Wojciech Sznapka has shares his technique for creating colorized exports of Behat tests for use in PDF files:

Behat scenarios are one of the best ways to describe system. UML Use Cases or tons of pages in SRS documents are fine, but hard to understand from the begining, and even harder to maintain in the future. Behat eases this process and also gives opportunity to automate requirements verification. To write Behat scenarios you need a text editor. I've picked my favourite - Vim, which highlights *.feature files syntax. But business people mostly don't use Vim, so I need to figure a way, to expose scenarios in easy and pleasant way.

His solution involves setting up some printing options in vim to export the tests as a Postscript file, setting the "colorscheme" to the default setting so the colors will be retained. The result is exported (via the "hardcopy" command) and can be converted into a PDF (with a result like this).

In a recent post to the 9Lessons.info site, Srinivas Tamada shows you how to connect Gmail with your system to import contacts via the magic of OAuth (pulled from Gmail to you).

Inviting friends is the most important part of the web project success. This post explains you how to import Gmail contacts from address book via Google open authorization protocol connect with PHP. It's simple just few configurations follow below four steps, use this script and give option to invite more friends.

Following a few simple steps and using this simple script - registering the domain under Google Accounts, verify ownership and use the OAuth consumer and secret keys in the script. It's then simple to grab the contacts and output their details as the "Contacts.php" example script shows.

On the ThinkPHP blog today there's a new post looking at their experience with PHPExcel to open, modify, save, etc Microsoft Excel files directly from PHP.

EAR's Spreadsheet_Excel_Writer combined with the project Spreadsheet_Excel_Reader on SourceForge was a good helper in the past - but only for BIFF5. BIFF8 support in spreadsheet excel writer has been a problem for a long time, and according to the authors, is still somewhat kludgy in the current version. So I needed an alternative. After a short research I stumbled upon PHPExcel which supports reading and writing of many formats in one API.

He lists some of these input and output formats and includes a simple example of how to use the tool. He creates a basic Excel file with a few different attributes (title, body, keywords) and show how to read in a document to extract the document's content.

Maggie Nelson points out a cool way that you TextMate users out there can get better syntax highlighted code for your blog posts.

A coworker, Craig Campbell just launched a new blog recently. One of the really neat things about his blog is how he handles syntax highlighting for code samples - check out examples in his interesting post about Cool Object Building with PHP. In fact, he got so many good comments about this approach that he even wrote a post explaining exactly how he does it: Syntax Highlighting for Your Blog Using TextMate.

Craig's process is as simple as selecting the TextMate bundle and choosing "Create HTML from Document with Line Numbers". The resulting output takes a little tweaking in the HTML and CSS, but the end result is quite nice (and better than several of the syntax highlighting plugins out there).

On the TotalPHP site there's a new tutorial showing how to pull data from your database and export it as a CSV file that tools like Excel can read in and use.

There are some occasions where you would want to export your site's information in CSV or similar text format. You might want to do this so you can view reports in a spreadsheet, or you might want an export of your product information to upload to a service like Google Products. Either way the method and end result are essentially the same.

The tutorial shows how to grab the information (via the mysqli functionality in PHP5) and formatting each row with the correct values in a certain order. Finally, the entire contents are echoed back out with the correct header() to force a download on the user's browser.

If you're a user of the PhpED IDE in your development work and have had a bit of a hard time with the CVS support, you might want to check out this new post from Richard Davey with a guide on how to get started - specifically with the CVSDude.com hosting service.

If you use NuSphere's excellent PhpED IDE then you'll know it has built-in CVS support for source control. This is a guide I wrote to using PhpED with the CVSDude.com service, so you can get your projects up and running in no time at all.

He talks about getting a new project set up, configuring the server correctly in the Project Properties, and running an import for all of the files in your application's directory.

With that all in place, he also helps you set up the reverse - a place to check the files back out to be able to work with them easily (in a few simple steps). There's even shortcuts you can assign to help make running the CVS functions simpler.

There's plenty of 2D graphics libraries out there, some 3D ones as well, but that hasn't stopped Jakob Westhoff from creating his own driver for the Image_3d package to allow for live 3D image browser rendering.

Quite some time ago my friend Kore Nordmann had a talk at our local PHP Usergroup about 3D rendering techniques which was quite inspiring. Shortly after that talk I decided to write a simple 3D renderer. But, hey there are so many of them already out there, that I decided to do something more unusual.

I just started over and began to write a ECMA Script based live 3D renderer for browsers which understand the new "canvas" tag. After some simple tests I realized that it would be quite cool to implement this as a driver for Kore's Image_3D package, which is entirely written in PHP.

Be sure to check out his post to see what this new driver makes possible. There's an image complete with controls to rotate, zoom, turn of its axis and export to both the SVG and PNG formats. Definitely work checking out!

WebCheatSheet.com has two new tutorials posted today - one dealing with the export of a database schema in an XML format and the other about sending emails from PHP.

Here's a link to the first article.

Sometimes it can be useful to have a dump of the current database schema. This script reads the schema from a MySQL database and outputs XML that describes the schema.

And a link to article number two.

So, you want to send automated email messages from your PHP application. This can be in direct response to a user's action, such as signing up for your site, or a recurring event at a set time, such as a monthly newsletter. Sometimes email contains file attachments, both plain text and HTML portions, and so on. To understand how to send each variation that may exist on an email, we will start with the simple example and move to the more complicated.

According to this note from the International PHP Magazine website, there's a new tool being offered by Aivosto that allows PHP developers to "reverse engineer" their code back into flow charts and UML activity diagrams.

Visustin is the ideal diagramming tool for software developers and document writers. Save your documentation efforts by automatic charting! Visustin reverse engineers your source code and visualizes it. No manual drawing is required. Your existing code is all you need. If you see a real complex case, print it out as a big mosaic and hang it on your wall.

Functionality includes the automatic creation of a optimized layout, the ability to do a multi-page printout, saving the graphs/charts/etc in various formats, run a "bulk chart" on all of your files at once, and export options including PowerPoint, out to the web, and Word.

You can get the full details on the product (as well as screenshots and a demo) from their website.

In this first part of a new tutorial on Ryan Malesevich's blog today, he introduces you to a set of scripts that can help you get the play stats from Apple's iTunes software out to a MySQL database for report/display/whatever you want.

I'm back with the third and final way that I know how to get iTunes play stats. In case you missed it, the previous methods were Javascript in Windows and Applescript in Macintosh. This way is Mac-centric again, well just the exporting the iTunes data to a MySQL database is only for Mac, you can write the PHP scripts with whatever platform that makes you happy.

He starts off with the "hardest step" in the whole process - using SQLTunes to export the data from iTunes. He goes through the configuration of the software and the steps needed to actually get the stats out. With the data in the database, he wraps up part one. Keep an eye out for the second part, display those stats via PHP scripts to your anxiously waiting viewers.