On his blog today, Vinu Thomas has an example of what he calls a "quicker and cleaner form" using the Zend_Form component of the Zend Framework.

Usually handing forms involves coding the form in HTML and performing client and server side validation, which usually makes the code for complex forms quite unwieldy. Zend_Form which is available in Zend Framework version 1.5 aims at simplifying this process.

With this new version comes the ability to add in methods for validation right into the form definition. His example shows a traditional login form that checks things like if it's required, checking the length and adding filters to modify the input.

Chris Hartjes has followed up on a previous post about user authentication in CakePHP with a few more comments in part two.

I got a question in the comments about my previous post on simple user registration about how to do some of the necessary validation for registration in the model. I thought I'd show some code I did to do exactly that.

He includes the code for his example with the key, he explains, being the use of a second field (the confirm password field) to do the validation.

Tim Koschuetzki has posted this tutorial today about how to create form fields with combined information from more than one database column.

Two days ago, someone on #cakephp had the problem of getting combined values out of the Model->generateList() function in CakePHP. I advised him on doing some Set::extract() things, which at the end of the day got rather complicated. As a result, I was conscience-stricken. Here is a much more elegant solution I could come up with.

He introduces the generateList function first, showing how to use it to create a simple select list in your form. Unfortunately, it only understands using one field at a time, so he worked around it, creating a solution - his myGenerateList function - that handles things similarly and returns the same kinds of results (so it can be used with the set() function as well).

The Bakery has three new items posted today - a view helper for CSS/JS file inclusion, field validation, and rewriting a plugin's paths:

• NiceHead helper with autoloading of javascript and css - Injects CSS/JS into the head tag in your layout and autoloads css/js files for you based on current controller and action.
• Multiple rules of validation per field in CakePHP 1.2 - On this article we'll take a look at multiple rules of validation per field, and how easy it is to use them on our 1.2 models.
• Rewrite a plugin's paths to look nicer - Plugins are a fantastic and vastly underused tool in CakePHP! But their default paths can be strange sometimes. This article describes how to rewrite a plugin's paths using bootstrap.php.

Check out these and more great CakePHP-related tutorials on The Bakery!

Continuing with their look at PHP5 and SQLite, DevShed has posted part two of the series - "Using Unbuffered Queries and More with SQLite with PHP 5".

Taking into account the group of characteristics that I mentioned [a few lines above], in this second tutorial of the series, I'll be taking a look at some of them. This will give you a clearer idea of how to use them as part of your existing and -- why not? -- future PHP applications.

They take a look at the hows and whys of working with the unbuffered queries and well as some examples - counting rows and fields in a database table and looking at the use of more "row-processing methods" to get different sorts of data out.