Nikita Popov has a new (language agnostic) post to his blog today about one of the most powerful things you can use in your development - something that a lot of developers don't understand the true power of - regular expressions.

As someone who frequents the PHP tag on StackOverflow I pretty often see questions about how to parse some particular aspect of HTML using regular expressions. A common reply to such a question is: "You cannot parse HTML with regular expressions, because HTML isn't regular. Use an XML parser instead." This statement - in the context of the question - is somewhere between very misleading and outright wrong. What I'll try to demonstrate in this article is how powerful modern regular expressions really are.

He starts with the basics, defining the "regular" part of "regular expression" (hint: it has to do with predictability) and the grammar of the expressions. He talks about the Chomsky hierarchy and how it relates to the "regular" as well as a more complex mapping of expression to language rules. He talks about matching context-free and context-sensitive languages and unrestricted grammars as well.

InfoWorld/DeveloperWorld has posted a list of eight power tools (IDEs) they suggest to any PHP developer looking for something more than just the standard text editors.

In this article, we examine eight IDEs: ActiveState's Komodo IDE, CodeLobster PHP Edition, Eclipse PHP Development Tools (PDT), MPSoftware's phpDesigner, NetBeans IDE for PHP, NuSphere's PhpED, WaterProof's PHPEdit, and Zend Studio. All of these PHP toolkits offer strong support for the other languages and environments (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, SQL database) that a PHP developer encounters. The key differences we discovered were in the tools they provide (HTML inspector, SQL management system) for various tasks, the quality of their documentation, and general ease-of-use.

There's a summary scorecard on the first page of the article if you want to jump straight to the good stuff, but the pages following that will give you much more information about each of the options - the good and the pad points. According to their overall scores, though, Eclipse PDT and Zend Studio tied it up for the highest rankings.

The NETTUTS.com site has some advice on how you can add a bit more power and flexibility to your PHP applications - shift them over to a multi-tier application structure.

As PHP applications become more and more complex, it can be easy to end up with a tangled mess of code that makes maintenance nearly impossible. Applying the concept of tiered applications can help to alleviate some of the difficulty in maintaining complex applications.

Tiered programming is a method that splits up the components of an application (like a separation between presentation and business logic). They talks about what a setup like that might gain you, the wrong way to do it and the right way that splits it out into the database tier, the business tier and the presentation tier.

On the Developer Tutorials Blog today, there's a new post aimed at WordPress users to help them on the path to becoming "power users" with five tips.

If you're a wordpress power user, you'll inevitably have some questions about how you can improve your blog or add new features. Here are five tips that will make life easier for people wanting to maximize their use of Wordpress.

The list is:

• Quickly Find Page/Post ID
• Custom Front Page
• Password Protect Wordpress
• Protect from the 'Digg Efect' with HTML
• Stop Hackers

Each of them with their own explanations (and links to other resources detailing how they're done).

In this new post on the Northclick blog, Soenke talks about the stream wrappers included in PHP and some of the magic that can happen when they're applied correctly. In this case, it's an application of the ssh2 library (by Sara Golemon).

The new system must be very stable with a strict error checking and has to support several ways of file transports (FTP, SCP/SFTP). SCP is faster then FTP and secure by nature. It's going to be the standard way for deployment.

After finding and loading the extension, things flowed along swimmingly - the code shows a simple transfer method of transfer over a secure ftp connection, complete with a few performance stats at the end.

On the ITBusinessEdge site, there's a quick column from Lora Bentley looking at things from the other side of the Zend/Microsoft story - Microsoft's.

She mentions the "about face" that Microsoft has seemingly made when it comes to Open Source projects, specifically the Zend deal:

As a DigitalJournal writer pointed out yesterday, the deal makes great business sense for Microsoft, given that PHP runs more than 2 million Web sites and the software company's servers and tools business contributed one-fourth of its total revenue in the latest quarter.

You can get complete information regarding the collaboration from the Zend website.

Some unfortunate news from Edin Kadribasic to be felt particularly by the Windows PHP users out there - the box that hosts the PECL packages for Windows has suffered a bit from a power failure.

The power failures are very rare in Denmark, but nonetheless this one managed to take out the build box. The website itself is not affected, but there are no updates for the time being.

The PECL4WIN project hosts a repository of PECL extensions precompiled for the Windows platform. The packaging and distribution system used by PECL is shared with its sister, PEAR.

UPDATE (11.15.2006) - The box is back up and working at 100% again (faulty memory was to blame). A new build has already been created.

Andi Gutmans has a note of celebration on his blog today - the book that he, Stig Bakken, and Derick Rethans worked on, "PHP 5 Power Programming", has officially passed one million downloads.

A few days ago I was informed that the PHP 5 Power Programming book has now been downloaded over 1 million times. Exposure no doubt. And considering that there are about 4.5 million developers out there, it's safe to say that probably between 1 in 5 PHP developers have actually laid their hands on it (or should I say their computer screens on it).

Andi mentions also being happy to see this milestone crossed for many reasons, one of which that it's a sign of the PHP community maturing. To grab your copy, check out this page on phptr.com.

There's some unfortunate news from Greg Beaver today on his blog:

Some of you may have noticed a power workshop on PEAR advertised on the website of the S&S PHP Conference in Frankfurt this coming November. For personal reasons, I have been forced to pull out, so I'm sorry to say I will not be meeting any of you in Germany. If you're going, have a great time there!

For more information about the rest of the offerings that will be at this year's conference, check out their official page, specifically this page for the Power Workshops.

In a previous post on the Internet Storm Center website, they mentioned an issue that had come up with the Invision Board PHP/MySQL message board system by which a user clicking on a certian kind of link would push a .wmf exploit to the user.

More information about the exploit and the updates that the Invision Board team have made to counteract it can be found in this board pasting.

Unfortunately, there has also already been an incident with the exploit, causing the boards of "a large company" that was using it as a forum for its customers. Links started showing up that were causing problems, redirecting users to another server's page that pushed the bad .wmf file to them.

If you are running an Invision Board version before 2.1.6, it is stringly suggested you upgrade.