After looking around for different hosting for some of his projects (one that was a bit more PHP-developer friendly), Brandon Savage looked into Slicehost, a virtual server option that gives a bit more control than the larger, more typical shared hosting environments. Here's his review of the move.

I'm not sure what I was expecting, but what I got was pretty amazing. Slicehost works by offering virtual servers for each account - that is, for each account they offer, you get your own box. [...] You're responsible for putting anything on it you want. And that's where the fun starts: you really can put anything you want on it.

The slices allow you to customize your PHP builds, add in MySQL, change up Apache - whatever you want. All you need to know is how to compile things and get them working together. Slicehost isn't a good option for someone that's not familiar with linux system administration, but if you know exactly what you want and how to put it there, their pricing is one of the best out there (plus they just got bought up by Rackspace so their future seems bright).

Johannes Schluter has posted showing how the new version of Netbeans (with PHP support) offers SQL completion support.

NetBeans 6.5 is soon to be released. After 10 years of NetBeans that's the first version of Sun's OpenSource IDE featuring PHP support. While 6.5 is waiting to be packaged the development didn't stop and the first features for the successor, NetBeans.next, are already being developed. David Van Couvering just showed a preview of a cool new feature: SQL completion in PHP strings, if it does what the screenshot promises that's a damn great addition in my opinion.

Johannes includes the screenshot of it in action.

Sameer has come up with an easy way to build out query strings to use in your GET requests:

Passing variables with a url is such a frequent thing programmers do that most of you may think this post is unwarranted. We call this method of passing variables as GET, the other being POST. It is one of those things which can be easily done in php. [...] The best way to pass GET variables is to use the http_build_query() function available from php version 5; which takes an array of variables and builds a nice URL encoded string which you can append to a url. And example is shown below.

He includes two code examples - one showing "the old way" of building it out by hand and the other using the http_build_query function. You pass in an array and what to connect them with and it builds out the string, no matter how many arguments there are.

Brian Moon has released a simple blogging application he's worked up - a super-simple, lightweight application that already has several of the common blog features built in.

Up until now, I have used Wordpress.com for my blogging. It works quite well. You can get started quite quickly and it does what most people need. My wife uses Blogger for our family blog. It is, IMO, not as nice as Wordpress.com in some ways. But, it does allow you to edit your styles (for free) and such which is nice. So, why would I want to reinvent the wheel? I am a control freak and rarely run other people's code. I know, it is a character flaw. I am working on it.

His application, WordCraft, already includes things like Akismet/CAPTCHA support for comments, custom page creation, pingback support, temlpating and email notifications. You can download the latest release (version 0.5) from his google code page.

The NETTUTS site has this new tutorial posted today about the creation of a site with a user registration and membership functionality built in.

A tutorial for the very beginners! No matter where you go on the internet, there's a staple that you find almost everywhere - user registration. Whether you need your users to register for security or just for an added feature, there is no reason not to do it with this simple tutorial. In this tutorial we will go over the basics of user management, ending up with a simple Member Area that you can implement on your own website.

They use a MySQL database to store the users' information, show how to create the login form to test the user's credentials and the registration form to make signup easy. They also thrown in a dash of CSS to help style the forms into something a bit more pleasing to the eye.

In a recent post to his blog Johannes Schluter looks at how you can use the new experimental MySQL driver for PHP, mysqlnd, and get into the streams that connect PHP and your MySQL database connections.

Ever wondered what your PHP application and MySQL actually do? An experimental mysqlnd branch will give you full access to the network communication stream. Using a custom PHP stream filter you can then intercept the communication.

He shows how to attach a filter on to the stream and what sort of output it would give for a query that wasn't valid SQL (including all of the "behind the scenes" queries that the database does to get table information from the schema).

This new article from PHPBuilder.com talks about getting started with one of the newly introduced components of the Zend Framework (in collaboration with Adobe) - the Zend_Amf interface.

To introduce this new Zend Framework extension and give you a look inside its functionality, I show you how to build a Flex application that pulls data from a MySQL database using PHP. First, you set up the application to use XML, the conventional cross-platform data-exchange method. Then, you change the code to use AMF and custom classes.

They give you the tools you'll need to set up the right environment (including version 1.7 or later of the Zend Framework and Adobe Flex Builder) and the steps to create the simple application. It uses a MySQL backend to store contact information ad a basic Flex interface to pull that information back out for display.

DevShed continues their look at custom exception handling in PHP5 application with this third part of their series, a look at handling exceptions from MySQL calls.

Having already introduced you to the main subject of this article series, it's time to summarize the topics that were discussed in the last article, in case you haven't read it yet. In that particular tutorial I explained how to implement a fully-functional customized exception system with PHP 5, which came in handy for handling a number of specific exceptions thrown by a basic MySQL abstraction class.

They create a custom MySQL exception class that sits on top of their MySQL abstraction layer (and Result handling class) and catches exceptions thrown from sample queries.

DevShed continues their look at web application security with part six of the series - a look at creating a registration form your site's visitors can use to create accounts/logins.

In this article we will be exploring the registration script of our site. This script is responsible for registering new users for the website. We will also be looking at database security; since the registration script also uses a database table, we will implement some of the concepts that we will be discussing.

Their example is relatively simple - it checks to ensure that none of the fields are empty, that one password matches the other and that the email address is in a valid format (using a regular expression). If it passes completely, its dropped into a MySQL database table that stores current user information.

The NETTUTS.com website has posted this new tutorial (complete with demo and source download) showing the creation of a simple blog in PHP (object-oriented style).

Today we are going to take our knowledge of PHP and MySQL a step further by creating a simple blog. While there are countless excellent free blog platforms, the purpose of this tutorial is not to make a "better" blog but to use the process of making a blog to learn about advanced database structure techniques and how to use data more efficiently by utilizing objects in PHP.

They start from the backend - creating the database first to store the post information for the blog. On top of that they create a "BlogPost" class to interface with each of the posts. This is then use to fetch the entries from the database and display them out in a simple list (which they augment with a little CSS).