Wes Mason has started up another project to provide you with a weekly dose of curated PHP content direct to your mailbox - the PHP Weekly Newsletter:

[The newsletter is a] curated weekly injection of hot PHP links for your inbox, including the latest articles of interest, videos from talks and tutorials, new projects and of course the latest news in PHP language and platform development. I promise to try to keep links fresh, comments relevant and the hate out of sight.

The first edition of the news letter will be coming out in about a week (on December 6th), so if you'd like to sign up, head over to the main site for the project and enter your address.

On the 9Lessons site there's a recent tutorial showing you how to make a customized signup form that still uses the Facebook authentication as its base.

Using facebook registration plug-in users can easily sign up on your website using facebook data. With one simple facebook login the form will be filled with user appropriate data. This plug-in is a simple iframe you can place it anywhere on your webpage. You can also add a custom field if facebook doesn't have.

He walks you through the four (or five, depending on your view) different steps you'll need to make the simple form. You'll need to have a database to store the user's local data in, including their Facebook uid. A simple iframe on your page gives you a Facebook login form and a basic callback page handles the successful submission and saving of Facebook's response. You can add a custom field in the form's json and it'll pass right on through too.

On PHPBuilder.com today Jason Gilmore has a new tutorial posted showing how to combine PHP, MySQL and a jQuery interface to create a newsletter subscription popup for your site that doesn't interfere with the flow of the site.

More recently, websites have taken a more aggressive approach in terms of inviting visitors to subscribe to a newsletter or consider some other special offer. The approach involves displaying a popup window the very first time a visitor navigates to the website. The visitor has the option of either responding to the offer or providing his e-mail address by interacting with the popup, or can choose to close the popup at which point it won't reappear for a (hopefully) significant period of time.

He uses two jQuery plugins - simplemodal and jquery-cookie to do some of the heavy lifting on the frontend. Full HTML, CSS and Javascript code are provided to make the interface work. There's no backend code for the PHP/MySQL integration, but it's a pretty simple form so it shouldn't be overly difficult.

In a new post to his phpDevelopment blog Andrei Gabreanu has added the third part of his Zend Framework tutorial series. This time he looks at using a CAPTCHA image in your form via a call to a Zend_Captcha component.

he third part of the tutorial series will present you with a fully functionable solution for a login and signup page that activates a RECaptcha, via Zend_Captcha as a Service, when the user attempts to login/signup 3 times and fails. The tutorial will also show you how to use your models and how to structure your business logic inside your module based application.

They help you set up the database configuration information, create a sample layout for the page, work with the authentication and users controllers and, of course, the form. The inclusion of the CAPTCHA is as easy as adding a Zend_Form_Element_Captcha to the Zend_Form instance and setting up the user/signin process.

On the NETTUTS.com website today there's a new tutorial showing how to create a simple signup form (username, password, email address) for your site with a MySQL backend database.

In this tutorial, we are going to be creating a user signup form that adds a user to a database, and then sends out a confirmation email that the user must click on before their account will be activated.

Everything's provided - the database structure, the code to make the submit process work, how to confirm the user once they come back in and creating a simple templating system for the emails it sends. You can download the full source to get it all in one bundle.

The Zend Developer Zone has posted today about a new webinar from Zend touting "everything you need to know" about the PHP 5 certification exam that the company offers.

Zend Certified Engineers are the most sought after PHP developers. [...] To become a Zend Certified Engineer developers must pass the Certification exam covering a wide range of PHP topics. Attend the Zend Certified Engineer Webinar and hear all the details about the exam.

The webinar will happen on January 30th at about 9am (PST) and will be hosted by Beth Gomez. You can reserve your spot today by signing up over on Zend's pages on Webex.com or just get more information about it from this page over on the Zend site.

In a new post, Lukas Smith mentions (among other things) an upcoming webcast via the folks over at php|architect covering the best practices of using the opcode cache in your applications.

oin us as we host PHP internals developer, Stas Malyshev (Zend) with a presentation on optimizing your use of PHP opcode caching software, be it APC, Zend Platform, or another.

This talk will cover techniques that you can use to squeeze the most performance out of your cache, such as avoiding runtime includes and conditional class declaration.

Register soon because the event happens this Friday (March 16th, 2007) and there is no cost to attend - but you do have to sign up.

As posted here by Marc Gear and here by Joshua Eichorn, the PHPLondon user group has announced their PHPLondon Conference 2007.

After the success of 2006 the PHP London user group are staging the UK's second dedicated PHP conference on Friday, 23 February 2007.

The conference will be a low-cost event, costing £50 for the day. There is a 230 person limit on the number of delegates we can support, and demand is expected to be high, so make sure you register early. If you'd like to register, check out the conference's main page and enter your information today.

The conference will be happening over at the Keyworth Centre and speakers attending include Cal Evans (of Zend's Developer Zone), Simon Laws (of IBM) and Rasmus Lerdorf (creator of PHP).