Ian Christian has added a new post to his blog today showing how you can create a custom form field type in Symfony 2 by extending the AbstractType.

I am finally starting to dive into symfony 2 properly. Yes - it's taken a while, work has taken me in different directions! I found myself needing to create a custom form field type pretty quickly, but couldn't find much in the way of documentation to do so, so I thought I'ld throw it up here; partly to help others, but mostly to get feedback to make sure I'm not approaching this from the wrong angle.

He includes the code that creates his custom "Person" model and the class to create his "transport type" select box that pulls in its values from a "choice list" class. He registers it in his bundle and it can then be included in his buildForm() method just like any other form field.

On the AjaxRay.com site today there's a new tutorial for the Zend Framework users out there with a library they can use to extend Zend_Form for custom phone number fields.

When taking Phone number as user input, we can worn users about phone number format by setting a hint/description and can validate using Regular Expression. [...] Now, if we try provide this feature in Zend Form, that's possible. We can create three individual Zend_Form_Element_Text objects and join there value together to make the phone number. But, in this case, validating them together is a hassle.

Instead of separate fields, the library they create makes it simple to handle them as a whole field. It works as a helper for Zend_Form and lets you set things like the separator between the text fields, a "format" string and a validator to apply to their fields (in the example code, it's the "digits" validator). Sample code is included to show you how it fits in your form.

The Zend Developer Zone has a new tutorial posted (from Vikram Vaswani) about adding in an auto-complete input field to your site. His example uses a PEAR class, Dojo and some components of the YUI libraries.

Fortunately, modern programming toolkits like Dojo provide ready-made widgets that have the necessary client-side functions for autocomplete. Add a little bit of server-side glue, in the form of a PHP script that talks to a database to generate valid suggestions, and enabling this functionality in a Web application now becomes a matter of hours, rather than days. In this article, I'll show you how to do this using three different libraries: PEAR HTML_QuickForm, YUI, and Dojo. Come on in, and find out more!

He shows how to combine Dojo, YUI and the HTML_QuickForm PEAR package to create a field that, based on what they enter into the input field, searches a database to find values in that table.

In a recent post to his blog Mike Bernat gives a quick tip on how to change the default value of a data-time input field in a CakePHP application.

Automagically generated date/time input fields normally default to the current date and time. For a couple of reasons, I had to change this to another default value.

His included code shows how to modify the default behavior of the form input field for the date with an array of parameters including the hour, minute and meridian (am/pm) values for the element.

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.