

How does the PHP developer in the trenches create powerful object-orientation code? By doing what the PHP's architects did, of course: cherry picking the most pragmatic of OOP principles and patterns! This talk is targeted at the PHP developer who has basic knowledge of PHP OOP syntax but wants to find out where OOP principles can fit into a program.

If you'd like to attend, head over to the meetup page for the event and let them know you're coming. It'll be happening at the CNet Network offices February 7th @ 7pm.

As Chris Hartjes points out there's a new release of the popular PHP framework CakePHP (as well as a new web site design).

While speaking with nate last night via IM, he told me about the latest set of changes for CakePHP 1.2. There is simply just too much to mention, so I suggest heading on over to the brand-spanking-new CakePHP home page and checking out the changelog.

You can grab the latest download directly from the homepage or look into the manual to find out more about the framework and how it can be used.