On the Development Seed blog today there's a new post by Alex Barth about integrating OpenID support into your Drupal installation. You can check out an example of it in this github project.

After a survey of available single sign-on solutions [for a client], we decided to go with an OpenID based approach since we needed to support different domains, wanted to avoid sharing user tables and did not want to add complex system requirements for browser clients or the server. [...] The great advantage of this scenario is that we know which five sites need to play nicely together and all of them are Drupal sites under the client's control. This premise allows us to add an additional site as a designated OpenID provider that we call "Hub" and make all five sites point to the Hub as their default identity provider.

They use two modules to make everything work together - OpenID SSO and OpenID Provider SSO and a PubSubHubbub model for keeping the user information up to date.

On The Bakery (the CakePHP resource) there's a recent post looking at a simple way you can integrate database query caching (using memcache) into your CakePHP application's models.

Most common way to access data is a database. Most common way to speed this up - Memcached. As a quite young CakePHP developer I had a bit of headache "how to cache queries effectively?". Now I know the way, so I share.

Rafal's method, as seen in this example using the caching methods included with CakePHP to serialize and store the database queries out to a cache.

Fabien Potencier has written up a post detailing a PEAR channel server manager he's developed, Pirum.

Pirum lets you setup PEAR channel servers in a matter of minutes. Pirum is best suited when you want to create small PEAR channels for a few packages written by a few developers. Pirum consists of just one file, a command line tool, written in PHP. There is no external dependencies, no not need for a database, no need to setup credentials, and nothing need to be installed or configured.

All you need to do to get the tool is download the pirum file and go. It includes features like per-channel HTML pages and Atmos feed release tracking along with several other standard PEAR channel features.

There's already been one project that's made the swtich - PHP_Depend.

Samuel Folkes has posted a few of his ideas on the tool(s) that every PHP developer needs to have on his belt to make their work easy and more effective.

Quite often, I am asked the question "What tools do I need for PHP development?". [...] For those who will listen, I have one very simple answer to that question: Aside from a server running PHP and a text editor, you need absolutely nothing. That answer may seem extreme but its the truth. Lets break it down.

Samuel suggests that, while the choices for IDE, debuggers and other tools for PHP development are too many to count, nothing is as good and clean as a basic text editor (his choice is Notepad++). There are a few things that can make your code more effective like phpDocumentor or PHPUnit, but those are more about good coding practices than how you develop.

On his blog Hari KT has posted a detailed tutorial for getting a blog up and running with the 1.9 release of the Zend framework:

I have been trying to work with zendframework 1.8 and now with 1.9. I have created a simple blog application. When I say a blog application , never expect it, something like wordpress. Its a simple application which can add posts, add comments.

He uses the command-line "zf" tool to do most of the initial heavy lifting - creating the project, setting up controllers and their actions - then follows it with more specific code, changing of a few config settings and setting up the models and views. The end result is a blog that allows users to log in and and comments and posts, depending on their access level.

WebReference.com has the latest tutorial in their "Simplified XML" series posted today. This installment focuses on the formatting of the documents in the browser and how to read them back in.

We have already discussed the XML functions so let's use an example to demonstrate how they work. First, we get the XML file that we want to use. The idea is to create an XML parser. This will then enable us to read and write to an XML document.

Their examples show code that parses an XML document, outputs a simple list of the values inside and how to take an XSL style sheet and apply it to the data as applied through a xml-stylesheet tag.

New on PHPBuilder.com there's a quick tutorial showing you how to create a simple calendar and add dates for your events.

Gone were any thoughts of simplicity whatsoever, or so I thought. Then it struck me. What was a calender but just a looping number system? The more I thought about it the more simple it became. At the end of the day, with a little research into PHP's date functions I had come up with something that actually worked. The working example can be downloaded here.

Their example uses either the current month or one inputted from the URL to determine things like day of the week to start, number of days in the month, how many weeks to display, etc. They also have to take the year into consideration so switching between December and January is just as seamless.

New on WebReference.com is this look (part of a series) at working with XML in PHP, this time it's specifically covering the DOM functionality.

With this series of articles, I will try to simplify and demystify the use and application of XML and the DOM. First, we will look at what XML is and then move on to what functions are available for use to manipulate and use XML.

The tutorial introduces XML and gives a sample structure of a document and breaks it down to explain each of the parts. Following that they look at some of the XML-related functionality to create their sample XML file.

In his recent blog entry Oren Solomianik takes a look at using the zdbform software (a web-based, simple database administration tool) he's put together using the Zend Framework.

If you're looking for a simple tool that uses Zend Framework's robust database classes (such as Zend_Db and Zend_Db_Table), you can check out zdbform. It's a short yet effective library that let's you perform simple administration tasks on your database, with minimal coding. It's not a full blown phpMyAdmin, but it's a simple way to view, edit and add your tables rows on a web interface.

He shows how you can use it in a script - from the front controller to the input forms - and some of the changes he needed to make in the form class itself to handle a few of the bit more tricky parts.

In a new article on PHPFreaks.com Brad Jacobs takes a look at creating a simple search of the information in your database. Their example will search a table containing article information (title, story content, etc).

The aim of this tutorial is to provide users with a basic layout and the logic behind creating a multiple field search in MySQL. As often time users tend to over do the search and add a lot of unnecessary code. By following and understanding this tutorial you should be able to implement this search into your own site and provide a nice and simple SQL Search of your own database. So roll up your sleeves and be prepared to get dirty.

Everything's provided for you - the SQL to build and fill the tables and the code to perform the search. They opted to go with LIKE statements in the where clause instead of using something like full-text searching. The former works for a lot of situations, but can get slower and slower the more rows there are in the table.