PHPBuilder.com has posted an article from Ian Gilfillan about one of the more popular PHP-based wikis out there, phpWiki.

This month it's time to look at another of those PHP applications I find useful on a daily basis. I like to use "wikis" for documentation for many of the projects I work on. [...] In this article we will look at PhpWiki, and we'll show you how to configure and use it with your own projects!

Ian includes a little history of the application along with the installation and configuration instructions to get you started. There's even a section there at the end talking about templates, wiki styles and links to other resources to get you up to speed.

Following up on Philip Olson's post about the evolution of PHP logos, Wolfgang Drews (of DynamicWebPages.de) has posted a few other examples.

Philip Olson has posted some kind of history of php-logos, so here are my two cents.

Included in his post are things like a 3D rendered example of a PHP booth, a few random ones he found that he had created for his site and the infamous PHP cake from the ten year birthday of the language.

DevShed is getting back to basics with a new series it's started - a beginner's guide to programming with PHP. They've already posted part one:

PHP has been taking the web by storm because of its power and versatility. If you'd like to add PHP-based applications to your web site, keep reading. This series of articles will teach you the language from scratch.

They start with a mini-history of the language to get the budding developers out there warmed up. From there they move into some of the foundations of the language - what it was created for, the kind of functionality you'll find inside it and a first trip into variables (specifically strings).

Philip Olson has posted a brief history of one of the more infamous features of PHP on its fifth birthday - register_globals:

It's been a long road and exactly five years (35 releases) since the much discussed and highly controversial PHP directive register_globals has been disabled by default in PHP. After sifting through the mailing list archives, the following set of information has been compiled. Feel free to make additions, corrections, and report register_globals memories!

His list includes some recent "tidbits" about the directive (including the fact that there's still lots of code in the PHP CVS repository that requires register_globals to be on). Following that, there's his brief timeline of the directive's progression - from its infancy as gpc_globals all the way up to more recent events - like its removal from the PHP 6 HEAD CVS versions. With the release of this next major version of PHP, "the beast" can finally be laid to rest.

Well, it's been a while since we've seen a "PHP versus whatever" kind of article around here, so I couldn't resist posting this look from Market Day comparing ASP.net and our beloved PHP.

The goal of this article is to provide some perspective on reasons why one might choose one over the other.

Unfortunately, it doen't really do anything of the sort. The article only serves to describe the two options - features, history, tools needed to use then - without ever giving any real reasons or situations where you might want to use one over the other. Their only real opinion on comparing the two is the "cost of the initial investment" or "comfort with using Open Source software".

Is anyone else out there as tired of these articles as I am?

IBM developerWorks has posted the second part of their series covering the development of PHP and Ajax to create a photo gallery application. In this part, they work off of the gallery already created in part one, taking care of one issue that plagues Ajax application - the breaking of the back button.

They start with a look at what it means to "save state" in the browser, including the use of the Back button to navigate between pages. Seeing that Ajax breaks this, they move ahead with a simple solution - creating an internal history stact for the application and use its own navigation methods. They provide some examples images to use and all of the code you'll need to accomplish this.

They create a class using the popular Prototype javascript library to create functions like do_add, do_back, and do_forward to correctly handle the adding and deleting of the items from the stack. Once that script is developed, they take and integrate it back with the photo gallery from part one.