Scott MacVicar shares a helpful hint for the PHP speakers out there - how to apply syntax highlighting to the code in your slides.

I use Apple's Keynote for doing my presentations and naturally these include some bits of code that need highlighting so that it's easier to read. [...] In the end I used GESHI which is a highlight library written in PHP that supports the syntax highlighting of around 50 different programming and scripting languages.

He's provided his sample implementation to help you get up and running. You'll need to download and install GESHI to get it working though. Here's an example of the output.

As a part of the release of the new book from Manning Publishing, Zend Framework in Action, Rob Allen has created a new site to act as a companion and to host new Zend Framework-related articles - ZendFrameworkBook.com.

The intention is to highlight interesting things that I see on the Zend Framework mailing lists and also to talk about book stuff periodically as well.

A good bit of the content will be summarized from the Framework's mailing lists but will also include other articles/tutorials/updates on proposals/etc that are happening in that community.

In a new post to his blog today, Felix Geisendorfer talks about view coding - specifically working with a menu and determining which element is active.

One of the challenges many of us have faced before and will face in future is building a menu. Now this of course is very simple assuming that we're just shooting for a static <ul> with some <li>'s containing the links. However the tricky part is to figure out what is the active menu item. I had some code doing this in the past but tried out a new flavor of it today which I call the MacGyver menu for CakePHP as it's a little dirty yet powerful and easy to maintain.

In his included code, he creates a simple navigation from an array of titles/links and, with some sorting, a regular expression and a CSS class, the selected item can be highlighted simply.

From the PHP-Coding-Practices.com website today, there's a new post that, using a tip from this article on BarelyFitz, shows how to control CSS information with PHP.

Today I stumbled upon a cool article that explains how one can control one's CSS colors via PHP to former relative shades. How is this done I hear you asking? Just look at the following code.

His example uses the tutorial's csscolor class and shows how to implement it with a base color and a highlight color and use it to generate variations of the same shades.

On her blog, Tiffany Brown has a review of an online editing resource she came across that can help you write code and work with remote files via a web interface - WorkSpace (including HTML, JavaScript, CSS, PHP, SQL, Java, and Perl documents).

WorkSpace - which currently is currently in limited beta testing - is an online text editing environment with an eye towards web development. You can create documents and save them in your hosted sandbox, or directly to your server via FTP.

She talks about her experiences with it - both the good and the bad. She liked the simplicity of it all but thought it lacked a few of the features it needed. She also mentions the lack of version control in the application.

I do like the idea behind WorkSpace. [...] The downside is that you're trusting a company with all of your web site data. I'm not sure the slight gain in the ability to work remotely is worth the trade-off of giving WorkSpace server access.

Sandro Groganz has two new WordPress tips for users out there looking to do some syntax highlighting in their posts and that want to move some older permalinks into a WordPress environment.

The first post spotlights a package that makes highlighting in WordPress simple - the iG:Syntax Hiliter v3.5 plugin. He includes some sample code to show how the CSS is formatted which, in itself, is a demo of what the plugin looks like.

The second article follows the steps he went through to make the move to WordPress URLs from the previous format. He leaned toward mod_rewrite, but decided to go a different way and whip up a custom 404 handler to get people where they want to go. He includes the code (all 15 lines of it) to show how he did it.

There's a new tutorial posted on the PHP-GTK Community site today - a quick one showing how to use GtkSourceview to create a simple PHP editor with syntax highlighting.

This widget is nearly usable as a real php-gtk IDE. It extends GtkSourceView widget and internally manages both a text buffer and language object classes.

They provide the code, but not too much in the way of explanation for it. Thankfully, most of it is pretty straight-forward. There are a few things that the script has to manage to make the it work - a text buffer for the data, a viewer (window), and the syntax highlighting component. For the view, there are a few handy functions already built in so you won't have to create them - undos, the syntax highlighting, line numbering, markers, and bracket highlighting.

On his blog today, Cocoliso talks about a handy bit of code to allow for syntax highlighting in your page - Geshi.

What if I told you that with as little as 3 lines of code, you could highlight code on your site? You'd jump at it, wouldn't you? Why not run with the big boys? Your users will love you for it and for good reason. It greatly increases readability.

He walks through the simple installation and how to use it in your page - complete with the code he uses to include the functionality in your page.

In his continuing effort to redesign his blog, Shiflett.org, he's been working on one of the things that really makes a blog useful - the commenting system. Specifically, he wants site visitors to be able to add their own code listings to the comments they post. He gives more detail in this new post.

I've been playing with this tonight. Feel free to follow along as I go. The first thing you want to do is create an ordered list from the code you want to format ($code in these examples).

He gives an example of a listing using his system and explains how it all works. It's a mixture of:

• PHP for parsing the data inside the 'code' tags
• CSS to correctly style the information, whitespace and all
• Some ini settings to set parameters for...
• ...the use of highlight string on the PHP code contents

A little str_replace magic later and you have list items styled as code blocks on your page. Check out his demo for an example.

PHPBuilder.com has a quick little article (an exceprt from "PHP 5 in Practice") that shows how, using a simple dynamic navigation system, highlight where the user currently is.

Although a site may not always warrant a full multilayer navigation menu, most websites usually have at least a few different sections. Often many pages have links back to the top pages of each section, and therefore it is useful to highlight which section the user is currently in. Listing 9.2.1 looks at the URL of the current web page and, based on that, determines what section of the website it is in and changes the section menu.

They provide the script and a brief explaination, but not much else. Seems like the snippet might make more sense with a little more context, but it's still useful.