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.

DevShed has started up a new series of tutorials today with this first part of their "helpers in PHP5" series. They look at some of the first steps into creating these helpers and the handy methods inside.

Despite its seeming simplicity, building helpers can be a pretty challenging process, particularly for beginners whom are just starting to implement the object-oriented paradigm in PHP 5. [...] I'm going to introduce you as gently as possible to creating different types of helpers, which hopefully will make you understand the basis of this process and encourage you to create your own.

They start off with a text helper that gives you methods to change newlines to <br> or <p> tags. They extend the class a bit more by adding in a few other methods - convert newlines to <div> tags, and uppercase/lowercase/uppercase the first letter in a string.

PHPBuilder.com has the latest in their series looking at beginner level PHP and some of the core concepts that go with it ("The ABC's of PHP"). This latest tutorial looks at string and text handling.

In the last part of this series we looked at what a variable was in general. Today we'll be covering strings and text. We'll look at the contents those variables would typically hold.

Topics include the differences between single and double quotes, appending to a string and special characters (like line feeds and tabs). Code snippets are provided for each to help you visualize what they mean.

This new tutorial from the PHPFreaks.com website shows how to add text into a custom created image (they go with an Arial font in a PNG image).

One of the standard features of a message board is allowing members to have a signature, which is appended to the bottom of each post they make. Posters can put whatever they want into the signature (within forum settings). Putting quotes in one's signature is one of the more popular things to do. [...] Soon afterwards, I started receiving messages on a fairly regular basis asking me "What kind of sorcery is this?? How do I do that??" You know, I think it's kind of funny people should ask, because this is really nothing new.

His code (the full script is here) sets up the font size, the font face (Arial) and the quotes to be randomly pulled from first. The image manipulation comes next - making a PNG resource, adding a few colors and shapes, and dropping in the text.

Each line of the code is covered in detail so you'll understand exactly what's going on. The end result is a script that makes a simple image and can be easily expanded to work with other sources (like databases or flat text files).

Sameer has put together a few images, the results from the Wordle website when he plugged in the names of the built-in functions included in PHP.

The application is simple. You enter a bunch of text and Wordle does the rest. The applet provides options to change color, font and layout. Just for fun I created a Wordle cloud to display php's built in functions. Two samples are shown below. The size of the font in the cloud is proportional to the number of functions starting with the particular name.

Among the largest on the list are words like "array", "get", "mysql" and "mcrypt". He used a call to the get_defined_functions() method and looped through the "internal" subarray to build his lists.

Sameer has posted an example of a new(ish) component of the Zend Framework - the Zend_Figlet component - and how you can use it to render the multi-line ASCII text figlet users are familiar with.

Zend_Text_Figlet is a Zend component which enables developers to create a FIGlet text. A Figlet is nothing but a technique of creating large letters using ordinary text. I don't know how to make a use of this in my daily matters, but its a nice recreation. A short history on Figlet can be found here. An example and the code to generate it is shown below.

He includes a few quick code examples to show it in action - including how to make it work with your own fonts and styles.

Recently on his blog Yannick has done some benchmarking comparing mbstring and iconv in PHP 5.2.4 release.

Following up on my previous post about the differences between the mbstring and iconv international characters libraries (which resulted in a tentative conclusion that nobody knew anything about those differences), and particularly the comments by Nicola, we have combined forces (mostly efforts from Nicola, actually) to provide you with a little benchmarking, if that can help you decide.

His code for the test script is included (for you to gather your own results) and a full listing of his results comparing the effects of possible caching, running up to ten executions. You can download the text file that he ran the script on here.

In this new tutorial from DevShed, they show how to take that PHP-GTK introductory knowledge a step further and create a simple desktop "notepad" application (corss-platform, of course).

If you think building a desktop application such as Notepad is difficult, think again. If you use PHP-GTK, it's almost ridiculously easy. This article will show you how. By the time you're done, you'll have a full cross-platform application in about 100 lines.

You need to already have the latest PHP-GTK version installed and have a basic knowledge of how to make an application before you start. All code is included as well as explanations as to where all of the parts go (including a simple find, time/date output, select all and how to tell if the user has modified the contents of the file).

Stuart Herbert has announced the release of a new site that takes the place of providing SMS messages to UK users from twitter, twittex.com - a site created with the symfony framework.

Last Thursday, twitter was forced to withdraw its free SMS alerts service to UK users. [...] Six days later, thanks to the power of symfony, PHP, mysql and q4m, we've built and launched a replacement service called twittex.com.

The site lets you prepay for the messages you want to use. Using the symfony framework made it easy to get a system up and running quickly and easily (in six days!) to fill the gap suddenly left by twitter's decision.

The IBM developerWorks site has a new tutorial posted (registration/login required) talking about image creating in PHP using the GD library.

The purpose of this tutorial is to show you how to get started with the GD library and to provide a variety of techniques you can apply to your Web-page coding. The tutorial doesn't cover every GD function, but it teaches you the basics. The Resources section provides Web sites where you can learn more about using the GD library.

They go through the creation of sample images, working with gradients and lines, adding text, saving the image data out to a file and how to work with existing graphics to modify them.