In a recent post to the PHP-GTK Community site, there's a new presentation on code completion for PHP-GTK in Netbeans (illustrated here).

Jose Antonio Bayona Medina has put up a slideshow demonstrating how to use the basic technique outlined in this chapter to add PHP-GTK 2 autocompletion in Netbeans 6.7.

You can see the presentation in the post or head over to Slideshare and check out this and other presentations by Jose Antonio Bayona Medina about more PHP-GTK work and code completion.

On the HubFolio site today Matthew Casperson has posted a new tutorial about deploying PHP-GTK applications with the help of the NSIS software (Nullsoft Scriptable Install System).

PHP-GTK is a project that binds the GTK desktop library. Unlike other solutions like Appceletartor Titanium, which create web applications that are distributed like a desktop application, PHP-GTK allows PHP developers to create native desktop applications utilizing the GTK platform. One of the issues with PHP-GTK is distributing the final application. This tutorial steps you through the process of creating a setup package for a simple PHP-GTK application with NSIS and HM NIS Edit.

He shows you how to create a simple PHP-GTK application, package it up with the HM NIS Edit tool and use the wizard to create the new package. Change a few configuration settings and compile the script and you should end up with a nice bundled installer.

Matthew Turland has posted a guide he created following his own process as he worked to compile PHP 5.3.0RC1 with PHP-GTK/Cairo support on a Ubuntu (Jaunty) installation.

The process was a bit arduous, as Ubuntu apparently has a rather "interesting" automake package, so I thought I'd document it here for anyone who might be interested in repeating the process. [...] I'm assuming here that you want to use as many available Ubuntu packages as is feasible, aside from maybe PHP itself, in order to minimize the amount of manual compilation necessary.

He works through the steps that include installing several packages (via apt-get), compiling PHP to work with PHP-GTK, compiling and phpize-ing the Cairo extension and including that into the php.ini for the local installation. There's even a quick test script (a clock) you can run to see if all it working correctly.

Frederic Marand has pointed out a new subversion repository that's been set up for the documentation on the PHP-GTK project.

After recent complaints in the PHP-GTK mailing list, auroraeosrose mentioned mgdm has set up a SVN repository for the docs, to ease working on them. This new repository is available at http://svn.thefrozenfire.com/phpgtkdoc/

The trunk currently has repositories for the gtkdocs and the phpdoc application you can check out and use to generate and develop on the documentation locally.

The PHP-GTK Community site has launched a new service to help PHP-GTKers out there find out other developers that might be in their area - a world map (based on Google maps) of other PHP-GTK developers around the world.

I reviewed the coordinates given by existing members and noticed a good number had visibly inverted latitude and longitude; so I inverted them again to place them where it appeared to make more sense (are there really PHP-GTK devs in the middle of the pacific, or near the South pole ?). So you may want to double-check your coordinates to make sure the values are correct, because it's likely I've not found every error.

He's also asking for the Brasil PHP-GTK community to include their information in the map as well as a request for anyone out there that might want to make a "prettier" icon for showing the developers on the map.

Frederic Marnad has linked to a few other articles about PHP-GTK from the PHP-GTK Community blog today:

• A guide to building out PHP-GTK with the pre-release version of PHP6
• A new introduction to PHP-GTK (with example code)
• An article on DeveloperTutorials.com on building desktop PHP applications

You can find more great PHP-GTK related content and links to tutorials and other sites on the PHP-GTK Community site's main page.

New on her blog Elizabeth Smith talks about tree views and rendering in a PHP-GTK application (with sample code included).

I get this question a lot - "How do I change the background color of a single cell in a treeview?" If you look around you'll see a couple of ways of doing this using display callbacks and other highly processor and memory intensive methods - but there's a much simpler way.

She explains how the tree views are rendered (with the GtkTreeView component, of course) via a "cell renderer" with different variations based on the contents of the cell - each with their own properties. Her example code illustrates how to manipulate this by making the tree object and attaching other columns to it with custom background properties. A quick screencast is included to show it in action.

DevShed continues their look at building PHP-GTK applications with this new tutorial covering something a little different - making applications that live in the system tray.

You have seen how easy it is to write your own desktop applications using PHP-GTK in the article "Building Your Own Desktop Notepad Application Using PHP-GTK." Once you have learned how to write desktop applications using PHP-GTK, you will be pleased to know that writing system tray applications is just a matter of adding a couple of lines of code. The bulk of your code remains exactly the same!

They create a GtkStatusIcon widget (resulting in a generic file icon in the system tray) and show how to modify the previous Notepad application to respond to being clicked.

In this new tutorial from DevShed, they show how to take that PHP-GTK introductory knowledge a step further and create a simple desktop "notepad" application (corss-platform, of course).

If you think building a desktop application such as Notepad is difficult, think again. If you use PHP-GTK, it's almost ridiculously easy. This article will show you how. By the time you're done, you'll have a full cross-platform application in about 100 lines.

You need to already have the latest PHP-GTK version installed and have a basic knowledge of how to make an application before you start. All code is included as well as explanations as to where all of the parts go (including a simple find, time/date output, select all and how to tell if the user has modified the contents of the file).

A new tutorial on the Zend Developer Zone shows you how to use PHP's "younger cousin" PHP-GTK to make a simple widget.

With PHP's younger cousin PHP-GTK's recent step to maturity with the 2.0 stable release it is a good time to give this project some more attention. In this article I will show you how to create a re-usable IPv4 Entry widget using PHP-GTK's excellent OO structure.

The end result is an interface that lets the user input an IP in a familiar way (blocks of three, automatically advancing to the next block). They talk about the code first, describing how all of the parts fit together before giving you an easily cut-and-pastable block of code (the class) that creates the widget.