Jonathan Snook hands off a handy tip for the CakePHP developers out there concerning the debugging information that can be displayed at the bottom of your application's pages.

I just wanted to document this somewhere but whenever I work on a CakePHP project, there's always the debug info that sits at the bottom of the page. It's big and bulky and once I'm off the default CakePHP styles, it's usually pretty ugly. I've done various stylings but I finally took a moment to implement a really simple idea: Fixed position the table and then use hover styles to toggle the visibility.

He includes the simple four style entries that can be used to tame this debugging information down into something a bit more useful (and less intrusive).

In response to another blogger's review of the php|architect "Guide to Programming with Magento", Michael Kimsal has posted some clarifications.

Starting off with "However, I'm not really the type of person to give accolades unless something is absolutely stellar. As such, this post will primarily be about the shortcomings of the book" I wasn't particularly surprised that there was more of a focus on negatives rather than positives.

Michael mentions three topics - the "first to market" point the reviewer makes about different versions of Magento between the book being authored and the release, some of the missing information the reviewer would've liked to see and the complexity of the example module that the reviewer complains is too hard to follow.

DevShed has continued their series (here's part one) looking at the use of file uploading in your PHP scripts. They build on that foundation and add in some more useful features this time:

The initial script in the first tutorial of this series lacked some important features, such as the implementation of an effective error handling module and the ability to check the MIME type and size of the file being uploaded. In this second installment of the series, I'm going to improve the logic of the script from the first tutorial to provide it with the capacity to retrieve useful information concerning the entire file uploading process.

They look back at the previous tutorial to remind you of some of the concepts and then move on to show you how to get information about the file (like the MIME type, name and size of the uploaded file). The last page is just the full source code for the cut and pasters out there.

DevShed has started up yet another PHP-related series today with this new tutorial covering part of PHP5's object functionality - destructors.

This article, the first part of a five-part series, introduces you to destructors and their use with PHP 5 programs. [...] The word "destructor" relates to certain methods or functions of a determined programming language that are responsible for destroying data that, in the context of that particular language, shouldn't exist any longer.

They create a sample class (for storing user information) and show how to integrate a destructor to remove all traces of the user's information from the properties of the class.

Sebastian Bergmann has figured out half of the puzzle he was working on but is still a bit stuck on the second half. He knows how to mine information from Subversion, but not they queries to ask the database for the info he needs.

I have written a small PHP script (the initial version of the script can be found here) to import the relevant data from a Subversion repository into the following tables of a relational database. [...] What I need now is two queries to ask the database

There's already been tons of comments in an effort to help him out, but it doesn't look quite like he's resolved the issue just yet.

UPDATE 12.06.207: Seems he's found a solution that'll work for him - here's the script.

Nessa has two posts that talk about how to use PHP to display the versions of software running on the local machine.

I've been working on this application for work that does some simple server reporting, part of which involves displaying the versions of major software running on the machines. [...] I need to be aware of this to make sure that customers are being moved to servers with compatible versions. It's also good in tracking and planning upgrades.

In the first post she recommends using the exec function in PHP to run system commands to get things like the cpanel version, python version and what perl you have installed.

Part two shows a little bit different way to get some of the same information - using the data in the /proc/version file as a single resource to get OS information.

Continuing in their series looking at how to handle static data in a dynamic PHP application (see part one here), DevShed has posted the next piece in the puzzle, working with static properties in PHP5.

Provided that you already have an average background in using static methods with PHP 5, over the course of this second article of the series I'll dive a bit deeper into this interesting topic and show you how to take advantage of static properties defined inside a given PHP class, in this manner completing, at least basically, the implementation of static data with PHP 5.

They start by reviewing the functionality from the previous part of the series and build on it, creating static properties within the class (user data in this case) and how to use it in a mini app to set and display the information.

A new note on the Internet Super Hero blog talks about a new improvement to the mysqlnd driver support a memory dump option for mysqli_debug.

Andrey has implemented a little mysqlnd only addition to mysqli_debug(): 'm' - dump memory information. It works like the other options described in PHP: Debugging ext/mysqli and mysqlnd with the only difference that it is only available with mysqlnd.

A comparison of the "before option 'm'" and "after option 'm'" is also included.

On his blog, Rob Richards reintroduces a library he's written (xmlseclibs) to work with information cards with a missing piece from the example code he provided before.

There is, however, a missing piece to the managed code example I had posted, which I am finally getting around to talking about. It is the Infocard Managed library file (icard_managed_lib.php). This library provides the functionality needed to create a managed card that a user can download and install.

He also includes the different classes that the library uses to create the information cards including ICard, ICardClaimType, ICardUserCredential and ICardSAML.

Michael Kimsal points out a small utility to create information he found himself needing over and over - information that looks like, but is not, personal details.

I put together a small utility to generate random user data several months back. I realized yesterday that I hadn't released the source code - I thought I had. This generates plausible names, addresses, phone numbers and social security numbers. The phone number area codes don't generally match up with the address, but the addresses are accurate in that the city/state/zip all match. The addresses are currently US-based only. The code will also generate SQL statements for you to insert directly in to your database if selected.

You can download the PHP code for yourself or just use his copy to generate some sample information when you need it.