DevShed has finished off its CodeIgniter series today with this ninth part focusing on making a simple content management system with the framework.

Designed to allow programmers to create applications rapidly by utilizing the Model-View-Controller pattern, the Code Igniter framework lets you add many capabilities quickly and easily. This article will bring everything we've learned together for the creation of a content management system.

Their system combines the bits of knowledge from the previous parts (segments of specific functionality) and combining them into a MySQL-driven system to store some information about the user's favorite movies.

DevShed continues their look at building PHP-GTK applications with this new tutorial covering something a little different - making applications that live in the system tray.

You have seen how easy it is to write your own desktop applications using PHP-GTK in the article "Building Your Own Desktop Notepad Application Using PHP-GTK." Once you have learned how to write desktop applications using PHP-GTK, you will be pleased to know that writing system tray applications is just a matter of adding a couple of lines of code. The bulk of your code remains exactly the same!

They create a GtkStatusIcon widget (resulting in a generic file icon in the system tray) and show how to modify the previous Notepad application to respond to being clicked.

The Solar Blog has linked to the latest download for the complete Solar system with no subversion connection needed:

As of late last night, you can now download (no SVN required) a tarball of a fully-operational Solar system with the 1.0.0alpha2 code in place: http://svn.solarphp.com/system/download/solar-system-1.0.0alpha2.tgz.

The three-step install instructions are also included - check out the download page for a quickstart guide on using this new code.

According to this new post to his blog, Paul Jones has passed on the torch for his Savant templating system over to Brett Bieber, a member of the Savant community.

Due to time constraints, mostly because of my Solar framework project, I haven't been able to pay as much attention to Savant as I think it deserves, so I made the hard decision to put it up for adoption. Lucky for the Savant community, Brett Bieber (aka Salty Beagle) picked up on that call right away.

Savant is a powerful but lightweight object-oriented template system for PHP that does not compile templates into PHP. It uses PHP itself as the engine to keep things simple.

Matthew Turland has posted about a topic that was the subject of a recent cover story in php|architect magazine - EAV modeling.

The mental image that came to me when reading about this approach to data modeling was taking the traditional relational table and turning it on its head. [...] EAV actually has to circumvent, work around, or reimplement features that most mainstream database servers today provide "for free" to the traditional relational counterparts of EAV in order to get equal functionality.

He talks about features the structure has (including row-level referential integrity and schema metadata) and points out some of the other document-focused database systems like Lucene and CouchDB.

Check out the story in the June 2008 issue of php|architect for that cover story from Carl Welch.

In the most recent CodeIgniter Community Voice, Lee Tengum talks about how he lost a bet and ended up paying for quite a bit of soda/beer because of CodeIgniter's flexibility, power and simplicity.

This week, our Community Voice author is Lee Tengum, who discusses how CodeIgniter has cost him over $8,800 in beer and soft drinks. Lee is a bit of a serial entrepreneur, with 5 successful startups under his belt including the recently launched http://cleverandy.com. He has become something of a cookie! jar of startup knowledge.

The group was developing a contractor management system for their business in CodeIgniter. They started the development on Wednesday and set Saturday as a goal for release (with plenty of fuel to get them there). Check out the rest of the story...

On the Paranoid Engineering blog, there's a recent post with a "CMS battle" of sorts between two of the more popular PHP-based content management systems out there - Drupal and Joomla.

It's hard to choose which one to use without trying them out. As usually, there are more options - home grown custom programming or even building your own CMS (which I was once stupid enough to do). Programming from scratch is always fun and beneficial for your skills, however, if you need things up and running in no time or you don't do (or don't want to do) any programming, using a CMS is the way to go.

His vote is for Drupal but he's included a long list of specs comparing the features of both so you can decide for yourself on which is the better fit.

The PHP::Impact blog has a new post that overviews the plugin system that the Symfony framework has to offer.

If you want to use the power of the Rails framework without having to learn Ruby, then Symfony is the right framework for you. After spending more than 10 months playing around with Rails, I can say that Symfony is a great alternative to Rails for programmers who already know PHP.

He talks about what a plugin is, how its used by the framework, the simple installation process and a "top ten" list of some of the most popular plugins (including sfGuardPlugin, sfSimpleForm and sfControlPanel).

Larry Garfield talks about a new feature of Drupal 7 in a new post to his blog - the new introspective code registry that's been introduced in this latest version.

As a GHOP Task , Cornil did a performance analysis of Drupal and found its two largest performance drains were the bootstrap process and the theming layer. Quite simply, Drupal spends too much time including code. [...] Fortunately, Drupal 7's self-learning code registry system has just landed, which should obliterate most of the wasted bootstrap cost.

Larry describes the "heart of it all", the token_get_all call, that parses through an entire PHP file, splitting out things like classes included and functions called. This is passed through a function_exists call to the current script and, if it's already there, the file isn't included repetitively.

In some thoughts related to the just-passed religious holiday, Alan Knowles decided to come up with another series of 7 deadly sins one could commit in their PHP (CMS) development.

Among those on the list are things like:

• Defines for configuration
• Filenaming
• If your code is public, you should try not to ridicule yourself.
• Mixing PHP and HTML

Check out the rest of the post and some of the interesting comments that follow.