NetTuts.com has come up with a Phing (the automated build tool written in PHP) build script that designers can drop in as a part of their deployment process to compress, concatenate and Prefixize all of their stylesheets and scripts.

We’ve created a build script for Phing that will give designers the ability to automatically compress, concatenate, and Prefixize all of their stylesheets and scripts — simply by typing five characters. I’ll show you how to use it in this quick tip video.

The post includes a screencast showing you how to get it all set up and working with the rest of your Phing install. They don't help you set up Phing - you'll need that already set up and running to use the task. You can grab teh script directly from github.

On the NETTUTS.com site today there's a new tutorial about using the LESS CSS tool to get the most out of the styling of your website. The tutorial uses the PHP implementation by Leaf Corcoran to accomplish the same things as the Ruby library offers.

During a sick day a few weeks ago, I got around to something I’ve been meaning to look at for about a year: LESS. If anything web technology is worth a look, I promise LESS is. In this article, we’ll look at the amazing power of LESS and its ability to streamline and improve your development process. We’ll cover rapid prototyping, building a lightweight grid system, and using CSS3 with LESS.

They use an output buffering trick to handle parsing and executing the ".less" CSS-based files through the library and spit the parsed version back out the other side. There's plenty of examples of how to use the LESS syntax ending up in their previously mentioned grid system using mixins, some cross-browser CSS3 and the CSS3 Pie tool.

Raphael Stolt recently spent some time working up a tool to visualize Phing buildfiles and he's blogged about it in this new post.

Out of the box the Phing -l option can be used to get a first overview of all available targets in a given buildfile but it doesn't untangle the target dependencies and sometimes a picture is still worth a thousand words. Luckily the Ant community already provides several tools to accomplish the visualization of Ant buildfiles, reaching from solutions that apply a Xslt stylesheet upon a given buildfile.

Using the ant2dot tool along with the Graphiz graphic library, he transforms the XML from the build file into a simple graphic showing the flow of the build. An example image is included.

Christian Stocker points out an interesting contribution by the web developers over at the New York Times website - the xslcaching extension for PHP.

It caches the parsed XSLT stylesheets into your apache child memory (shared memory is on the todo list) and reuses it at the next request. [...] As - depending on the size of your stylesheets - the importing of XSLT stylesheets may take a considerable amount of time, this extension may really improve your website's performance.

Check out the project's page for full details on the installation, use and license for it (including some links for further reading).

Christian Stocker points out an interesting contribution by the web developers over at the New York Times website - the xslcaching extension for PHP.

It caches the parsed XSLT stylesheets into your apache child memory (shared memory is on the todo list) and reuses it at the next request. [...] As - depending on the size of your stylesheets - the importing of XSLT stylesheets may take a considerable amount of time, this extension may really improve your website's performance.

Check out the project's page for full details on the installation, use and license for it (including some links for further reading).

On the PHP-Coding-Practices.com site today, there's a new tutorial posted showing how to create monocromatic (variations of the same color) CSS stylesheets quickly and easily via PHP.

The monochromatic color scheme uses variations in lightness and saturation of a single color. It looks clean and elegant. [...] The monochromatic color scheme is perfect for our task of generating CSS via PHP based on forming shades of a base color.

You'll need to grab their library to work with in the tutorial, the rest is included in the tutorial. They show how the CSS is defined, how to use the CSS in your page and some sample screenshots of the resulting layouts with the monocromatic coloring.

On the PHP-Coding-Practices.com site today, there's a new tutorial posted showing how to create monocromatic (variations of the same color) CSS stylesheets quickly and easily via PHP.

The monochromatic color scheme uses variations in lightness and saturation of a single color. It looks clean and elegant. [...] The monochromatic color scheme is perfect for our task of generating CSS via PHP based on forming shades of a base color.

You'll need to grab their library to work with in the tutorial, the rest is included in the tutorial. They show how the CSS is defined, how to use the CSS in your page and some sample screenshots of the resulting layouts with the monocromatic coloring.