In response to this tutorial over on the PHPro.org website a new post has been made to the PHP in Action blog with an "even cooler" way to do the same sort of DOM fetching - XPath.

I'm a little bit surprised at the claim [the tutorial makes] that it's the "correct" (only) way, since there's at least one more that I find even cooler: XPath. Admittedly, it's slower, yet it's a more powerful language.

A quick example is included, building up from a simple search for anchor tags up to a custom query looking for just the anchor tags with a class of "bookmark".

Kevin Waterson has added three new tutorials to his PHPPro.org website recently:

• Introduction To SQL - The language used in relational databases is SQL. Regardless of the database used, a standard language is used to communicate with them all. This tutorial shows some basic concepts to using SQL.
• Reciprocal Links - Automating reciprocal links at first glance looks a daunting task. This helper class takes away much of the pain of what can be a mindlessly tedious process and simplifies it into a few easy to use class methods
• Get Links With DOM - Perhaps the biggest mistake people make when trying to get URLs or link text from a web page is trying to do it using regular expressions. The job can be done with regular expressions, however, there is a high overhead in having preg loop over the entire document many times. The correct way, and the faster, and infinitely cooler ways is to use DOM.

You can find the links to these and many other great tutorials over on the PHPPro.org website's tutorials section.

Smashing Magazine has posted a huge set of resources for the WordPress users out there - a toolbox containing links to tutorials and tips and tricks on various parts of the blogging tool.

With all of the WordPress development that is going on, there is a need for an organized collection of resources to educate, inspire and equip developers to improve the quality and efficiency of their work. This post provides all kinds of WordPress-related resources to do just that.

They've broken it up into a two categories - Helpful Resources and WordPress Tutorials - with topics ranging from working with comments and navigation menus to making your own WordPress theme from scratch.

Stefan Koopmanschap had a problem - adding a link to a Zend Framework form (Zend_Form) built from an XML definition:

I was quickly told by the friendly people in #php_bnl on irc.freenode.net that I needed to use Decorators for that, so I went diving into the documentation. Reading the official documentation, I couldn't really get into how exactly the decorators worked and what I could do with them.

It was this article on the Zend Developer Zone that helped him the most, though. He explains his solution, defining the Decorator with a setDecorator method call, and includes the one-liner that made it work.

With PHP4 out of the way, it's time to make way for PHP5. To get the ball rolling, Gennady Feldman has posted some links to PHP5 resources that can get you on your way.

After posting previous item on the end of PHP4 I thought it would be beneficial to put up a number of pointers for those who are still using PHP4 and are looking for information that will ease the pain of migration to PHP5.

Links include:

• http://www.php5.org/
• Why are you not using PHP 5
• Migration to PHP5

On the PHP::Impact blog today Federico points out five articles that can help you learn more about the Standard PHP Library, specifically in dealing with iterators.

When PHP 5 was initially released, it included a strong sense of standardization introduced in the core package. This can be a real time saver when common programming issues must be solved through proven, standard solutions. That's precisely the case with iterators, since the SPL package includes many predefined iterating classes that can be used for traversing different data structures, without having to reinvent the wheel over and over again.

The links include this article on phpro.org and this one on Zend's own site.

Paul Reinheimer has a suggestion on how to improve the PHP manual to be an even better resource - enhancing the "see also".

Something I'd like to see in PHP is a little more in the See Also section. They're pretty good, but it's not quite as spider-web like as I'd like. For example, yesterday I added a few links from md5() and sha1() to hash(). Lot of people know about md5() and sha1() within PHP, but I find hash() is rather unknown overall, which is a pity as it exposes a tone of different hashing algorithms.

You can see an example of his updates in the md5 manual page linking it to sha1_file, crc32, sha1 and the hash functions.

On the Debuggable blog, Felix Geisendorfer has posted some code (thought up by Marc Grabaniski) to go through Google and find the pages that they have indexed for your site. Their goal is to check and see if the migration of a site was successful.

Just get a list of all pages google has indexed from your site and then use that as your basis for checking if your migration worked or not. This is very convenient because you do not have to know all your own urls yourself, and you'll only get the relevant ones (if they are not in google they are unlikely to have traffic).

The code is included as well as an example usage. He also points out FixtureShell for more command-line CakePHP examples.

According to this new post to the CodeIgniter blog, they've added a new feature to their Wiki - a link between them and the CodeIgniter forums.

Threads will be automatically created and linked for you via the discussion links found at the bottom of wiki articles. More details about this integration can be found at a blog post made in the ExpressionEngine blog, as well as a free ExpressionEngine extension to implement this on your own sites that utilize the ExpressionEngine wiki and discussion forum.

The plugin (the "Wiki Forum Talk" extension) bridges the two components and either makes a new topic when a new wiki entry is added or, if there's already a forum topic for the entry, it automatically links to it.

php|architect is hosting a coding contest that started on Saturday. The task is to grab the contents of an HTML file and grab all of the links out of it, removing duplicates.

You may use any built in function, the phpinfo() of the server used for testing will be attached. You just need to retrieve the links, you don't need to worry about them being relative or absolute.

It should be able to be called from the command line and return the links, one per line. They include how the scripts will be measured (speed, accuracy, etc) and the prize list - $100 gift card for phparch.com, a one year subscription or *drum roll* an autographed picture of ProPHP podcast hosts Paul Reinheimer and Sean Coates.

To submit your entry just email it over to c7ycontests@phparch.com with the subject of "C7Y Contest - February" on it.