On DevShed today there's a new tutorial posted looking at how to customize your osCommerce site's title tags to make things a bit more meaningful.

If you use osCommerce for your site's e-commerce, and you're not happy with the quality or quantity of visitors your site receives, keep reading. Though osCommerce provides some excellent features, its weaknesses could be getting in the way of giving you the number of visitors and conversions you expect. Fortunately, there's a solution, hidden in something as simple as a title tag.

The trick is in editing two files - the main index and a product info page - to add in a bit of PHP at the top that pulls out the matching category information for the item and pushes that into the $title variable for output.

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.

DevShed has a new tutorial posted today looking at two methods that you can use to sort the search results from your WordPress blog my title instead of by date - a bit of code and a plugin.

Sorting search results by post title in WordPress is often useful, if your website needs its entries to be sorted alphabetically. As a quick background, WordPress is the most popular open source, free blogging/CMS platform. However, the default search results are sorted by date, so there is no easy way to sort them alphabetically except to edit the core WordPress search functionally source code.

Here's the two options:

• Updates to the Query.php file to change up the "order by" value to work for the post_title and ascending/descending sort orders
• The Sort Search Results by Title plugin that lets you keep away from the WordPress source and change the results order with a drop-in plugin

New on the TotalPHP blog today is this article talking about reading RSS feeds with PHP (more specifically with SimpleXML).

PHP 5's ability to read XML files is fantastically easy to use. In the past it was possible but it required quite a bit of long winded code to get any where. PHP 5's SimpleXmlElement function makes working with XML a breeze, and with much less code too!

They include a script as an example - five lines to completely parse and pull the title and link information out of the remote RSS file. The example creates a SimpleXML object using the feed's URL and makes each element inside accessible as an object (that can be looped through and properties can be checked on).

In this new post to his blog Juozas Kaziukenas takes a look at one method for getting the information out of a remote page - parsing it with PHP and XPath (assuming the page is correctly formatted).

When I was writing about how I use web scraping, I was still hadn't tried using Xpath (shame on me). [...] It turned out, that using Xpath is extremely easy, really. When you master it, you can do everything in seconds. Yes, you need to know how XML works and how to write correct Xpath queries (brief explanation of Xpath syntax is available at W3Schools), but hey - these topics are in 1st year of university.

He includes both some sample code (to fetch a titles and prices for cameras from bhphotovideo.com) and a link to a XPath checker you can use to ensure that your query is correctly formatted. It's good that he also includes a quick reminder about the ethical issue with web scraping - it could be considered stealing depending on where the information comes from and who is providing it.

Continuing on from his previous post on output handling, Arnold Daniels shows how to build on the previous setup and add the ability to include dynamic data into the template.

For instance, it would be nice if the data in the left column, 'Beauty Tips', could be different for each page. There are several ways to solve this, but for know I will choose the simplest.

He takes a few steps to make adding the content simple:

• Adding markers for the title and left menu to the template
• Change the OutputHandler class to make it less static
• use setData() to title the page
• user setData() to add left column content
• Use mark() and endmark() to section off a part of the template.

He's provided a demo and made the source code available for download.

Dave Dash has posted a quick hit for symfony framework users - how to dynamically adjust your page title at your whim.

A lot of the content on reviewsBy.us and other sites we make using symfony have dynamic content. We try to have our page titles reflect the content by prepending the name of the specific restaurant, document or menu item before the site name.

Their path to the prize is a method, prependTitle that's included in a class (myActions.class.php) and used via it's reference in the application's app.yml file.

On the ThinkingPHP Blog today, there's a look at how to handle inline links to dynamic resources - specifically allowing users to create links in their own content to dynamic content elsewhere on the site.

I thought of something that would be both, easy to implement and easy to use. What I finally came up with is tightly coupled to my new url system that I'm using, so make sure to check it out in case you've missed it.

The basic idea of the system is that the URL of the page (made up partly of the title) would be the unique identifier for the page. For example, "[page 12]" would be expanded out to "/pages/12:my-title". Felix takes this idea and runs with it, showing how to implement it in a CakePHP project inside of a Model and a Component. The sample usage code is, of course, also included in the post.

Over on the ThinkingPHP blog today, there's two new tutorials from Felix Geisendorfer - one dealing with the conversion of WordPress titles into the "slugs" the system uses, and the other the first article he shows a method how, inside the structure of CakePHP, to make a component to grab the slug out of the URL and parse it down to the different parts of the title.

In the second, Felix demonstrates how, with some simple if logic, you can simulate dependencies. His examples include a simple if to check for the return of "true" from various functions and an inline example of an svn export and FTP.

Here on PHPDeveloper.org, we're always trying to do whatever we can to help out the PHP community, so to further that effort we're going to start posting a weekly "jobs roundup" of the job information we recieve. There won't be a charge and it can be anything from contract jobs out to permenant positions anywhere in the world (hooray for the internet!).

Now, on to what we need from you - we'd prefer the information to be as concise as possible. Cut and paste of a full listing isn't the way to go here. We'd prefer the summary of the position with a link to more details.

Here's the key info we'd like:

• Company Name
• Position title
• Position location
• Summary description of the position
• A link to more information on it (on Monster, Hotjobs, your site, etc.)

Other information included along with the request might me truncated or modified slightly to fit within these guidelines.

To submit your job information, send it along to jobs@phpdeveloper.org and we'll get it posted and include the phrase "JOB POSTING" somewhere in the subject line. Since this will start off as a weekly thing, you'll need to wait until Friday to see the information show up.