On WebReference.com today Ryan Butler has written up a tutorial of a simple search feature that can be integrated into any site (with their content in a MySQL database).

In this article, you'll learn how to create a searchable form feature that will query a database table and display current staff member information. During the analysis you'll learn how to do the following: create a database table that will hold current staff listings, create a search form and use PHP, in coordination with Structured Query Language (SQL) to capture information entered by the visitor and append the information to display the results we want to show.

They give you the files for the project and work through each, showing how to make the database, put information in and connect to the database to run the query. He opts for the LIKE functionality in the WHERE clause to find the term as a wildcard in the FirstName field. It's not the most efficient, but it can be useful.

Asvin Balloo has posted a quick look at making the URLs of your website a bit more "pretty" and SEO-friendly.

When I started implementing mod_rewrite in websites I had a problem in PHP as how to make a SEO friendly URL. All tutorials were geared towards how to implement mod_rewrite, about modifying .htaccess files, but none treated how to make the urls friendly with dynamic content.

He shares a function that he found that helped him a great deal - a method called friendlyURL. It changes a bit of text into a more friendly version of itself ("this is a test" becomes "this-is-a-test") that can be used in anything you'd want. An example could be in automatically generating links to other pages on your site that search engines can easily follow.

Joshua Eichorn has blogged about three new projects he's added to the PEAR2 repository:

• COnsole_CommandLine - a port of the PEAR1 console package
• Template_Dwoo - a Smarty-compatible template engine
• template_engine - a simple templating engine (and the example package for namespace usage)

Not really what I expected to be the first round of new code, but its nice to be setting up access for people. Oh and remember PEAR2 is targeted at php 5.3 but not everything is namespaced yet since not everyone wants to run snapshots of php for development.

You can find more of the packages on the PEAR2 svn repository.

Jordi Boggiano has blogged about a new PHP5 templating engine called Dwoo that's just been released for download.

Early this year I wanted to rebuild my template engine to have something stronger to work with, so I started thinking about it and then asked myself why I didn't use one of the available engines out there. The fact is that - and I guess I will lose many of my few readers here - I am not fond of using php itself as a template engine (with Savant or similar).

Features of the templating engine include a striking similarity to Smarty's methods, the fact that its code is scope aware, it has template inheritance and comes with a plugin system that can be extended as you see fit.

You can get complete information about the engine from the Dwoo homepage.

On the Developer Tutorials site today, Akash Mehta has posted his look at having search functionality on your website.

Today's websites have a lot of content. [...] Needless to say, effectively searching all that data can be a real challenge, and chances are at the end of the day you'll still be stuck with a slow and ineffective search system. [...] Implementing effective search doesn't have to be hard. In this tutorial, I'll show you how to build a basic site-specific web search in just five lines of code, using the Yahoo! APIs.

He includes a (very) brief look at the search API Yahoo! offers followed by examples of queries and then on to the real deal, a search system that takes in a user query and asks the Yahoo! API for results matching it. The results are outputted below the box.

Hasin Hayder has posted an example of a "world time search" he's worked up that uses the geonames.org and Yahoo! developer APIs to pin down the time at any given location.

I recently came by this site WorldTimeEngine where users can search the local time of any place using the name, street address or just latitude and longitude. Since that time I was thinking how easily you can make your own. As long there are some good people over there (For Geocoding API) - its a not a big deal, you know?

His script pulls the location of the place (latitude/longitude) from the Yahoo! geocoding API and passes that back into the geonames web service to get the local time. The result is an array with the lat/long, address you submitted and the time output in a standard string.

DevShed finished up their series on creating a search engine for MySQL with PHP in this latest article, finishing off the application with its HTML frontend.

In the previous article I showed you how to spawn the results returned by a specific search query across different web pages, so in this last part of the series I'm going to complete this search application by fixing a concrete issue associated specifically with paginating MySQL data sets.

They review the code they've created so far for the search engine and push on with the creation of a web page generation class to handle the output of the paginated results.

In a new post today Alex Netkachov steps through how he added the PHP scripting engine to his metabase scriptMaps on an IIS 5.1 web server:

I spent a few days on investigating how to modify IIS metabase from script. What I need is to add PHP engine to IIS programmatically during installing PHP. [...] The metabase object can be enumerated and each item of the enumeration can be enumerated to. The elements of this hierarchy represent folders you can see in IIS management console.

He builds out the ScriptMaps functionality (a recursive "walk" function) and another function to add the PHP scripting engine onto that (addPhpIsapi). A word of warning from Alex, though:

This code now is the part of Jamp installer. But because this functionality is dangerous, this code is not run during default installer and it recommended to backup the metabase before running it.

DevShed continues their look at creating a search engine (after part one) with this next tutorial in the series. It focuses on the pagnation of the results from the search query.

In this second tutorial of the series I'm going to show you how to add some crucial characteristics to the previously-developed search engine. These include the implementation of paginated results and the ability to perform Boolean searches.

They build on the code from the previous tutorial and add in some simple pagination functionality by changing up the Result class to handle things like counting rows and displaying only a certain number of results at a time. To help make the pagination easier, they've also included a method to keep the search term constant across each page of the results - a custom session handler.

DevShed starts off a new series of articles today with the first part of a series covering the construction of a search engine with MySQL and PHP5.

It's valid to notice that aside from the wealth of web-based applications that can be built quite easily with PHP, there's one in particular that's becoming very popular with many modern web sites as they grow in size. In this case, I'm talking about developing an internal search engine for any web site, by using the capacities provided by the powerful MySQL/PHP 5 tandem. [...] In this series, which is comprised of three instructive tutorials, I'm going to teach you how to build a web-based search application that can be easily adapted to suit your personal needs.

Part one talks about the creation of the front end for the app, how to perform searches against your data from a PHP5 script into a MySQL database and brining some of the modules of the application together (the code to both make the database request and output the results).