On the Zend Framework blog Matthew Weier O'Phinney has written up a new tutorial showing you how to discover and read RSS feeds with the help of the zend-feed component of the Zend Framework.

Remember RSS and Atom feeds? Chances are, you may be reading this because it was on a feed.

[...] An interesting fact: Atom itself is often used as a data transfer format for REST services, particularly content management platforms! As such, being familiar with feeds and having tools to work with them is an important skill for a web developer! In this first of a two part series on feeds, we'll look at feed discovery, as well as reading, using zend-feed's Reader subcomponent.

He gets started by installing the zendframework/zend-feed component with Composer and pulling in the zendframework/zend-http component to make the HTTP requests for the feeds. He then shares some code that helps with RSS/Atom feed discovery on a site and viewing the results. This list is then used as sources to import and code is shown that outputs the basic information about the feed. Finally he shows how to look through the entries in the feed and output the title, link and description of each.

Derek Allard has a new post to his blog today sharing five things about CodeIgniter you might not know - things he's discovered in his CI work over the past few years.

Every time I start a new project with CodeIgniter I find myself tasked with something, often a small thing, that I’ve never "solved" before. I try to use these moments as opportunities to explore PHP and CodeIgniter a little bit deeper. Often times I surprise myself by learning something new, or surprise myself at having forgotten something relatively "basic". Here are 5 things I've discovered or rediscovered in the last few years. If you're a CI veteran, some of these will be old news to you, and some might be new.

Here's his list of five handy tips:

• There is an optional second parameter in $this->uri->segment()
• Any library can have a configuration file
• remove_invisible_characters()
• CodeIgniter 2 allows for libraries to have drivers
• Views can be returned as data with a third parameter

You can find out more about the CodeIgniter framework on its website.

As mentioned in this new post to the Zend Developer Zone, the Zend Framework has been set up on an "unofficial PEAR channel" you can install the popular framework from.

The author, Geoffrey, with some help from Arnaud Limbourg, has created a PEAR channel to use in installing Zend Framework. As with any PEAR channel, the first thing you have to do is tell PEAR to go "discover" the channel.

Cal gives the simple commands to get the process underway, showing both how to discover and install the framework from this new resource.

As mentioned in this new post to the Zend Developer Zone, the Zend Framework has been set up on an "unofficial PEAR channel" you can install the popular framework from.

The author, Geoffrey, with some help from Arnaud Limbourg, has created a PEAR channel to use in installing Zend Framework. As with any PEAR channel, the first thing you have to do is tell PEAR to go "discover" the channel.

Cal gives the simple commands to get the process underway, showing both how to discover and install the framework from this new resource.