On the SitePoint PHP blog they've kicked off a series by Zoran Antolovic walking through the creation of a blog application using the latest from the Symfony project - Symfony Flex.

Our journey towards a stable, robust, high-performance web app will start with the simple but functional application — the so-called minimum viable product (MVP). We’ll populate the database with random content, do some benchmarks and improve performance incrementally. Every article in this series will be a checkpoint on our journey!

This article will cover the basics of setting up the project and organizing files for our Symfony Flex project. I’ll also show you some tips, tricks and helper scripts I’m using for speeding up the development.

So far they've posted the first two articles of the series:

• Part one explaining some of the basics of Flex and getting the application set up (including some sample fixture data)
• Part two showing how to populate the application with more realistic data, run some basic performance tests and create a first unit test

There's much more to come in the series including the creation of file (image) upload handling, user registration and login and the creation of image galleries from uploads.

In a quick new post to his blog today Slawek looks at a method he's come up with to more efficiently serve up files in a PHP application using the nginx web server.

Sometimes we need to serve files directly from application, especially when file access is restricted by account permissions. Using readfile() to achieve this can successfully kill our web server – even without huge load. To avoid performance problems we can use nginx X-Accel-Redirect feature, and serve files from application through nginx server.

He sets up an example situation - serving up gallery images for a basic site - and shows how to configure the nginx server with the "/gallery" directory and the PHP code you'll need to push the "X-Accel-Redirect" header along with the contents of the image.

On the Codrops blog there's a recent tutorial posted showing how to create a fully-functional image slider/viewer with a combination of HTML, jQuery and a bit of PHP (here's a demo).

In this tutorial we are going to create another full page image gallery with a nice thumbnail area that scrolls automatically when moving the mouse. The idea is to allow the user to slightly zoom into the picture by clicking on it. The thumbnails bar slides down and the image resizes according to the screen size.

Based on this tutorial, they show you how to build on it and add a few new features like a changing cursor depending on its position in the current image. The show the folder structure you'll need, the HTML and PHP to make the backend work and the CSS and Javascript to round out the frontend. If you want to skip straight to the good stuff you can also just download all the code and get started.

Josh Holmes has a new post to his blog today about the inclusion of a new piece of software into Microsoft's Web Application Gallery - phpBB, the popular forum software.

Well, it’s official – the phpBB package has been finished, tested and accepted into the Web Application Gallery. You can see the official announcement on the Microsoft Web Platform blog. That means that you can install phpBB on Windows through the Web Platform Installer (WebPI) which gives you a very simple wizard to walk through.

With the Platform Installer, handling most of the dependencies is all done for you and installing this very popular application onto your site or local machine is just a few clicks away. This phpBB install requires that you use PHP 5.2.13 and SQL Server. This package was pulled together by a group at the JumpIn Camp that happened recently.

Juozas Kaziukenas is also participating in the WinPHP Challenge and has already selected his project:

My project will allow people to upload huge collections of photos (probably archived in one zip file) and get nice online gallery. Users will have selection of Ajax or Silverlight version and password protection for galleries. If I have time, I will also add ability to select different photos shuffle style, background theme and/or music, and maybe even automatic tour with captions.

He's chosen to go with the Zend Framework as a backend and has already begun setting up the server with Windows Server 2008 and IIS (as connected through a remote desktop connection).

He has also looked at Deep Zoom and Dynamic assemblies to include them into his app.

As Lauren Cooney mentions in a new entry to her blog, Microsoft has launched a new version of their Web Platform Installer - now including PHP!

Why do I need this? Well, first of all, this version of the WebPI installs the community version of PHP. Additionally, instead of going to several different websites to download and install Microsoft's web products, you can now seamlessly and quickly install them from one website - and you can update them from this website as well. This is the simplicity we have been aiming for - one website, one download, and simple updates to the best products for building web solutions.

The Installer includes a "Community Version" of PHP rather than a customized "Microsoft version" that allows for current PHP applications to be ported to the environment easily. Their Windows Web Application Gallery has also been updated with several new PHP-based applications that can be dropped right into the WebPI environment and used. You can find out the details about all of this (and more) on the Microsoft Web Platform site.

In this new tutorial from NETTUTS.com there's information on how to create a gallery of the images from your Flickr account with help from SimplePie, a PHP tool for parsing XML feeds (like RSS).

Ok, so we're going to be touching on a number of technologies for this tutorial. We'll be using an RSS feed from Flickr, a bit of PHP, and some jQuery to make things nice and interactive! We'll use SimplePie to handle the RSS feed, as it makes life much easier, and can be used in any other projects where RSS feeds are involved.

They pull in the public photo information for a given user ID and parse details like the title of the gallery and each image's details, including descriptions. Add in a few links, some Javascript (jQuery) and HTML and you have a simple image gallery that automatically updates when you upload new photos to Flickr. You can grab the source here or just see it in action in their demo.

The NETTUTS.com blog has a new screencast posted showing how to create a simple thumbnailing script you can use in any application (like an image gallery).

In this week's screencast, I'll show you how to upload files and then have PHP dynamically create a thumbnail. Whether you're building an ecommerce site, or just a simple gallery, these techniques will absolutely prove to be useful. If you're ready for your "spoonfed" screencast of the week, let's get going!

The post also includes all of the code and HTML that you'll need to get it up and running (very cut and paste-able).

The NETTUTS.com site has posted a new PHP-related screencast that covers a simple script to scan over the contents of folders in PHP. To illustrate, they create an image gallery script that mirrors the filesystem structure.

Let's imagine that you want to build a page that will display snapshots of your latest work. [...] In such instances, the best solution is to make PHP scan your "portfolio" folder and dynamically create the code for you. If you want to update your page with a new snapshot, all that you need to do is drag the image, and its respective thumbnail, into the appropriate folders - and PHP will do the rest. Let's build it now!

The screencast comes complete with the entire source and a link to a demo to show the end result.

The NETTUTS.com site has another tutorial showing how to combine a powerful language, PHP, and an equally powerful Javascript library, jQuery, to create a simple photo admin site - part one of a series.

I'm pleased to present you with part one of a two part series on creating a photo site using PHP, jQuery, and AJAX. Originally, I intended to fit the entire tutorial into one screencast, but that quickly became a pipe dream as I realized that there was simply too much to cover. Nevertheless, even if you only watch this first video, you should learn a great deal.

In this first part of the series he'll walk you through creating a simple login form to authenticate the user, grab images from the database and show how to keep the database updated. There's a screencast along with the code/html for the tutorial as well as a source download if you just want to skip straight to the good stuff.