Federico Cargnelutti has posted an interesting overview that graphically shows outlines for a few major PHP projects showing where the includes are coming from.

The includes of the system map out the dependencies of the system, which files depend on which, which subsystem depends on which. When working with a system, it's always useful to map out the dependencies before hand.

The software he's created the images for include WordPress, phpBB, and a few frameworks - Symfony, Zend Framework and CakePHP. He used the Inclued and Graphviz software to make the charts.

The IBM developerWorks site has a new tutorial posted (registration/login required) talking about image creating in PHP using the GD library.

The purpose of this tutorial is to show you how to get started with the GD library and to provide a variety of techniques you can apply to your Web-page coding. The tutorial doesn't cover every GD function, but it teaches you the basics. The Resources section provides Web sites where you can learn more about using the GD library.

They go through the creation of sample images, working with gradients and lines, adding text, saving the image data out to a file and how to work with existing graphics to modify them.

In this DevX tutorial, Octavia Anghel shows how use PHP to create images based on the SVG libraries available to any browser.

Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) is an XML specification for producing vector-based graphic content that you can create, modify, and manipulate dynamically from programming languages. Here, you'll explore the most important techniques and libraries for integrating SVG with PHP to create diverse graphic content'"from simple shapes to complex graphs.

They show a few different ways to get the job done including a straight 'echo' call with the output, sending a converted SVG document over with a PHP header or including another (or multiple) SVG documents into another and outputting them. They also talk about tools like the phpHtmlLib library, the PEAR::XML_SVG package and the PEAR::Image_Canvas package.

Mikko Koppanen has posted another quick example of using the ImageMagick functionality in PHP - overlaying a string of text over a currently existing image.

Ever had the situation where you have a piece of string which you need to overlay on an image? Maybe a situation where the area reserved for the string is known in pixels but you need to know the font size to fill most of the area? Think no more!

In his example (ready to cut and paste), he defines the text in a variable and, with the help of the newPseudoImage method, adds the text over the top of his sample image. Example input and output is provided.

DevShed continues its look at using the GD graphics library in PHP with the second part of the tutorial series, this time focusing on the creation of images from existing images (and their streams).

As I stated at the end of the previous article of this series, the GD extension comes packaged with many other useful functions, which indeed deserve a close and detailed look. Thus, in this second tutorial I'll show you how to create different types of image streams from existing graphics, but in this case limiting the process to building GIF, JPG and PNG images.

They work through each of the types (GIF, JPG and PNG) creating an new one from a previous "clouds" image of the same type (a GIF out of a GIF, a JPG from a JPG, etc).

Richard Davey points out two new interesting PHP commands he discovered when looking through the graphics (GD) section of the manual - imagegrabscreen and imagegrabwindow.

Upon further investigation both of these commands can be used to take screen shots of the desktop of your server, or any applications window (such as a web browser). Both commands are listed as being "Windows only" and also possibly only in CVS, but I found both of them are in the 5.2.3 standard release and compile without error. However at the moment neither appear to actually do anything other than return fully black images

In testing the functionality, though, his only results were black screens and images instead of the expected image results.

According to this new post on Pierre-Alain Joye's blog today, a new version of the GD graphics library has been release - version 2.0.34.

It took a lot of work to get this version released. Version 2.0.34 is a bug-fix-only release (all known security issues have been fixed), and upgrade is strongly recommended. It is also my very first GD release (hopefully, the first of many to come), and marks the official freeze of the 2.0.x tree, only security-related fixes will be made on this tree from now on. Please find the release announcement here.

He also invlites any language binders to contact him about hosting for a project if it's not available.

On The Bakery blog, there's a new article introducing dAuth:

The authentication (not authorization) system with a focus on security, using techniques such as challenge-response, customizable multiple-stage password hashing, brute force (hammering) detection etc.

The dAuth system is based around a challenge-reponse authentication system and handles ensuring the user is who they say that are, but not that they're authorized to be looking at what they see.

They include a graphic to help explain how the process flows and some talk about the changes made from some of the previous versions including detection of brute-force attempts, preventing the disabling of the fallback, and session hijacking compensation.

There's some brief bits about the installation of the tool and some final words to shove you in the right direction.

On AnyExample.com, there's a quick little tutorial demonstrating how to convert an RGB value passed into a function into the corresponding HTML hex color.

There are actually two functions - one for hex to rgb and the other for rgb to hex (though it's not a far leap to make a wrapper function that handles the value correctly by detecting the format - a string or array). They give the code for both of the functions and a bit of sample code for the PHP it could be embedded in.

The only real place I can think of using something like this is in a web-based graphics application - maybe for color-matching or something. More often than not, though, simple software like Huey for Windows can provide you the same information (and more).

Any other applications you all can think of?

On the Technobabbler blog, there's a quick look at their creation of a (weather) radar loop they could view on their cell phone.

I used the great mobile site from the NWS, but it still didn't give me the effect I wanted. And hey, I'm already filling a database with weather observations and radar images! So I decided to see what it would take to make a custom radar loop that I could get to at any given moment. The Treo can display animated gif files, so that seemed like the most efficient solution. The question is, how do we create an animated gif using PHP?

To answer the question, he found this script ("GIF images into animated GIF with native PHP class") and used it to create a simple script to grab the GIF images and combine them into a single animated image suitable for viewing in any browser. He includes the script used to generate it as well as an example of the result and how it looks on the phone.