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.
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.
Tiffany Brown shares a quick function she whipped up to create dropdown menus from the contents of a newline separated text file (or files).
I developed this PHP function for a project I'm working on. I'm posting it here in case I need it again, or in case you find it handy.
The function turns each line into an option tag making defining custom menus based on the contents of dynamically-given text files easy.
This could also be easily adapted to create navigations menus at the top of your pages with a few modifications to the HTML tags being used and some CSS to change the look of the list.
Cory Borrow has posted a tutorial he's created to show how to harness the power of PHP and GD to create thumbnail images out of the contents of a text file.
Today, I'll give a little info on how to achieve the process of creating a thumbnail using PHP, GD and the text from a text file. It is really pretty simple, so lets get started.
The trick behind the translation is in reading in the contents of the (plain) text file and pushing it into a string value of a newly created GD-generated image. He includes the code to make using it in your own app simple (a cut and paste version) - his method FileToThumb.
Kore Nordmann has posted a new article series (to the "Articles" section of his site) with six different pieces talking about different aspects of image creation with PHP:
On the Tilllate Blog, there's a new post discussing the use of caching in applications, specifically for dynamic data.
Consider you have a set of data that is changing dynamically for each page request and you need to cache that data the fastest way possible. You can't cache dynamic and unpredictable data as a whole, can you? Hence, we would put each data entry into cache separately to be able to fetch it separately and dynamically. But this means bombing your cache infrastructure with with requests.
They break it up into a few different topics - caching text elements on the page, two-tiered caching (grouping cached items), incremental caching and cache versioning. They don't share an example of their code unfortunately, but they do mention something about a possible contribution to the Zend_Cache component of the Zend Framework.
DevShed has continued their look at working with PDFs in a PHP5 application with this new part, part four, focusing on making a PDF with basic rectangles drawn in it.
All right, now that you know how to include basic blocks of text into a simple PDF file, in addition to incorporating some images, the question that comes up here is: what's the next step to take? Well, in this fourth part of the series I'm going to show you how to draw a few basic shapes, once a PDF document has been opened, like empty and filled rectangles, which can be useful if you want to decorate the document with these kinds of forms.
The tutorial walks you through the creation of another sample PDF file (with text and an image) and shows the process for adding rectangles via the rect() function call on their PDFLib class.
