On the Techfounder blog (from Eran Galperin) there's a quick tutorial about using the Zend_Mail component of the Zend Framework to send both normal, plain-text emails and ones with MIME attachments.

Using PHP's built in function (aptly named mail() ) is relatively straightforward - until you need slightly more advanced features, such as adding and encoding email headers or sending multiple mails efficiently. Fortunately, the Zend Framework comes with a very capable mail component called Zend_Mail.

He shows how to send a simple email, do something a bit more complex with a custom SMTP server, read messages from a remote POP3 email box and how to attach a binary file/message.

Following up on this article from Akash Mehta, Bryan has posted five more suggestions he has to help make you a better PHP developer.

I thought all of Akash's suggestions were good but a little broad and seemed to involve a lot of reading. And while any budding developer will jump at the chance to expand their burgeoning technical library, I thought there were a couple of items we could add to his list.

The recommendations that made his list are

• Start a project that other people (developers and end users) will use.
• Learn another language.
• Teach someone PHP.
• Ask for suggestions not solutions.
• Use what you read.

I'm particularly a fan of the third one (teaching) - not only does it spread PHP out even more through the masses, but it can really test you on your knowledge (some of those "how do I.." questions can get a bit complex, even from beginners).

Akash Mehta has posted a list of suggestions he has for developers wanting to move up and enhance their skills in the language:

So, you're an up-and-coming PHP developer, you're spending a lot of time learning new tricks and you're always on the bleeding edge when it comes to using technologies in your web applications. What's next?

His four answers to "what's next" are:

• Read books, write code.
• Attend conferences
• Take courses and qualification tests
• Watch the web

...with the final one being his most important.

Martynas Jusevicius has pointed out a handy tool to work with Microsoft Excel files in PHP - PHPExcelReader.

There is a nice tool for reading Microsoft Excel files called PHPExcelReader. It works with .xls files up to Excel version 2003, which are based on the BIFF format (later versions use OOXML). It is written in native PHP and does not require any third-party libraries or the MS Office package.

He includes an example of it in use - a loop that runs through the cells of a spreadsheet and outputs each of them (going across the row via an inner for loop as well).

On PHP-Learn-It.com today, there's a new tutorial looking to get you, the budding PHP developer, into working with cookies in PHP.

A cookie is often used to store data which can be used to identify a user, for example, person's username. [...] In this tutorial, we will learn how to write, read and delete cookies in PHP.

They show how to create the cookie (with set_cookie) - both one that will timeout when the browser closes and one that stays after - how to read the value from them and how to remove them by setting the data in the past.

DevShed continues their look at design patterns in PHP with this last installment of their Memento pattern series - "Using the Memento Pattern with a File Reading Class".

Let me now introduce the topics that I'll be covering in this last article of the series. I'll show you how to use the memento pattern to keep track of some properties that correspond to a file reading class. In this way we'll construct a flexible mechanism for moving back and forth between file lines.

They create both of the needed classes for the pattern to work - the originator and the caretaker class - to handle the reading of the files. The code for both is pretty cut and paste-able, so there's no problem getting your example to work. With those constructed, they tie them together with an example of the design pattern in action - reading and displaying the lines of a text file to the user.

In a new tutorial over on PHPBuilder.com today, they demonstrate how to create and work with one of the most popular data exchange formats on the web today - RSS.

Recently I was looking for an RSS aggregator. I was having surprising difficulty finding one that did exactly what I wanted. [...] I began seriously considering writing my own. This month, I show you how to create a basic RSS reader yourself.

He gives a simple primer to what RSS is and what it looks like (explaining the XML spec) and includes an example of what a simple document looks like. He uses the older XML functionality in PHP (expat) to do the parsing and includes to code that he uses to get the job done.

Harry Fuecks has gotten busy and posted the third part of his "Joy of Regular Expressions" series over on the SitePoint PHP Blog today.

Following on from the last part, this one is more of an intermission-a round up of regex syntax seen so far and a couple of links following feedback.

He looks at two different topics:

• A "must reads" section of resources for getting the most out of regular expressions
• A comprehensive "cheat sheet" with tips on expression delimiters, literals, pattern modifiers, character classes, quantifiers, assertions, sub-patterns, and working with the blackslash.

PHPit.net offers up yet another fine tutorial for your learning pleasure - this time with a focus on email, reading it that is in Read your e-mail with PHP (catchy, eh?).

E-mail is something we use every day, and almost everyone has their own e-mail address. To read our e-mail most of us tend to use something like Microsoft Outlook or Mozilla Thunderbird, but it's also possible to use PHP to read your e-mail. In this tutorial you will learn how.

I will take you through all the steps necessary to read your e-mail with PHP, and show you how to display all the newest e-mails in your inbox.

They use the POP3 class from PHPClasses.org to do most of the work, from connecting to thse server, logging in, grabing stats (like the number of emails), and grabbing and parsing out each email's data.

On Pierre-Alain Joye's blog today, there's a quick release note about the latest version of his PECL package, Zip, being released - 1.4.0.

I just release Zip-1.4.0. This release adds support for all kind of comments, read or write. One bug has been fixed, Windows users may had problems to add files to an existing archives. Thanks to Irokez (pear's OpenDocument project for SoC) to have catched it.

He also includes a brief code example of the commenting functionality.