Rob Morgan has a recent post showing you how to use Phinx, a PHP-based database migration tool, to handle your database changes (both "up" and "down").

Earlier this year I decided to open-source one of my personal software projects - Phinx. Phinx is a database migration tool (think Ruby on Rails ActiveRecord migrations) where can you describe all of your database transformations in pure PHP. I have used this tool for many of my consulting projects, however it still took a lot of effort to turn it into a re-usable product. In this tutorial I'm going to explain how to install Phinx and use it with a simple guestbook application.

He uses a sample guestbook project for his example, showing how to get it all installed and how to create a migration that adds a "posts" table.

In a new post to his blog, Josh Holmes has posted about some of the testing he done with Azure and SimpleCloud to get them connected and playing nicely together.

I've been playing with Zend's SimpleCloud API for the webcast that I'm doing with Zend today. I started with the Zend Framework Quickstart tutorial but changed out the backend to hit the Azure Tables and such (well kinda – I used Zend Studio 8 Beta 2 and didn't use the ZF tool but I still created a little guestbook). I'm going to expand this example to include blob storage and queues as well in the near future but at the moment, I'm just going to hit the Azure Tables.

He uses the Zend Framework CE, Zend Studio Beta, the Windows Azure SDK and the Windows Azure 4 Eclipse plugin to interface directly with the Azure instance. He shows how to create the project (complete with screenshots), map the IIS document root directory to the Azure instance (a Virtual Directory) and build the application. All of the code and table structures needed are included with the end result looking something like this.

In this new blog entry Marc Gear suggests a few things that you can do to help learn a new framework quickly and easily:

There are dozens of PHP frameworks around now, some attracting more attention than others. I am no expert on these frameworks and have not used a single one extensively so I wouldn't dream of recommending one over the other, nor do I want to enter the debate about what is or is not a framework (I'll work on the assumption that anything calling itself a framework is a framework). Instead I'm going to concentrate on how you can get started with a new framework as quickly as possible.

He suggests four examples that can help you get more familiar with each framework and how they're structured - a "hello world" as a first step, creating a simple calculator, making a guestbook and making a simple script to parse and paginate a remote RSS feed.