On NETTUTS.com there's a recent tutorial - the ninth part of the "CodeIgniter from Scratch" series - posted (by Burak Guzel) for all of the users of this popular framework out there. It looks at, starting from the very beginning, how to create an upload and image manipulation script for use in the framework.

In lesson nine of our CodeIgniter series, we'll build a small image gallery that allows you to upload files, and automatically create thumbnails

He links to the previous eight parts of the series if you need to catch up as well as the source code for this installment so you can follow along with the screencast. For those more on the go, you can also download the screencast and watch it whenever.

On PHPBuilder.com today there's a new tutorial posted helping you create a simple CAPTCHA image you can use in your forms to help to somewhat secure them from scripts out there that might abuse them.

CAPTCHA protection is used on web site forms and works by generating a random string, writing it to an image, then storing the string inside of a session. Then, the site checks the CAPTCHA when the form is submitted. In this article, you will learn how to make your own simple CAPTCHA image using PHP. You will create the CAPTCHA image step by step.

Their example uses numbers, lowercase letters and a few other characters to create the distorted image. The tutorial shows you how to take this character set, pull out a few randomized values and push them into a dynamically created image with PHP's built-in GD functionality. They also include a brief script showing how to use it in the form for validation of the submission.

The Zend Developer Zone has a new tutorial from Vikram Vaswani on working with GraphicsMagik to create and manipulate images in your PHP scripts.

Based on the robust, multi-threaded GraphicsMagick library, aka the "Swiss Army knife of image processing", PHP's GraphicsMagick extension allows developers to add street cred to their image (sorry, I couldn't resist!) with some fairly powerful API methods. This article discusses the extension in detail, introducing you to its key functions and showing you how to rotate, resample, transform, crop, carve, and otherwise mangle your images until they roll over and beg for mercy.

The tutorial looks at how to get the package installed (both from source or as a pecl package) and how to check and make sure it's up and working. The sample scripts included show you how to grab the info about an image, resize it, write it out to a file, rotate/flip it and do a few other fun tricks (including using built-in filters).

In this second part of their "dynamic twitter signature" series DevShed expands on the previous part and adds in code to work with the GD libraries to make the image.

In my last article we began putting together a solution that will allow us to display dynamic Twitter signature images in forum posts and emails. In this article we'll continue where we left off by adding the functions that will harness the power of GD to create the actual image.

They review the previous code - a simple class that makes a request to the twitter servers for the latest statuses from the user - and adds on the fetching of the user's avatar and to push the text content into the generated image.

Kae Verens has a new post to his blog looking at a form of non-destructive image manipulation - using the URL of the request to determine the changes that need to be made.

The solution is to not actually create copies, but to record the changes applied to the original image in the URL of your manipulated image. When the server is asked for those URLs, it runs the manipulations on the original image and gives you back the new image. Of course, we will cache the new manipulations so this doesn't need to be done every time, but this now allows you to replace the original image, then clear the cache, forcing all the variants of it to refresh, without you needing to do it again.

A demo of the script in action is included in the post as well as a link to download the script doing the work.

On the Content with Style blog Pascal Opitz looks at creating a custom Zend form element for uploading images.

It really is time to post something, isn't it? Here is a quick way to have an image preview inside of a form based on Zend Form. I am using the auto include mechanism for this one, utilizing the PEAR naming convention, and all my files will sit underneath a Shared folder within the library folder.

Their custom element is created in a two pieces - the form element itself and a custom view helper to define how the form element is displayed. An example of its use is also included.

Vito Chin has announced the release of a new image manipulation extension that was ported from Imagick - Gmagick.

The extension seeks to make the image processing capability of GraphicsMagick accessible from PHP. GraphicsMagick is forked from version 5.5.2 of ImageMagick and had since developed with important differences and improvements. [...] In terms of Gmagick and Imagick, we try to keep the method interface similar so existing Imagick users will find converting to Gmagick a breeze.

You can grab the extension from its PECL page.

NETTUTS.com has posted their list of the top fifteen "wonderfully creative" uses for PHP on your sites.

If you are familiar with the basics of PHP, then you're probably wondering how you can use it to make your website more appealing. The possibilities are endless, and you can write your own PHP scripts or implement widely available scripts from around the web. Let's get started with 15 creative uses for PHP for your website!

Some of the uses mentioned include:

• E-Commerce
• Graphical User Interface
• Building an Online Community
• Parsing XML Files
• Image Processing and Generation
• Create a PHP Photo Gallery

Others include templating, working with Flash and with one of the more popular PHP blogging tools - WordPress.

WebReference.com continues their look at user personalization with the second part of the series - how to validate that the users signing up for your site are valid. (Here's part one, the introduction).

In this article, we will be looking at user authentication. User authentication simply means verifying that a particular user has the right to access a part of our application. Because our application deals with user preferences, access control is even more pertinent especially since multiple users are going to try to access this application at any given time.

As a part of this user validation and customization, they need to create a form that non-human scripts have a harder time using (hopefully weeding them out and getting better user information). The article steps you through a few lines of code that you can use to create a simple image of a four-digit number whose value is placed in a session variable so it can be validated on submission of the form.

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.