On the Joomla community site there's a recent post made of a video from the Joomla Day conference in Australia about creating a Joomla template from scratch. The presenter is Norm Douglas.

Norm Douglas recently presented about how to create a Joomla template from scratch at the Joomla Day in Melbourne, Australia, on 13 February 2010. This is a very informative 77 minute presentation and also covers using the Firebug Firefox addon, code editors and much more.

He covers some simple tools you get you started, the basics of HTML to create a sample layout and looks at CSS definitions that can make the layout look a bit better. Firebug (the plugin for Firefox) helps make locating the different parts of the page easier with a highlighting feature.

On the Ibuildings techPortal they're posted the latest podcast in their Dutch PHP Conference 2009 sessions series - Boy Baukema's talk on why every PHP developer should love Javascript.

In this talk these and more comparisons will be drawn between the two languages. The main weaknesses and strengths of JavaScript will be discussed and compared to PHP. Examples will be given of closures and lambda functions in JavaScript and they will be compared to the implementation of these same features in the upcoming PHP 5.3. And through comparison the speaker will demonstrate that the two languages are quite similar.

To listen you can either use the in-page player or you can download the mp3 directly and listen offline at your leisure.

In a new post to his blog Michelangelo van Dam talks about a presentation he gave on testing Zend Framework applications (slides) and shares some of the code samples and techniques he mentioned.

Since then I got a lot of questions how to set up a testing environment for Zend Framework applications that uses version Zend Framework 1.8 or newer. We start off by setting our environment best fitted for our unit testing. I use a virtual linux system for this, using VMWare, but with some extra background research these global settings can be applied for your own (test) environment as well.

He includes the code/XML to set up the PHPUnit instance, a TestHelper script to set up the environment correctly and the controller and its test case. Screenshot output is included for both the test runner and the code coverage report.

In this new post to his blog Paul Jones points out a set of slides from a coworker of his (Theo Schlossnagle) based around his book "Scalable Internet Architectures".

This is not strictly PHP, but it is about scalability, and every PHP programmer *ought* to be thinking about this stuff. Theo Schlossnagle of OmniTI (where I work as a web architect) has this slide deck posted about Scalable Internet Architectures.

Paul points out some highlights of the slides:

• Slide 7: "Lack of awareness of the other disciplines is bad."
• Slide 29: Know the difference between "premature optimization" and "necessary optimization".
• Slide 59: "Scaling is hard, performance is easier. Extremely high-performance systems tend to be easier to scale, because they don't have to SCALE as much."
• Slide 63: Combine this with slide 59, and you have the reason why you need to know your application responsiveness.

On the PHP in Action blog today Dagfinn has pointed out a presentation that, while directed at Java developers, has some good suggestions for anyone working in software development - 10 Ways to Improve Your Code (from Neal Ford).

I discovered a video presentation available from QCon SF 2008 by Neal Ford called 10 Ways to Improve Your Code. Although the examples are in Java, most of the presentation is relevant to PHP. There are some ideas here that I've never heard of myself, such as "anti-objects". Some of the main headings are a bit cryptic, so you may have to see the video itself to have them explained.

The list of ten ways includes things like test-driven development, good citizenship, the "single level of abstraction principle and anti-objects.

On DevShed today they continue their introduction to CodeIgniter series with this new tutorial looking at views nd how to move some of the presentation logic out of them an into a "sub-view container".

Manipulating views with CodeIgniter is a straightforward process. [...] However, CodeIgniter gives PHP programmers enough freedom to handle views in several useful ways, which can speed up the development of web applications. Therefore, if you're taking your first steps with CI and wish to learn some handy approaches that will help you work with views in a truly painless fashion, then start reading this tutorial now!

Their method defines a reusable view "container" (their content_view.php) to handle the looping that was previously just done in the one view for the user listing. This makes the content_view script reusable across more than one view and standardizes some of the look/feel in the view's output.

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.

If you've given any kind of technical presentation, you know that presenting code samples (clearly) can be one of the larger challenges. Matthew Weier O'Phinney has found a solution that works well for him and his slides - Highlight.

Being a technical presenter, I've often run up against the issue of how to present code snippets. The easiest route is to simply cut-and-paste into your presentation software. However, such code is basically unreadable. [...] The first trick I tried was to take screenshots of gvim. However, this had distinct downsides. [...] The next trick I tried was to use Zend Studio or Eclipse to create my screen shots.

He talks about the tool (Highlight) and its use - basically you specify the input, output and the language it needs to highlight for with more fine-tuning options like font size, line width and more. Compare this and this to the end result of Highlight here to get a feeling for how the product might look.

As mentioned by the EuroTechEvents.net, there's a Yahoo! Developer Network event coming up in the UK (London) covering PHP, oAuth and Web Services.

YDN Tuesdays are a way to meet and hear technical presentations from Yahoo experts for free. They will be held on the first Tuesday of every month throughout 2009. YDN Tuesdays will kick of with James Broad discussing PHP, oAuth & Web Services.

The event will start at 6:30pm on February 3rd (2009) at this Skill Matter location. You will need to register to attend.

DevShed has posted the fifth part of their series looking at CodeIgniter and its use to make a simple blogging application. The focus this time is on the output, working with the views to "pretty up" the resulting pages.

Although in its current state, the blogger works well, its visual presentation looks pretty primitive. Therefore, in this fifth part of the series I'll be adding some CSS styles to the view files that comprise this blog application to improve its look and feel.

They start with a review of the code so far - a simple blogging app with the ability to let users comment on each entry. The HTML and CSS you'll need to add to the views to make the output look more like this.