Padraic Brady has an addendum he's posted to his "making a blogging application with the Zend Framework" series dealing with a few random issues from along the way.

The interesting thing about live publishing of a long tutorial series is that it's not flawless. In fact it's the opposite. [...] To cover all these I'll occasionally highlight the more important ones both in notes to new entries, or where they slip past me, in Addendum entries like this one.

There's four sections in this update - one dealing with the referencing of base URLs, another worrying about magic_quotes settings, an updated database schema for the project and the final about removing non-english characters in the title URLs.

The IBM developerWorks site has posted a tutorial (you'll need to log in) showing how to use native XML databases to speed up development time for your applications.

Native XML databases have grown in popularity along with XML, because data is stored as native XML, rather than through tables in a traditional database. Using a native XML database means that a change to the schema requires minimal changes to your code and no change to the database. PHP and Java developers can benefit greatly from using native XML databases

IT talks about how to connect to the database (in this case DB2), grab the XML data via a query and how to insert information back in via a web-based form. There's also an example showing how to make a "search" on the data and how to change the schema of the database on the fly as well.

Related to an issue from a previous post, Greg Beaver has posted a solution to his Relax NG schema problem in PHP.

Shortly after my last blog post, I got a very helpful email from Rob Richards, who offered to help me with my trials and tribulations. He took a quick look at the schema for package.xml, and a sample package.xml and was able to find two small tweaks to make parsing actually work (gasp). This changes everything. I am abandoning the creation of a relax NG schema in favor of the battle-tested xsd. The error messages for xsd validation are far clearer than the rng ones.

The code included shows how much simpler the error messages are with the XSD validation option versus the RNG ones.

Raphael Stolt has posted a new tutorial today talking about how to validate the content of XML files within a PHP 4 application.

Today I ran into a small problem, validating import XML data against a DTD(Document Type Definition), and discovered a neat way to solve this without PHP4's own means, as the PHP 4 version on the running system wasn't supporting the DOM XML Functions. Xmllint, a command line XML tool, parses provided XML files and can be used to verify that these files are well formed and are satisfying an associated DTD/XML Schema.

In his example he shows a simple implementation of the tool, grabbing the file's information and pushing it through a command line request to check the file.

Developer.com has posted a new tutorial by Jason Gilmore about the creation of a simple search engine based around a MySQL database and using PHP to perform the queries.

In this article I'll offer a simplified version of this search engine, introducing you to some compelling PHP and MySQL features along the way. You might adopt what you learn towards building your own search engine, or towards other applications.

He starts with the base of the application - the database schema (including loading data into it) - and works up from there. He opts to go with the fulltext search type as it can provide a huge performance boost over just using something like LIKE statements in your query. He also includes a bit of HTML for help make the output easier to use.

WebCheatSheet.com has two new tutorials posted today - one dealing with the export of a database schema in an XML format and the other about sending emails from PHP.

Here's a link to the first article.

Sometimes it can be useful to have a dump of the current database schema. This script reads the schema from a MySQL database and outputs XML that describes the schema.

And a link to article number two.

So, you want to send automated email messages from your PHP application. This can be in direct response to a user's action, such as signing up for your site, or a recurring event at a set time, such as a monthly newsletter. Sometimes email contains file attachments, both plain text and HTML portions, and so on. To understand how to send each variation that may exist on an email, we will start with the simple example and move to the more complicated.

The WebReference.com site has a new tutorial posted today - a look at the creation of a custom RSS feed with the help of a a dash of both PHP and MySQL.

You'll learn how to syndicate your own custom RSS feeds using PHP and MySQL. We'll first learn how to create two database tables and then how to retrieve data from them which will be formatted into an RSS feed.

They start from scratch instead of trying to integrate with your pre-existing database schema. They choose to go with a news system that includes the contents of the post, an image associated with it, and a link back to it. They create a class to make the RSS that contains methods like GetFeed, getDetails, and getItems to help build the RSS output. It's all done by appending the tags and information togethter, so don't look for any XML handling here.

DevShed is starting another new series today with part one of their look at "Building an Invoicing System" - building the login script.

In this first part of "Building an Invoicing System," we are going to look at invoice management. Why would anyone want an online invoicing system? Well, if you are a freelance web developer like myself, you will undoubtedly need to invoice your clients so as to be able to get paid at the end of the month. This application will help you to manage your client details as well as your invoices.

It's a basic level tutorial, and starts from the basics - being sure PHP and MySQL are installed and working together. They offer a few troubleshooting tips if things aren't working right before giving you the database schema and the actual (simple) script to use for logging in a user.

DevShed has posted part three in their "Simulating the Model-View-Controller Schema in PHP" series today, this time focusing on the last of the three, the View.

All right, after refreshing the topics covered previously, as well as clarifying some key concepts with reference to the concrete subject of this series, this journey will continue by constructing yet another practical example to expand your overall knowledge of object-based programming with PHP. In particular, it's designed to show you to use a MVC-driven relationship in another real-world situation.

If you're wondering to what other cases this relationship can be specifically applied, then I have good news for you. In this final article, I'll show you how to implement the MVC schema, in order to generate different outputs (or views) from a given MySQL data set.

They start over with their code, generating a new schema based around a MySQL processing class. The controller pulls its information from the database (our model) as to how the results should be displayed. Next they describe the model to help interface with the actual table and finishing it off with the output class, resulting in either XML or plain-text output of the user information.

Lukas Smith was one of the attendees of the just-past php|tek conference in Orlando, Florida and has posted his own wrap up of his experiences.

Besides his talks, he also shares some of the experiences outside of his talks too, including perspectives on the hotel, the area, his participation in the panel discussion on PEAR and, of course, the goodies handed out.