DevShed continues their look at using the CodeIginiter PHP framework to build a sample application in this latest part of their series - a look a paginating the database results from a query.

As you may guess, however, Code Igniter comes bundled with a robust set of core classes, which can be used to perform all sorts of clever tasks, such as working with databases, performing file uploads, validating user-supplied data, and so forth. [...] I'm going to show you how to improve the MySQL-driven application developed in the preceding tutorial, since it'll be provided with the capacity for paging database records, via the pager class included with Code Igniter.

He starts by reviewing the previous part of the series, pulling the data from MySQL, then shows how to push that through the pagination component to create a simple user listing.

At the Developer Tutorials blog mentions, a new offering from Yahoo! is making it simple to "spice up" the results for your site when someone searches for it - Yahoo! Searchmonkey. It's a PHP-based platform for creating an application that's returned inline with the search results.

Rasmus Lerdorf has an example of the potential output for a search returning a restaurant's name, links to its menu/wine list, reviews and a link to make a reservation.

There's lots of fun things to do with this tool - check out the developer page for more information and grab the developer tool to jump in and get started building your own custom result.

DevShed has continued their series looking at using the Yahoo! web services with PHP5 in part two - their look at returning the results of a query in serialized arrays.

I'll show you how to parse the results returned by a determined web search service using a few array PHP processing functions. [...] Let's learn how to fetch results returned by the different Yahoo! Search Web Services in the form of serialized PHP arrays

You'll probably want to check out part one of the series before forging on to this second installment - there's a lot of good introductory information in there. With all of that information ingested, you'll have no problem following along with this next part.

They show how to get the results back from a search in an XML format and how, with the simple addition of an optional "output" parameter, can get the same information back in something PHP can natively use (the arrays).

DevShed continues their look at creating a search engine (after part one) with this next tutorial in the series. It focuses on the pagnation of the results from the search query.

In this second tutorial of the series I'm going to show you how to add some crucial characteristics to the previously-developed search engine. These include the implementation of paginated results and the ability to perform Boolean searches.

They build on the code from the previous tutorial and add in some simple pagination functionality by changing up the Result class to handle things like counting rows and displaying only a certain number of results at a time. To help make the pagination easier, they've also included a method to keep the search term constant across each page of the results - a custom session handler.

As previously mentioned, Nick Halstead will be revealing the top three places in the results from the programming competition he was hosting. Today starts the top three list with third place - an entry from Karol Grecki:

I was really impressed with Karol's entry and if it was not for the fact that it did not 'run out of the box' it would have been a close cut thing to be the winner. The fact is that because it was a pain to get running the two other judges only gave it 1 point each.

Karol's website or just download the code and play along at home.

As per php|architect the XAMPP Group has released ther results of a survey for users of the package.

Included in the spotlights of the results were things like:

• Almost half of the XAMPP users would like to also have ASP.NET bundled with XAMPP
• XAMPP is popular not only in private use (91%) but also in the non-profit and educational sectors
• XAMPP users are generally pretty neutral when it comes to frameworks and add-on packages like phpBB and Wordpress being bundled with the package
• Over half would like to see PostgreSQL bundled also, not just MySQL

On the SpinDrop blog today, Dave Dash continues his look at the Lucene search engine for the Zend Framework with this new post showing how to boost certain terms' relevance in the search results.

Lucene supports boosting or weighting terms. For example, if I search for members of a web site, and I type in Dash, I want people with the name Dash to take precedence over somebody who has a hobby of running the 50-yard Dash.

He shows how to, with the help of a few simple lines of PHP code added to your application, you can easily boost terms based on field by whatever multiplier you choose.

In an effort to add to the ever-growing list of "keeping it simple" benchmarks out there, Hasin Hayder presents his own results for the task of fining the number of times a word occurs in a given string.

Today I was just thinking what are the possible ways to count the occurrence of a specific word inside a string. I found some possible ways finally and I just benchmarked them. Wanna see the result?? - for sure you will find it interesting too.

Methods range from a simple split() and count() call out to using the regular expression functions to locate the matches. After running it four times (to check for accuracy), he the stats were pretty much the same. It looks like the substr+count method was the fastest overall with last place falling to the array function method.

Always looking forward to the future of PHPUnit, Sebastian Bergmann has started gathering some ideas for future additions to the project:

I started to collect ideas for features that I would like to see in PHPUnit but currently lack the time to implement myself.

The two listed in this post are:

• Mutation testing - an approach where the testing tool makes some change to the tested code, runs the tests, and if the tests pass displays a message saying what it changed
• Web Interface for Test Result Database - output viewer for the database logging PHPUnit is now capable of.

Continuing on from the first part of the series looking at the use of Adapter objects, DevShed has posted part two today - using the Adapter objects along with Directory Iterators to integrate with a MySQL database.

Provided that you understand the basic concepts of the adapter pattern, in this final tutorial, I'll show you how to use it in conjunction with the "DirectoryIterator" class, bundled with PHP 5, and with a couple of MySQL wrappers as well.

They jump right in (as was said, assuming you read the previous article) to using the directory iterators and the adapters together to make a class that gets information about the files in a directory. They take this and show a sample use that's then transformed into a class capable of using the same logic on MySQL results.