With the recent stir caused by the new iPhone, it's only natural that developers are looking for easy ways to make their sites as compatible as possible with the mobile platform. The Symfony project has posted a guide to helping you make your apps optimized for mobile use.

symfony 1.1 introduces native support for different formats and mime-types. This means that the same model and controller can have different templates based on the requested format. The default format is still HTML but symfony supports several other formats out of the box as defined in the factories.yml file.

Using this system, it's easy to add new output formats by adding to the default layouts the framework comes equipped with. The Content-Type can be changed and layouts can be disabled as needed. This lets you make a custom definition just for use with the iPhone without a lot of hassle.

They also include an example of how to make one of these optimized layouts, including some iPhone "screenshots" of the resulting pages.

The Developer Tutorials blog has posted a series they've worked up to show bloggers out there running WordPress how to create a custom theme from scratch:

In this multi-part series I'll detail how to create and design a Wordpress theme from nothing more than your imagination using Photoshop, CSS, XHTML and PHP.

Here's the list so far:

• Part 1 - getting the tools and an overall layout idea
• Part 2 - splitting it up to make the layout parts
• Part 3 - converting the Photoshop template to XHTML
• Part 4 - cleaning up the XHTML and doing some styling with CSS
• Part 5 - how to preload some images with Javascript to make the page load faster
• Part 6 - creating the WordPress-specific markup
• Part 7 - working up the PHP functionality
• Part 8 - integrating PHP into the template
• Part 9 - marking up the "framework" of the site (header/footer/sidebar)
• Part 10 - adding additional files like a links page and changing the posting template
• Part 11 (?) - deploying the theme out to the public view

Helgi has posted about the updates that have recently been made to the PEAR website (pear.php.net) to help correct some issues and bring in some new features.

I just did a new release of pear.php.net which has a bunch of new features and bug fixes, most of which you can see here.

Some of the updates include:

• One column design instead of the 2 column design
• Usage of the YUI CSS reset + fonts
• The package list on http://pear.php.net/packages.php doesn't highlight deprecated packages anymore
• Now developers can see bug reports by unconfirmed accounts
• The RSS feeds now contain new line breaks!
• Patch uploading during ticket creation now works

He also specifically mentions some of the feedback he's gotten on certain things (like the new layout, the CSS of the site and the DES passwords) and explains some of the rationale behind their update/use.

The Bakery has four new articles/tutorials posted today covering things like Mambo's choice to go with CakePHP, a layout switcher, SimplePie and caching elements.

• Mambo-licious - Join us in welcoming Mambo to the CakePHP community.
• Automatic Layout Switcher - This component allows you to have two layouts for one site and switches between them automatically based on the domain.
• SimplePie CakePHP Component - SimplePHP is a PHP class for retrieval and parsing of RSS feeds.
• Cache Elements Individually For Each User - Caching elements in general has been discussed before on bakery and this article takes caching of an element to a higher level. This article explains how to cache elements individually for each user.

Be sure to check out the rest of The Bakery for more great CakePHP-related content and news.

Solar fans will be happy to see (as mentioned in the latest post from Paul Jones) that all of the previous (and future) posts he's been making as tutorials on certain parts of the framework have been integrated into the Solar manual.

The translation went pretty quickly, because I wrote the original blog entries using Solar_Markdown, which converted them to HTML for the blog. Then I did some quick edits and re-converted them using Solar_Markdown_Wiki (which is the markup format for all the class API and manual entries at the Solar website).

Posts adapted so far include the posts covering views and layouts, using HTTP and sending email from Solar.

Paul Jones talks about an aspect of the Solar framework (Solar_App_Bookmarks) and its inclusion in the Stenhouse CSS Framework:

Solar comes with a reference application, Solar_App_Bookmarks. As I outlined in an earlier post about views and layouts in Solar, the bookmarks application is extended from Solar_App_Base. The Base package holds all the layouts, and those layouts are what I want to talk about in this entry. Solar_App_Base comes packaged with the Stenhouse CSS Framework.

Paul briefly introduces the framework and includes example code - an XHTML scaffold, main layout files and some layout partials to show the framework in use.

While the Zend Framework works out how it's going to integrate complex views, Paul Jones posts about how the Solar framework makes it simple to work with views and layouts.

He breaks up the post into different sections for the kinds of view/layout and controller combination:

• Page Controller, View, and Layout
• Variable Assignment
• Other Layouts, or No Layout
• Multiple Formats
• Shared Layouts

The code in the post makes it simple to add an overall template for the site instead of having to add a header and footer to each view (or where the include doesn't belong).

Pádraic Brady continues his series on working with Complex Views in the Zend Framework with this new article - part seven focusing on the Zend_View Enhanced method.

It's been a long, and hopefully interesting, road to Part 7. In this concluding entry to the long running, and oft delayed, "Complex Views with the Zend Framework" series I introduce the Zend_View Enhanced Proposal for the Zend Framework, elaborate on its operation, and provide some opinions on the ongoing debate over its implementation.

In this final entry of the series, he recaps previous concepts (like Partials/Layouts/Controllers/Placeholders) and how far reaching the Zend_View Enhanced component is. He also includes some of the helpers and interfaces he's proposed for the module including:

• Zend_View_Helper_Partial
• Zend_View_Helper_Controller
• Zend_View_Helper_HeadScript
• Zend_View_Helper_Doctype
• Zend_View_Helper_HeadStyle

He takes each of the concepts mentioned above and applies these different helpers/interfaces inside them, illustrating with some sample code as needed.

On the PHP-Coding-Practices.com site today, there's a new tutorial posted showing how to create monocromatic (variations of the same color) CSS stylesheets quickly and easily via PHP.

The monochromatic color scheme uses variations in lightness and saturation of a single color. It looks clean and elegant. [...] The monochromatic color scheme is perfect for our task of generating CSS via PHP based on forming shades of a base color.

You'll need to grab their library to work with in the tutorial, the rest is included in the tutorial. They show how the CSS is defined, how to use the CSS in your page and some sample screenshots of the resulting layouts with the monocromatic coloring.

Rob Allen has two new posts today, both revolving around the same thing - an update to the Zend Framework called the action helper ViewRenderer. The first just mentions an update to his "Intro to the Zend Framework" tutorial PDF, but the other gets a little more in-depth:

The Zend_Controller_Action_Helper_ViewRenderer action helper is a great bit of code that automates rendering a view template based on which action has been called. This is very useful, but renders the action template, not my layout template. To solve this, I am experimenting with extending the Zend_Controller_Action_Helper_ViewRenderer and overriding it so that it know about my layout template. I also prefer to use the view suffix "tpl.php" for my view scripts, so I've made my class automatically set my preferred view suffix.

He illustrates with some code, an example that shows how to tell the ViewRenderer about his "tpl.php" files and link them back to the action that's called on the URL.