On the Master Zend Framework site Matthew Setter has a new tutorial showing how to pull in Instagram photo feeds in a Zend Framework 2 application via their on developer functionality.

In today’s tutorial, we’re going to learn how to retrieve and display an Instagram photo stream in Zend Framework 2. We’re going to cover the essentials of adding the libraries we’ll need to composer.json, handling authentication and then retrieving and displaying our photo stream in a controller action. We’ll be doing all of this by using composer to create a new Zend Framework 2 project, based on the ZF2 Skeleton App project and then add a new controller and action which will handle the work involved.

The tutorial uses a basic skeleton application and a PHP Instagram library to make the connection to their API. He shows you how to register your application with Instagram and set up the OAuth configuration to handle the authorization process. He walks you through the creation of the controller, setup of session support and the creation of a "photosAction" to view the results of the photo feed pull. He includes a screenshot of what the end result should look like with it all up and working.

On NetTuts.com today there's a new tutorial that helps you create a "photo tag wall" using the Twilio picture messaging functionality and some PHP. The picture messaging service lets you send and receive photos over phone numbers and short codes.

Twilio’s recently announced Picture Messaging has vastly opened up what we can do with text messaging, now we can attach photos to our text messages and have them get used in different ways. In our case, we are going to build a Photo Tag Wall, which will contain photos linked to tags that will be displayed on a website. This can be handy for events, or parties, or just about anything where you want to associate photos and tags.

They use a combination of the Jolt microframework for the structure of the app, Idiorm/Paris for the MySQL handling and the Twilio PHP library to talk to their web service. They start by setting up the database tables for both the "tag" and "photo" (SQL included). They include a sample configuration file, used by the Twilio library, and get into the actual code. The first part shows how to make the request to the API and resize the fetched data into a correctly sized photo on the server. Then they get into the routing, making both a root path and a "listener" for the Twilio API to call when a new photo it sent. Finally, they set up the actual photo wall page, pulling the image data from the database and the image from the local file system.

In the second part of their series looking at the Laravel PHP framework and creating your first application with it. In part one you got a brief introduction to creating and configuring an application. In part two they dig a little deeper and talk about Laravel's ORM functionality.

In this Nettuts+ mini-series, we’ll build a web application from scratch, while diving into a great new PHP framework that’s rapidly picking up steam, called Laravel. In this lesson, we’ll be working on an integral part of any web application: the Models. Along the way, we’ll learn about Laravel’s amazing ORM implementation: Eloquent.

The tutorial introduces you to the concept of "Models" and some of the conventions that surround them in the Laravel framework. They show some of the most common operations (CRUD) and how to define relationships between the models (has many, has one, etc). They apply this to their "Instapics" example application, creating the interfaces for the users, profiles, relationships, photos and comments. They include the code to create the controllers/views to go along with them, making a simple interface to show users and their photos.

You can find out more about the Eloquent ORM in this section of the Laravel manual.

On the NetTuts.com site there's a new tutorial introducing you to one of the relatively new players to the PHP framework scene - Laravel. In this article you'll see how to set up and create a basic Laravel app - a simple social app for sharing photos.

In this Nettuts+ mini-series, we’ll build a web application from scratch, while diving into a great new PHP framework that’s rapidly picking up steam, called Laravel - a simple and elegant PHP 5.3 framework. First up, we’ll learn more about Laravel, and why it’s such a great choice for your next PHP-based web application.

They briefly introduce the framework and talk about some of the things that it offers for the PHP 5.3 users out there (including the use of packages called Bundles, the built-in ORM, migration and Redis support). They start you off on the road to building the sample application with instructions on downloading, configuring and creating the first controllers, templated views (with Blade) and a bit on asset management.

On NetTuts.com there's a new tutorial showing how you can create Instagram-like filters in PHP using the ImageMagick library/extension.

PHP comes bundled with GD (GIF Draw/Graphics Draw), which is a library for the dynamic creation of images. It can be used for simpler image operation, such as resizing, cropping, adding watermarks, creating thumbnails (Jeffrey wrote about it), applying basic photo filters – you’ve probably used it before. Unfortunately, if you want to create something more complex with GD, like Instagram effects, you can’t. Luckily, though, we have ImageMagick!

He starts off by comparing the two graphics libraries and talks briefly about how to downliad and install Imagemagick on your development platform. Included is a PHP class to help you use it, coming complete with functions for changing the color tone of the image, adding a border and adding a vignette to the image. Also included are some "presets" represented in a few simple functions:

• Gotham
• Toaster
• Nashville
• Lomo
• Kelvin

There's also a few links to other resources you can use to find out more details on what Imagemagick has to offer.

PHPMaster.com has posted the second part of their series helping you build a mobile photo blog powered by email attachments pulled over POP3. (Part one is here)

This is the second article in a two part series in which I show you how to create a photo blog that is updated from your mobile device. Part 1 laid out the plan for building the application, set up the database requirements, and introduced you to some user contributed functions from the PHP manual which make it easy to retrieve messages from a POP3 mail server. In this installment I show you how to bring everything together so you can start photo-blogging on the go.

In this new tutorial they include the code to authenticate against the database, insert the email details into the tables and inserting the formatted results into blog posts. It's finished off with the code to pull out the latest entries and display them along with their matching photos.

PHPMaster.com has started up a new series of tutorials today with part one of "Creating a Mobile Photo Blog". The set of tutorials will show you how to create a simple blogging tool that will upload images as submitted via an email address.

This is the first article in a two-part series in which I will show you how to create a photo blog as part of your personal website which you can update from your phone simply by sending an email. You’ll write a script to check the inbox of an email account for new messages using POP3; the script will extract the messages’ subject line, body text, and attachments and update a database accordingly. You can then pull the information from the database for display on your blog, in a sidebar, or however else you see fit.

The start with some of the security considerations you'll need to keep in mind when creating a script like this depending on how open you want it to be (like filtering based on the "From" email or sending an approval message before posting). Included in the post is the SQL to create their basic tables for posts, image details and the pending items. There's also a PHP class (POP3) that makes an IMAP connection to a remote server, authenticates as your account and fetches the latest messages along with their attachments. These are pulled with a quick script and displayed via a foreach.

Part two will get into more of the integration of the images and the approval technique prior to posting the images.

In the wake of the PHP North West conference, several of the attendees (and speakers alike) have posted their summaries and thoughts about the two day event. Here's a few so far:

• John Mertic's Deployable applications slides
• Lorna Mitchell's Teach a Man to Fish
• Lorenzo Alberton's slides
• Stuart Herbert's posts on Jeremy Coates, the Saturday speakers, track 1, Friday social, the audience
• Jamie Hurst's wrapup

As others pop up, they'll be added to the list. Don't see yours here? let me know!

On the Codrops blog there's a recent tutorial posted showing how to create a fully-functional image slider/viewer with a combination of HTML, jQuery and a bit of PHP (here's a demo).

In this tutorial we are going to create another full page image gallery with a nice thumbnail area that scrolls automatically when moving the mouse. The idea is to allow the user to slightly zoom into the picture by clicking on it. The thumbnails bar slides down and the image resizes according to the screen size.

Based on this tutorial, they show you how to build on it and add a few new features like a changing cursor depending on its position in the current image. The show the folder structure you'll need, the HTML and PHP to make the backend work and the CSS and Javascript to round out the frontend. If you want to skip straight to the good stuff you can also just download all the code and get started.

Kae Verens has posted a cool little application of how to pull information out of a photo and parse it with the GD library. His example is a visual sudoku solver (part one, at least).

The plan for this one is that, if you’re doing a sudoku puzzle in the pub or on the train, and you get stuck, you just take a snapshot of the puzzle with your camera-phone, send the photo to a certain mobile number, and a few seconds later the solution is sent back as an SMS message. The solution costs you something small - 50 cents, maybe.

The script looks at a picture of a sudoku puzzle, converts it to b&w and tries to find the squares surrounding each position of the board. With these measurements, the next step is to grab the numbers already in the puzzle and hand those off to the puzzle solver to be processed.