Andrew Wulf passed along a note about an ajax-based PHP documentation site aimed at making it simple to get at the PHP manual from a single page interface.

I wrote this little app for my own needs initially, as PHP is such a big monster that it was hard to find the right documentation, or discover which of the N similar packages I should use. When I moved servers I fixed up the app enough and decided to release it to the world. It's pretty handy as is, but there are still several things I need to add, particularly paging through the documentation, and supporting bookmarks.

The site, phpdox.net, supports two kinds of searches - one through an index of page titles and another through the hierarchical names of the documentation's filenames.

In response to this tutorial over on the PHPro.org website a new post has been made to the PHP in Action blog with an "even cooler" way to do the same sort of DOM fetching - XPath.

I'm a little bit surprised at the claim [the tutorial makes] that it's the "correct" (only) way, since there's at least one more that I find even cooler: XPath. Admittedly, it's slower, yet it's a more powerful language.

A quick example is included, building up from a simple search for anchor tags up to a custom query looking for just the anchor tags with a class of "bookmark".

On the Debuggable blog there's an interesting post where Felix talks a bit about something I've seen requested quite a bit - a method for locating information in an array. His answer is an XPath-style query system to root out your custom information.

One of the requirements [of the original Set::extract method] was that the new method would need to be faster or at least as fast as the old implementation. My first attempts were big failures. Not only did the solutions I came up with contain tons of bugs. No, they were are also a lot slower the old extract function. A few benchmarks later and I discovered the biggest bottleneck in my implementation: Recursiveness.

He notes that no doing things recursively (not just in this situation, but ever) can help with a speed boost. In his example, a small change made all the differences and the XPath implementation in the CakePHP core makes grabbing information from any array simple.

While the implementation does not support full XPath (and probably won't in future), feel free to make suggestions on additional selectors or the idea in general.

Wanting to automate the trackbacking process for articles linked to on the site, the ProDevTips blog went with a simple method using the Google Blog Search and Zend_Feed to parse the resulting feed from the search.

So Google Blog Search it is then. When you use the search you have the option of subscribing to it through an RSS feed. I did a link:url search and just copied the resultant feed URL. Using this URL it is possible to fetch for instance 10 results and display them through parsing the atom feed.

The example script queries the Google search, requests an output format of atom and spits back out a listing of the other sites/blog posts that link to any given article.

The ProDevTips blog continues their series on using Doctrine in a sample application in this new part, a look at paginating the results from your database query.

Things are starting to become more and more feature complete. Let's look at how to implement general search and pagination.

They define the search to perform ($searchConf) and the pagination parameters ($pageConf) and apply them to their current Doctrine setup applying a simple layout to make the numbered links for switching between pages. They also define the search() method that pulls the results from the table to push into the pagination component.

On WebReference.com today Ryan Butler has written up a tutorial of a simple search feature that can be integrated into any site (with their content in a MySQL database).

In this article, you'll learn how to create a searchable form feature that will query a database table and display current staff member information. During the analysis you'll learn how to do the following: create a database table that will hold current staff listings, create a search form and use PHP, in coordination with Structured Query Language (SQL) to capture information entered by the visitor and append the information to display the results we want to show.

They give you the files for the project and work through each, showing how to make the database, put information in and connect to the database to run the query. He opts for the LIKE functionality in the WHERE clause to find the term as a wildcard in the FirstName field. It's not the most efficient, but it can be useful.

Gustav Eklundh has posted a whole series of search type implementations to his blog - here's the list so far:

• Quicksort
• Gnome sort
• Strand sort
• Merge sort

He briefly explains each of the sort methods in each of the posts, sometimes with links to external sources (like Wikipedia) for more information on the method.

The Symfony project's blog has a new post today about a big move that one of its resources it making - the framework's plugins are getting their own section.

I am pretty happy to announce that I have just deployed a new version of the symfony project website with a brand new "Plugins" section (look at the top menu entries) to replace the Trac plugin management system.

The new section has a listing of all of the available plugins (can be filtered) and dedicated pages for each of them with things like license, version and release information. You can also search the plugins based on keywords and authors. Developers adding their plugins have a full admin interface and uses the Trac accounts to manage access.

Antony Dovgal has a quick post today about a PECL extension that makes for quick and easy full-text searching on standard SQL databases.

As some of you might have noticed, I've been a bit busy lately creating new PECL extension - sphinx. The extension provides an interface to a feature-rich fulltext search engine Sphinx written by Andrew Aksyonoff. We (Andrew and me) made our best to keep the extension as compatible to the pure-PHP API (shipped with Sphinx) as possible in order to make the transition easier.

The PECL page has already been created as well as a page in the manual for how it works. He also briefly mentions the installation (including teh required libraries).

Asvin Balloo has posted a quick look at making the URLs of your website a bit more "pretty" and SEO-friendly.

When I started implementing mod_rewrite in websites I had a problem in PHP as how to make a SEO friendly URL. All tutorials were geared towards how to implement mod_rewrite, about modifying .htaccess files, but none treated how to make the urls friendly with dynamic content.

He shares a function that he found that helped him a great deal - a method called friendlyURL. It changes a bit of text into a more friendly version of itself ("this is a test" becomes "this-is-a-test") that can be used in anything you'd want. An example could be in automatically generating links to other pages on your site that search engines can easily follow.